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PC Today: Personal Finance, Web Browsers, PDAs & Handhelds
February 2001• Vol.9 Issue 2 Page(s) 135 in print issue
Tips To Improve Your Opera Experience Pleasant Browsing, Enter Stage Left

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

Once you have Opera set up to look and run the way you want, you can do some additional things to improve your browsing experience. Whether you are looking for a way to make Opera more accessible, more fun, or more informative, these tips will help enrich the time you spend browsing the Web with Opera. We’ll even show you how to become an active member in the Opera community.

Use Opera With AOL. If you want to use Opera with AOL, there are a couple of things to keep in mind in order for it to work properly. First, make sure to install Opera in the AOL directory, which is the directory that contains Winsock.dll or Wsock32.dll. (The AOL directory will be installed on most systems at C:\ PROGRAM FILES\AOL.)

You should also make sure that both Opera and AOL are the same bit version. For example, you can run the 32-bit version of Opera with the 32-bit version of AOL, or the 16-bit Opera with the 16-bit AOL, but you can’t run the 16-bit Opera with the 32-bit AOL or vice versa.

Create Your Own Button Sets. Opera’s Button bar is where you’ll find icons such as Save, Open, and Print. As we mentioned in the previous article, you can change the look of these buttons by cutting and pasting a new Button bar from Opera’s Web site. But if you’re feeling especially creative, you can try designing your own Button bar to work with Opera. Buttons can be image files of any size in .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .XBM format. You can create your own button images or modify someone else’s using an image editor (such as Photoshop) and then save them in one of the above formats in Opera’s BUTTONS folder. (This will usually be C:\PROGRAM FILES\OPERA\BUTTONS.)

You’ll also need to create an .INI file for this folder that will specify which image to use for each button function. You can see a sample .INI file online at http://www.opera.com/support/config/sampleini.html or simply copy the current Button bar .INI file to your new button folder and reset the location of each image for the button it fits.

Open Browser Windows In Background. It’s probably happened to you many times: As you read a Web page, you come upon a link that looks interesting. But if you click it to read it, you will have to break from what you were reading in the first place. To avoid this interruption, open the linked page in a background window by pressing SHIFT-CTRL while you click the link. Now you can read the linked page at your leisure.

Join An Opera Newsgroup. Newsgroups are valuable in that they not only let users of a particular product ask questions and share tips, but they also foster a community atmosphere that can greatly enrich a user’s experience with a product. Opera supports many newsgroups specifically geared toward beta testers, Opera users who share a specific language or operating system, and forums for general and technical discussions. You can get information on how to access these groups from http://www.opera.com/forum.html.

Opera also publishes several English-language newsletters that will bring the latest news, tips, and more right to your e-mail inbox. You can sign up for these newsletters at http://www.operasoftware.com/mailinglist.html.

Check Out MyOpera. Once you’ve figured out just the right way to use Opera, navigate to MyOpera, which provides users with an Opera-specific portal that gives them quick access to WebMail, stock quotes, news, and more. While not as full-featured or personalized as similar portal sites such as Yahoo! and Excite, MyOpera is well worth checking out, and its Opera-specific slant makes it unique among portals. You can check out MyOpera at http://www.myopera.com/.

Be A Beta Tester. If you’d like to improve Opera performance for all users, consider becoming a beta tester. To volunteer, simply send an e-mail to beta@opera.com and tell them about the computer you work on and why you want to beta test and give them a little background about yourself.

by Rich Gray

Features For Users With Disabilities

In addition to working with many older computers and operating systems (a boon to those who can’t afford or don’t want to update their systems), Opera offers a full range of features to help users with disabilities navigate the Web with ease. On a very basic level, users can make Opera easier to view by changing the font size and type, removing unnecessary menu items and scroll bars, customizing sounds, and much more. Opera is capable of more involved adaptations, too.

Full keyboard navigation. Even if you can’t use a mouse, you can still browse the Web. Opera goes overboard in providing keystroke combinations and keyboard shortcuts so that you can easily use the browser without going anywhere near a mouse. View the Keyboard Shortcuts window for a list of keyboard combinations by pressing CTRL-B from within Opera.

Toggle document and user settings. Fancy fonts and other design tricks may be high style for some users, but they are often very difficult to read. You can toggle document and user settings to try to overrule hard-to-read design elements by pressing CTRL-G.

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