A Swedish wolf in Norway

Since the last post about the info panel, there haven’t been very many big changes. From the feedback received I have added some pieces of information that wasn’t in the last update — the info panel will now list the last modified time of the page or resource (if available, this entry will not show up for dynamically generated entries), and the time of the last download, i.e how recent your copy is.

I have also added some image meta data when you have an image open, as seen in the sample on the right. It will show the dimensions and bit depth of the image (the same information that you can currently retrieve by right-clicking the image and selecting “Image properties”). Not visible in this sample is that it will also display EXIF information, if available.

For all those of you who are waiting for a version with this updated panel to be available, I recommend you to head to the desktop team’s blog, as hopefully they will announce a build from the branch code-named “Kestrel”, which should contain these updates.

Stay tuned.

One of the more overlooked features in Opera is its Info panel, which is used to show information about the current page. It is not enabled by default, so to see it you need to turn it on manually, and in its current implementation it does not contain that much interesting information. It got a small face-lift in Opera 9 with the new styling for internal documents, plus that it shows more relevant information about e-mail documents.

But it still has some problems, and because of that, we are looking into adding more relevant information, and removing information that is irrelevant. Among the things that are to be added is a list of style sheets and scripts linked to from the page, with links so that you can easily open them without having to dig through the source code of the document.

I have also fixed some of the outstanding problems. For example, if the current document was an MHTML archive or a stand-alone image, Opera 9 will display information about an internally created HTML wrapper, not the actual document or image. For images, it would also list some nonsensical information like character encoding, which always was “none”, and number of in-line elements, which always was zero. These entries will be removed.

However, we cannot think of everything internally, so that is why I want to ask the readers about what you would like to see in the info panel? I cannot promise to include everything, there is a limit to how much information it will fit, but I do appreciate your feedback.