7 Ways to Make Opera Awesome

I use Opera as my primary browser. Between its better interface, better tab management, and better development tools, it beat Chrome (my former favorite) on nearly everything (the big, I daresay huge, disadvantage is its slow pageloads compared to Chrome). But when you first load up Opera, it has one of the worst user experiences in browsing.

This is not Opera’s fault – indeed, Opera has some of the coolest features of any browser, as well as some awesome stuff for web design (Dragonfly > Developer Tools > View Source). It’s simply because the default options were picked by someone living in a basement who has never used a browser since Netscape. So here’s how to power your browsing in Opera.

1. Fix double-clicking opening the context menuThis is probably one of the most annoying defaults, particularly for those of us who read by constantly highliting and dehighliting text (viz., clicking a lot). It’s extremely simple to fix – just click the Opera button, go to Settings->Preferences->Advanced->Toolbars, and uncheck the option that says “Double-click text to display context menu”.

2. Bring back the UniboxOne thing I always liked about Chrome was the Unibox – one place for searches and addresses. Turns out, Opera has the exact same thing in their address bar, but they obscure that by adding in a needless “Search with Google” box to the right of the address bar. Just right-click that box, go to customize, and click “Remove from Toolbar”. You won’t miss it. I promise.

3. Get your extensionsOpera extensions make browsing much better. Currently, I’m using the following:

   • AutoPatchWork to automatically open series’ of pages (think Google results).
   • CSS PrefixR to make sure I get the full Opera experience even if the programmer was lazy about his proprietary CSS coding.
   • Close tabs right of current because I loved that functionality in Chrome.
   • Documents preview to preview documents (though I’ll probably switch to another with more capabilities).
   • Faviconize Google because it lets me skim Google faster.
   • HTML Color Coder because I’m sick and tired of opening a new tab to pick a color.
   • Mini Wikipedia, again to prevent excess tabs.
   • My Dropbox because I have Dropbox.
   • NetTools and The Developer Briefcase because I’m a web developer.
   • Opera Internal Pages so I can quickly see my browser settings pages.
   • PageRank to see the Google search weight of a site.
   • Persistent Text to save my form data.
   • Source in case I do want to look at the source code directly (though viewing it through Dragonfly is almost always sufficient).
   • YSlow to help me optimize my page loads.

4. Enable Opera TurboOpera Turbo is an awesome service that pre-compresses webpages for you so you use less bandwidth on slow connections (it slows down fast connections slightly). Just look at the bottom of your browser window, click the fourth icon from the left (looks like a speed gauge), click “Configure Opera Turbo”, and change it to “Automatic”. Tada! It will now detect a slow connection and automatically turn Turbo on if needed.

5. Speed up your scrollingYou may notice that scrolling through pages is a little laggy and jumpy. This is because of Opera’s smooth scrolling being somewhat less than optimized. If this bugs you, click the Opera button and go to Settings->Preferences->Advanced->Browsing and uncheck “Smooth scrolling”.

6. Give your Windows 7 taskbar tab previewsWindows 7 users might notice that, in (for example) IE, if you hover over the taskbar tile, it shows each tab as a preview and something you can click. Opera initially goes with each window. To enable tab previews from your taskbar, just go to Settings->Preferences->Advanced->Tabs->Additional Tab Options, and check the box that says “Use Windows 7 taskbar thumbnails.

7. Use tab grouping to your advantageOpera has the best tab grouping system I have ever seen (the only downside is that its difficult to close all but a group of tabs). Just use it. Drag one tab on top of another. Do it.

I hope this brief guide has either helped you as a current Opera user, or convinced you to give it a try. What are some other things that you can tweak to power your browsing? Why do you use or not use Opera? Tell me in the comments.

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