[Zardon]

Sunday mornings, my time for doing some downloading, playing with apps etc, and generally drinking a lot of coffee.

Today I took the time to play with opera 7.5.4 and I have to say I came away exceptionally impressed with how fast, stable and customisable the whole package now is.

I tend to not stick with one browser and move between firefox. mozilla and IE for testing etc but I have overlooked opera since a few builds ago when I found it extremely buggy.

I know everyone has mentioned tabbed browsing, nothing new there but I feel operas implementation is very good indeed and works well, I especially like the way it can store at your choice all the pages you have last been on before quitting and can reload them all when reopening. I have found almost everything customisable in this browser, and the left panel while easily closed gives some very powerful options, such as viewing every link on the page in one panel of text based clickable links........

There is also a nice skin http://my.opera.com/community/custom...earch=&skip=40 (meguiDdo) which totally matches the midnight heaven theme and the quality of skins overall seems much higher than those created by the firefox community.

Well worth a look today if you guys are just wanthing to play around with some software.

[Zardon]

[bake15]

Thanks Zardon
exellent browser,very fast,loads of options and looks cool
auto reload sounds good too(not tried it yet though)
that skin is awesome

[Zardon]

Its really very good, even my online banking works perfectly with it and firefox gives a few little niggling issues.

ive been quite pleased with the skinning options and available skins on the opera pages, some very high class skins available.

browser is as fast as firefox with layout setups I find more usable (I know this is personal taste). everything in the setup is configurable and it works well - I also like the little load speed bar at the bottom with detailed info.

[Zardon]

A browser comparison chart.......

http://spreadopera.auriance.com/browser_comparison.php

[bake15]

The start off from last page saved is very cool too

[Zardon]

open your 10 favourite sites, just close the browser, reload, auto updates on opening. I used to have a plug in for IE for that, mymontage it was called - didnt offer the same level of tabbed browsing though.

[No_Style]

Welcome to Opera

I've been using Opera for over a year now and they've improved a lot over that year. I look forward to 7.6 Final! They've got a Preview out for it now and it has G-Mail working great on it. The current 7.5.4 doesn't handle G-Mail well. I also use Maxthon along side with Opera just incase I need to use it.

I configured my Opera to look very simplistic and very much like FireFox and Maxthon. Be sure to look through all the settings and such. But I'm sure you've already done so

[YAYitsAndrew]

Make sure you take a look at mouse gestures, they're one of my favorite opera features.

As for skins, my personal favorite is phoenity native
http://my.opera.com/community/custom...hoenity+native

Fits in well with windows and has well designed buttons and colors following the phoenity art style found at www.phoenity.org

As for refreshing pages, opera has an auto refresh feature that's quite handy. If you need to camp a page waiting for something to go live or you want to refresh a forum index you can right click the page and set it to refresh every x intervals of time. When the new woot.com item is coming I set it to 5 seconds while things like forums do fine at 5 minutes.

Make sure you change your options to identify as opera; for some reason the default ident is IE and this really hides opera's numbers on the net

edit: and you'll really love that auto-reopen pages feature when opera crashes (which does happen on occassion with poorly coded WMP inlines)

[No_Style]

Originally Posted by YAYitsAndrew

Make sure you change your options to identify as opera; for some reason the default ident is IE and this really hides opera's numbers on the net

Yeah, that's very true.

[Zardon]

Originally Posted by YAYitsAndrew

Make sure you take a look at mouse gestures, they're one of my favorite opera features.

As for skins, my personal favorite is phoenity native
http://my.opera.com/community/custom...hoenity+native

Fits in well with windows and has well designed buttons and colors following the phoenity art style found at www.phoenity.org

As for refreshing pages, opera has an auto refresh feature that's quite handy. If you need to camp a page waiting for something to go live or you want to refresh a forum index you can right click the page and set it to refresh every x intervals of time. When the new woot.com item is coming I set it to 5 seconds while things like forums do fine at 5 minutes.

Make sure you change your options to identify as opera; for some reason the default ident is IE and this really hides opera's numbers on the net

That reload option is great, another feature I had in the "my montage" add on for IE a year ago. The last version of opera I really used was just after version 7 and it was bugged to hell and back, but this one is really very very sweet. im using it now as my primary browser -- I dont think id ever have thought id say that.

Im a big fan of that dark theme i mentioned in the first post, I tend to go for darkish themes as they look better on large LCDs or laptops and are easier for sustained forum browsing. I installed it on my voodoo A64 laptop and its really very crisp indeed.

I notice one little problem on the DH forum, but its quite minor, I see when you go into a thread for example and hit back, it has a problem with the falkang ad under the ATI ad as its conflicting with the refresh .. meaning in operation one click backwards goes actually to the thread you are already in, meaning you need a double click to get to the last page you were at.

