Smart Computing-Editorial

Guide Series

Buy This Issue
Table of Contents For This Issue


PC Today: Personal Finance, Web Browsers, PDAs & Handhelds
February 2001• Vol.9 Issue 2 Page(s) 133-134 in print issue
How To Customize Opera Create A Browser You Can Call Your Own

Jump to first occurrence of: [OPERA] [BROWSER]

Like its more prominent competition Internet Explorer and Netscape, the Opera browser allows for a high level of customization, so you can configure it to look and work the way you want. All of the following customization tips are based on the most recent Opera version, 4.02.

Set Your Home Page. People work better in familiar surroundings, which is why so many computer users like to set up a home page. In Opera, you can set both a global and a window home page. The global home page will open every time you open the Opera browser and will remain the same until you change it. The window home page is handy if you are doing a lot of work in one window and want to return quickly to a certain page. Once you close that window, the home page setting will be discarded.

To set a home page, choose Set Home Page from the Navigation menu. This will open the Set Home Page dialog box, where you can type the URL (universal resource locator; Web address) into the Global Home Page or the Window Home Page text boxes or both. Click Use Active to use the page Opera is currently displaying. Click OK to save your changes.

To configure Opera to display your global home page instead of a window home page when you launch the browser, choose Preferences from the File menu. In the Preferences dialog box click Start And Exit, and in the Start section click the Show Single Window With Global Home Page radio button. Click OK.

Start & Stop The Tip Of The Day. There’s no doubt about it: the Tip Of The Day feature many applications (including Opera) display on startup is a great tool for learning about a program, but it can become annoying after awhile. To keep the Tip Of The Day from popping up at startup, choose Tip Of The Day from the Help menu and uncheck the checkbox next to Show Tips At Startup at the bottom of the Tip Of The Day window.

Assign Sounds To Opera Actions. Seeing may be believing, but hearing an action performed is helpful, too. From the Sounds section of the Preferences dialog box (choose Preferences from the File menu and then click Sounds), you can easily test and set sounds for many “triggers,” or actions, Opera performs. First make sure the Enable Sounds box is checked. Then select a trigger, such as Startup, and drill down through the files list by double-clicking folders until you find the sound file you want associated with that trigger.

There are a lot of sounds in C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA. Get there by double-clicking [-c-], [windows], [media]. If you want chimes to sound on startup, click chimes.wav, click Apply, and then OK. To hear a sound, double-click its name or select it and click Test.

Personalize The Hotlist. Opera’s Hotlist serves as a quick way to access your bookmarks and other key files. By default, the Hotlist double-paned window is docked on the left side of the screen. To resize the Hotlist, click-and-drag the corner of the window to the desired size and shape. Right-click in the margin of the window to access a pop-up menu with options for changing the location of the window.

The Preferences dialog box is ground zero for most of your customization tasks. You can access it from the File menu.

To further customize your Hotlist, choose Preferences from the File menu and click Hotlist. This section gives you many options for how the Hotlist will look. You can do such things as choose the default font and change the appearance of the bookmarks list.

Toggle Images & Manage Other Bandwidth Busters. Users with slow Internet connections will appreciate Opera’s ability to filter out elements such as images, animations, and sound that make a page load slowly. Loading images in particular can slow your browsing to a crawl, so use the monitor icon in the lower-left corner of the active window to quickly toggle images on and off. When you click this icon, Opera will load pages without images, placing the word “image” in a box where each picture would be and an X in the monitor icon. Click the icon again, and an arrow indicates that Opera will only display images in your cache. Click it one more time, and Opera clears the monitor icon of all symbols and fully loads all the images.

You can permanently disable the downloading of images through the Multimedia section of the Preferences dialog box. (From the File menu, choose Preferences, Multimedia.) This is also where you can choose to block animations, streaming video, and more.

Fill In Forms Automatically. One of the most tedious aspects of Web surfing is filling in forms whenever you do such things as order something, sign up for a newsletter, or register with a site. You can speed up this process considerably by making adjustments in the Personal information section of the Preferences dialog box (File menu, Preferences, Personal information).

Fill in the appropriate fields with your name, address, e-mail address, and other pertinent information. Then, when you need the information, right-click any text field in a Web form, select Insert Address from the pop-up menu, and choose the right information for that field from the menu. Opera will automatically insert the information for you. Choose Insert Contacts from the pop-up menu to access three Special categories that you can customize to fill in any other information you use frequently.

Give The Button Bar A New Look. The Button bar in Opera is fully customizable, and you can quickly access the available options by right-clicking anywhere on the bar. The pop-up menu lets you select between a Simple view (a bar with minimal icons) and Full view (a bar with more than 14 icons), or you can select Off to get rid of the bar completely. Choose Properties from the pop-up menu to access the Toolbars section of the Properties dialog box. (You can also access this from the File menu by selecting Preferences, Toolbars.)

The Toolbars section lets you further customize the Button bar. For example, you can select whether you want the Button bar (and the Progress bar) to contain text, images, or both. You can select your font and colors and choose between button sets to change the whole look of the bar. Opera ships with two sets of buttons, but you can download more from its Web site (http://www.opera.com/buttons.html). The Toolbars section also lets you configure whether the mouse-over pop-up text help that Opera provides for URLs and buttons is on or off.

Configure Opera’s Windows. Opera is no slouch in the area of windows configuration. The Windows section of the Preferences dialog box (from the File menu select Preferences, Windows) gives you many options for setting the way document windows look and work.

In the General section, click the appropriate checkboxes to do such things as automatically maximize windows when they open and dedicate more RAM to windows to avoid image flickering. In this section, you can also tell Opera to automatically fill in the rest of a URL you have previously accessed.

The button section of the Opera Web site features many different button sets developed by Opera or submitted by users. You can download a button set you like and use it in your browser.

The Document Windows section lets you choose whether to show scroll bars, the Progress bar and new Toolbars, and window size. You also get to decide whether bookmarks you select will open in new windows, and you can filter out pop-up windows, which usually contain advertising or surveys that ambush you as you surf.

Configure Opera For E-mail Use. Opera gives you several different options when it comes to e-mail. You can set it up to work with your own e-mail client, or you can use the e-mail client that comes with Opera 4.02. You can even use OperaMail, a Web-based service that Opera provides at no charge.

To set Opera up for e-mail use, access Preferences under the File menu and click E-mail. If you want to use an external client, select this option and then browse to find the program. You can also select the Use System Default option, which will use whatever program Windows has configured as default.

To use Opera’s client, select this option and click New. You’ll need to fill in the relevant information in the E-mail AccountProperties dialog box (available from your ISP [Internet service provider] or your current e-mail client properties dialog box), and you can customize options on the available tabs, such as whether to queue e-mail and set up signatures. Make sure you name the account and then click OK to exit.

Choose Security & Privacy Settings In Opera. Having a secure browser on the Internet has become very important as more people use the Internet to buy and sell things, and Opera’s Security section in the Preferences dialog box (File menu, Preferences, Security) will let you tailor the browser to the security level you need. In addition to viewing and deleting Certificate Authorities and setting security protocols, you can password-protect you security settings and select how often you’re prompted for the password. Clicking the Show alert box will prompt a warning message before your browser sends out a form insecurely.

The Privacy section of the Preferences dialog box lets you set how your system will react to and store cookies. You can be very cautious and set your browser to never accept cookies, be very trusting and set your browser to always accept cookies, or choose a setting in between.

Opera’s Options. The Opera browser provides many options for customization. With a few of these simple tweaks, you’ll have Opera looking and behaving the way you want it to in no time.

by Rich Gray

Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database.

Copyright & Legal Information Privacy Policy