more or less

Some sort of collective delirium of hope is spreading like hellfire through the Opera community, a hope which is nevertheless constrained in numerical limitations of 2.5 * 2

Here are my numerically constrained delirious wishes. Most will be somewhat out-of-the-box. I think browsers are stuck in pretty archaic interface paradigms and need a damn good kick in the butt!

1. Page content indexing — this is simple and a prerequisite for wishes 2 & 3, when you visit a page and it gets added to your history, index the textual content of that page. Visited a page, remember it talked about elasticated lederhosen, but can't find it in your browsers history? Opera's index will get it to you in a flash. This will provide lots of rich meta-data for delirious wish 2:
   
2. Unified meta-data interface — many users have long asked that the wonderful dynamic search fluidity of Opera Mail could be applied to bookmarks. I want to take it much further. Opera stores gobs of data all over the place; notes, bookmarks (and their comments, nicks), mail, history (and indexed page content above), tab sessions, current pages etc. All of it is dispersed in its own store, each has a separate search function and UI domain. I want all this information to be indexed and searchable in a unified manner. Bookmarks, notes, mails, web pages in history can be tagged and I can search across domains to get at my data. It will simplify the UI and greatly amplify the way we can link and unify the information we store. It is the modern metaphor of the web: semantic and remixable, applied to the browser interface.
   
3. Page Management — we are still stuck with ineffective old metaphors for handling lots of pages; a tab bar which shrinks until it looks like pixel vomit, or spills into anonymous menus. Opera makes it worse by having Mail / RSS / IRC /settings / cache / history pages to add to the mix of web pages; what a goddamn mess! Tabs contain information, they mean or represent something (more so when their textual content has been indexed). A user should be able to organise this chaos. Dynamic groups are the foundation for this; and there are many interesting avenues to explore…
   
4. Re-architected Action System — doesn't sound very sexy I grant you. Basically Opera has an internal command system which is hooked into by menu's, gestures and buttons; it is the bedrock on which most of the UI is built!. The current system has been with us since V7 — it is old and creaky. That doesn't stop lots of people making really cool mini-extensions with it (check here and the links contained within), but a *lot* more could be done. This is a fundamental plumbing issue which would allow much more elaborate extensions to Opera's abilities. Ideally a scripting language (ECMAScript engine is already built-in) should replace the logic-challenged old syntax. This gets you many more extension-a-likes without the problems of 3rd-party developers twisting the innards of your browser inside out. Opera need to make a proper functional repository for these customisations (Opera's current system sucks big time).
   
5. A new icon; please, pretty please?! Now I use a Mac, the Opera icon is even more revulsive than it was before :yikes:
   

And what others have deliriously blabbered: UserJS manager, Web developer tools (javascript debugger #1), Auto-deletion of RSS messages after X days and so on and so forth.

Lets get the tags out of the way: ResearchWizard, scipio, Neeraj, robodesign, Eddie, Tomu, operafan2006, Steve (oops, multiplication function has gone awry already).

EDIT: now here is a blog tag we'd love to see: Jon!!!