Not a big issue for me personally as I tend to use forum links much more than back and forward buttons in any browser, but ill see if we can sort that out, not sure its possible without breaking something on every other browser we support on DH due to our ad configuration.

All in all though, truly excellent and I just paid for it (even though there are widely available cracks, serials etc) to help them continue development.

[No_Style]

I use the skin called "Fresh" It's nice and simple

And with page incompatibility issues, Opera is very strict with standards. If you don't conform to them, the pages won't work properly

Check out this markup validator. You'll notice DH has some errors and it points them out as well Check out www.opera.com and you'll see that their site is 100% validated. It's pretty interesting.

[YAYitsAndrew]

Zardon that's the bug I mentioned to you when I first came to these forums. Hooray for it being fixed (maybe)!

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/feedback/59399-msn-ad-ruins-forum-browsing.html

As for incompatibility, if opera doesn't detect correctly formatted html it will load the page in 'quirks' mode which attempts to emulate IE because the page designer probably made sure the page looks correct there.
That whole quirks mode thing never really convinced me though when css is involved. Opera in quirks mode still tends to render css correctly while IE doesn't. That's good I guess :P

more on quirks mode:
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/doctype/

[Zardon]

Originally Posted by No_Style

I use the skin called "Fresh" It's nice and simple

And with page incompatibility issues, Opera is very strict with standards. If you don't conform to them, the pages won't work properly

Check out this markup validator. You'll notice DH has some errors and it points them out as well Check out www.opera.com and you'll see that their site is 100% validated. It's pretty interesting.

We are aware of those errors in validation, the problem is , I think quite a few of the custom hacks and ad codes mess things up if we stick to strict coding. ill have to look into it. I know we had the whole thing working with a prior build of opera but they tend to change the builds and codes quite often. DH as a whole works well in opera though.

[No_Style]

Originally Posted by Zardon

We are aware of those errors in validation, the problem is , I think quite a few of the custom hacks and ad codes mess things up if we stick to strict coding. ill have to look into it. I know we had the whole thing working with a prior build of opera but they tend to change the builds and codes quite often. DH as a whole works well in opera though.

I don't think its Opera's fault for following the rules, but I did wish they would bend them a little bit to display simple things properly on other pages.

For sure, DH works overall really well with Opera. I have no obvious or inconvient errors like I do with some of the other sites out there (Intel's site sometimes gets weird). I did notice that the WYSIWYG editor doesn't work very well under Opera, but I never use it anyways because of the hassle it has with editing posts and making news posts. It's great to see that we're edging closer to 100% validation.

[YAYitsAndrew]

For those interested, here is the UI for opera optimized by someone who's used it for over 2 years. If you are running on a resolution less than 1280x1024, you'll want to use f4 to open/close the sidebar instead of leaving it open all the time.



edit: changed the picture to not include my start menu and chose a page less distracting to display. The old picture including zardon's screenshot for some freaky screenshot of browser in screenshot of browser in browser action in case anyone makes reference to that. Don't worry, I'm confused too.

[No_Style]

Originally Posted by YAYitsAndrew

For those interested, here is the UI for opera optimized by someone who's used it for over 2 years. If you are running on a resolution less than 1280x1024, you'll want to use f4 to open/close the sidebar instead of leaving it open all the time.

edit: That shot looks freaky cause it also has zardon's shot in it :P

Haha, nice setup. I personally dislike things like sidebars and I usually keep just top bar stuff. The Mail client works great as well if you guys haven't tried it out.

Speaking of resolutions, you guys heard of the new feature coming up in 7.6? Auto resizing will take the horizontal scrolling completely out of webpages which are made too big for lower resolution viewers! (hopefully) They've also got voice browsing coming for 7.6. Innovative people, they are.

P.S - I see Delphi 7 there, whatcha working on? And did you find Friday's Penny Arcade's alien looking a lot like a mutated Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama?

[YAYitsAndrew]

More useful opera features:

Pressing g will first disable all website images. Pressing it again will display only cache'd images. Pressing it again will load all images again. There's also a button in the upper right near the address bar that will do this. If you're going to a site with tons of ads or porn (such as a crackz or warez site) then it's handy dandy to disable all the lesbian transexual (wo)men in red leather outfits. Also good if you find yourself on 56k for some reason.

Pressing tab in opera does not tab from link to link, it tabs from UI component to UI component. This means that you can jump right to that login box with tab instead of tabbing through 50 links first. If you want to go through the links one by one, the 'a' key will do that for you.

F11 for fullscreen, just like IE.

There are a lot of addressbar shortcuts. Type 'g puppies' into the address bar and you'll automatically google search for puppies. Type 'z ninja turtles' and you'll automatically be taken to an amazon search for ninja turtles.

[YAYitsAndrew]

Zardon if you use imageshack.us to host your screenies, the thumbnail support is automatic. Just copy the correct URL.

