:A2B and More

I’ve been using Opera as my main browser for about 3 or four years now - in fact I’ve got it running on my Nokia 6600 phone as well as my Windows PC. I really like it as a browser - independent, lots of features, great forums where people actually take the time to respond to your comments, and it seems much less vulnerable to security scares experienced by browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Setting up Opera as a first-time user can be a slightly intimidating experience - almost every single aspect of the look, feel and background workings of the browser is configurable, and it can take ages to work out how to customise (customize, whatever) it so that it is as useful as possible. Recently, I’ve had a few newer users ask me how I got Opera working well. I put together a few tips for one of them - I hope they’re useful:

Appearance

- IMO the best way to customise the look/feel of the browser is by right-clicking on one of the toolbars and selecting “customize” to get the Appearance menu. I then like to have a “floating” panel placement with Mail, Bookmarks, Contacts etc selected, and “show panel placement at edge of window”. Then when you click on e.g. the Received view in the mail panel, the window will open up.
- Selecting “Restore All” in the main Window menu will give you all your windows/tabs detached from the background, then you can move them around
- In the “customize” menu mentioned earlier, you can select the buttons tab and drag the buttons anywhere you want - dragging “All accounts” and “Start search” into the mail panel and the mail view window can be very useful as you can then restrict a view (or a search) to just one account. Also having the “Check” button in the mail menu is useful as you can “Check All” or check just one account.
- I think the main toolbar panel needs some buttons dragging into it as it misses back and forward and some other by default - you can do this using the technique above.
- There are various keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures like F11 for full screen, plus you can define your own. See Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts where you can click on edit to see all of them.
- The Opera forums at http://my.opera.com are a goldmine - people are usually very responsive when you’ve got a problem (as long as you’ve searched the forum for an answer already)
- On the Appearance -> Toolbars menu I have the progress bar pop up at the bottom of the page, select “images and text below” in Style and “No wrapping” in Wrapping. I don’t bother with the status standard toolbar, but do have a personal bar (you can put bookmarks on it, or whole bookmarks folders)
- Skins are in the Appearance menu, I have Zephyr running. Lots more on the Opera site

Main Preferences

- The Tools -> Quick Preferences menu is quite useful
- To get PDFs viewable in an Opera window you might need to install a plug-in DLL in the right directory - details in Opera forum (plus you need 8.51 as there was a bug with it in 8.50)
- In the preferences -> general menu, selecting “Continue from last time” as a Startup option is good - it will even continue from where you were if it crashes (it doesn’t crash too too often these days). I’ve also got “Open pages in tabs” selected as the pages option. If your panel placement is “floating” in the appearance menu then I find this is really flexible as you can move your windows around.
- I don’t bother with Wand (tools -> preferences) but I do have the auto-complete section filled out so that I don’t have to type in my street address every time I fill in an HTML form
- The Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced settings are where the fine stuff happens. I’ve got “Remember last size” selected for Browser -> New Pages so that all new pages open in a standard size - you may need to “restore all”, change the size of the window to the way you want it, then exit/restart Opera to get it working just the way you want it. Also, “Cycle Pages” in recently-used order allows you to cycle through the open windows using CTRL-TAB. Reuse existing page is clicked, as is show scroll bars. Can’t remember why, but I have smooth scrolling turned off - think for CPU or memory reasons on my crappy PC at home.
- I don’t bother with this, but Preferences -> Advanced -> search allows you to define a URL like “g andre stiphout” to search Google for your name when you hit return. I don’t bother because I have “Google Search” and “Find in Page Search” buttons dragged into each browser window from the Appearance menu, so I just type in the Google search term there and hit return.
- In preferences -> advanced -> history, I’ve got the memory cache set to automatic.
- Proxy servers are under network in advanced preferences

M2 Mail Client

- M2 is great for running multiple mail accounts on one machine - you can check them all individually or the whole lot in one go
- Most of the mail settings are in tools -> mail and chat accounts
- When sending from my laptop, I automatically BCC myself so that my home PC will always pick up a copy of any mail I send. I then have “Leave messages on server” selected in accounts -> edit -> incoming for the laptop, but not the home PC. Guess I could use IMAP for this…
- If you want to use multiple “From:” addresses with the same POP3 account, then set up another account and uncheck the “Include this account when checking manually” box in accounts -> edit -> incoming.
- I have the “Check/Send”, “Compose”, “Start Search” and “All Accounts” buttons in the mail panel in the floating panels. Then I can select which account to check from the drop-down, only look at one account by selecting an account from the “All Accounts” drop-down, and search for mail by typing in a keyword - it will automatically open a search window when you hit return. If you then click on All Messages -> Received in the panel, it will change the contents of the mail window to the received view,although you can come back to the search by selecting it under the “Searches” views.
- When you hit compose you just select the From: address and it will send the mail from the account and automatically change the signature you have defined in the “outgoing” settings for that mail account.
- I have unselected “Automatically wrap outgoing messages” in the outgoing settings as I found that wrapping was getting nasty, but I do have “Add contacts when sending message” selected as then you can just type in the first few letters of a contacts name and Opera will give you a list of options.
- Whilst only one mail/news view window may happen to be open at the same time, Opera will remember the settings separately. So you can “view -> threaded” for a mailing-list by clicking on the view button in a mail view and “view -> flat” for a general window (which may or may not contain the same mailing-list messages.
- I’ve also got “Display” set to “List and message below” in the mail window view settings.
- Mailing-lists are recognised by some kind of X-mailing-list header so some of them don’t show up as a mailing-list. However, the ones that do have the right headers make use of this incredibly useful feature in the mail panel where you can just click on “Mailing-lists” and then select the list to see the latest messages. You can also remove mailing-lists from your normal “Received” view if you only want personal mail to be shown.
- I only have “read”, “mailing-lists” and “filtered” showing in my received view. You can click on the “spam” button to dump something into the spam view - the filter learns quite quickly, but you need to scan your spam folder every so often for false positives and then click the “not spam” button. If any of the buttons aren’t in any windows just drag them from the appearance menu.
- Because I have something over 200,000 mails on my PC at home I’ve got Period set to 1 month in the view -> period menu in the Received mail view which improves the speed of the application. This doesn’t stop mails from “Forever” showing up when I search for a keyword.
- “Redirect” is equivalent to “bounce” in Pine.
- I can’t remember how I set the quote mark as a “>” in the composer window, but each composer window has it’s own view menu where you can add header fields.
- You can also add RSS feeds in the feeds menu - I’ve got about 30 in there! When you view a weblog or another site with an RSS feed in your browser window, a small RSS icon pops up in the URL bar. Click on this to subscribe to the feed.
- When you import mail from an mbox file it gives it its own account/view.
- Empty trash just by right-clicking on the trash view in the panel. I use CTRL-A to select all mail in my spam view, then hit the delete key, which dumps the spam into the trash view/folder. Then right-click to delete.
- Saving attachments used to be easy with the standard windows save menu but now it’s a bit of a pain as Opera introduced its own menu. Lots of people complained on the forums though, and that often has an effect, so maybe it will be changed at some point.

Okay, hope that helps people out a bit. Feel free to drop me a comment if you’ve got more questions.

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