Ramblings

Actually wanting to add this feature for a long while, but it wasn't until today when I noticed someone wanted the feature that I decided to make a User Javascript to be able to pan any web page with the mouse. The following User Javascript allows you to click, hold and drag a web page around in the same way you are used to move a map around, just remember to hold the shift key when dragging. This so that regular text selection and drag-n-dropping of images and pages doesnt break.

Update: You can scroll in big images without modifier key, and the scrolling should time out if you havppen to release the button outside of the browser.

Update2: Script now only allows to use the left mouse button. Hold down shift to drag pages, and shift not needed when dragging an image alone. Only images without tags surrounding can be used to move page.

Download Drag Scroll User Javascript

People used to using Other Browser(tm) might have been missing the possibility of being automatically redirected to a search engine if they type in an non-existent address in the address bar.

Some browsers, including Opera allows you to automatically add a prefix and postfix so that say 'foo' becomes 'www.foo.com', but it normally stops there.

Fear not. A user actually asked for this feature in one of the IRC chat channels at http://my.opera.com/chat/ and being a person who likes challenges, I couldn't not try to see if it was possible to implement using User Javascript.

User-what? You might ask. Well, it just happens to be that Opera lets you run your own scripts on virtually any page out there. You put a script in a dedicated drawer and you tell Opera to look there when loading pages. The script might be run before a page loads or after it is finished, depending on elements found in the page, the domain of the page or other criteria.

Actually most of you have already been using this kind of technique without even knowing about it. Opera does run its own set of scripts on pages that are very badly designed, or plain wrong (mostly targetted at broken browsers like MSIE). These are carefully tailored scripts made in-house at Opera so you don't need to know about them. Although the JavaScript console reports whenever such a "hot-fix" is run.

Anyway, as it is, you can stroll over to the excellent User JavaScript repository site http://userjs.org and download the auto-search-forwarder script, put it in a directory of your choice and go into:

Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> JavaScript Options

, then select the directory in the "My JavaScript files" gadget.

When typing addresses that don't exist in the address bar, you will now get redirected to Google's Feeling Lucky feature. That is namely the first hit searching on the term you typed.

Unfortunately any spaces you might have typed disappear, but you can circumvent that by using underscore, this means if you want to search for "foo bar", use "foo_bar".

Good luck

PS. For more User scripts that let you do other cool stuff, use http://userjs.org. For discussing User scripts and similar there is an own group right here on My Opera: http://my.opera.com/userjs