As for delphi7, I'm working on a map editor for battalion, a turn based game over at www.urbansquall.com (cheap plug). The map editor is in beta right now and if you enjoy the game I can give you a link to the beta of the editor.

[No_Style]

Originally Posted by YAYitsAndrew

There are a lot of addressbar shortcuts. Type 'g puppies' into the address bar and you'll automatically google search for puppies. Type 'z ninja turtles' and you'll automatically be taken to an amazon search for ninja turtles.

Indeed. You can also make your own by editing the search.ini file. I've added:

d for dictionary.com
gi for Google Images

Other worth while features which I use rarely or occasionally include:

Holding Shift + Arrow keys will allow you to navigate from link to link on a webpage.

..I'll add more if I can think of some.

[Zardon]

imageshack have auto thumbnail support? pretty cool, ill stick to Dh though, ive enough sites to bookmark


some good tips. tell me this as you know so much about this build of opera. in preferences there is in history and cache an option called "check documents" along with other settings.

is the check documents just like the "reload every..........."? as in when you manually hit reload in the nav bar it loads the site and gets the newest "document" from the server? (control F5 to IE users).

[Zardon]

mm I see the DH WYSIWYG editor loads up javascript interface in opera, for example when using the italic button on highlighted text.

[Dom]

Opera's pretty cool. Definitely one of the best browsers out there.

[YAYitsAndrew]

Originally Posted by Zardon

some good tips. tell me this as you know so much about this build of opera. in preferences there is in history and cache an option called "check documents" along with other settings.

is the check documents just like the "reload every..........."? as in when you manually hit reload in the nav bar it loads the site and gets the newest "document" from the server? (control F5 to IE users).

I'm not totally positive what those do. From past experiences with them my best guess is that they are the time before a regular reload will actually go to the server and pull a new page instead of loading from the cache. This is nifty and doesn't interfere with anything using server-side scripting such as php forums (you'll always get the latest content since the cached page is just the php script and not the returned html content.

Keeping these at high settings (the default 5 hours for instance) is a good way to keep opera nice and fast. You may however run into some issues with updating images since 5 hours is a long time when you're doing web development. I usually right click on the image and open it, then refresh that page. It will grab the latest version of the image.

And for no reason at all, another opera tip!

Double clicking on a plaintext link will usually select the whole damn thing. You may have to experiment doubleclicking in different spots for it to grab complicated stuff with ?'s and lots of /'s and &'s. The double click will bring up a menu with a "go to url" option at the bottom. Very handy for 'clicking' links in plain text.

[PangingJr]

i'm glad you like the new Opera. Zardon.

i love Opera.

Check documents: on your next visit within x hours. no reload.
If you want to check if a page has been updated, then press F5 to reload the page from the web, if any information has been updated, those new parts will be downloaded and displayed fresh (things that are unchanged are not downloaded again).
Opera 7 Performance Enhancements
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera7Performance

Custom Buttons to Drag'n'Drop into your Opera 7
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/CustomButtons


Opera 7 Wiki!
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera7

[No_Style]

I always keep reload to "Always" I always want the latest updated stuff. It's true it doesn't make Opera uber snappy, but it keeps content up to date which is important on a forum.

[Zardon]

Originally Posted by No_Style

I always keep reload to "Always" I always want the latest updated stuff. It's true it doesn't make Opera uber snappy, but it keeps content up to date which is important on a forum.

reload is in "check documents?"...... I dont think you need that on "always" to get updated posts in the forum, at least I dont think you do.

[No_Style]

Originally Posted by Ctrl-Alt-Del

i'm glad you like the new Opera. Zardon.

i love Opera.

Check documents: on your next visit within x hours. no reload.
If you want to check if a page has been updated, then press F5 to reload the page from the web, if any information has been updated, those new parts will be downloaded and displayed fresh (things that are unchanged are not downloaded again).
Opera 7 Performance Enhancements
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera7Performance

Custom Buttons to Drag'n'Drop into your Opera 7

Opera 7 Wiki!
http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera7

Great site CAD, thanks

[No_Style]

Originally Posted by Zardon

reload is in "check documents?"...... I dont think you need that on "always" to get updated posts in the forum, at least I dont think you do.

I mean the "Check Documents" setting, sorry. Sundays~.. Gotta love em .It's also for frontpage stuff. I found that if I kept it on 5 hours that I wouldn't get any updates. For instance, when I close my browser and open it back up, I wouldn't get any new news. Which forces me to click the refresh button to reload everything.

[YAYitsAndrew]

I'd rather do the refresh mouse gesture (up then down with right mouse button held down) when i'm doing web dev (somewhat infrequently) than have to wait for a page to refresh everytime i go to it. If you leave the check documents setting the way it is going back and forth to pages you've already visited is instant. As fast as switching tabs (right mouse button then scroll mouse wheel).

*hides opera tips in post*