Let’s take a look at how we can easily change default lightweight appearance of Opera’s progress bar to a “heavy-armed” one which provides us with more information at the same time. Either right-click anywhere around the active tab in your browser (on any panel) and choose Customize from the menu or select Appearance from the Tools menu or again use a keyboard shortcut for it by pressing Shift+F12 (neat how many ways there are in Opera to achieve a simple task, ain’t it ;) ). After selecting the Toolbars tab in “Appearance” window, focus your sight on a drop-down list near …you guessed it… the Progress Bar label.

Here you can choose one of 2 options (excluding the default and Off ones), depending on your personal preferences. Selecting “Show inside address bar” option will make the progress bar appear inside of the address bar which seems a bit impractical to me because it blocks the address bar preventing you from accessing it directly. Though, someone might like it being displayed this way. I personally prefer the other “Pop-up at bottom” option which makes the progress bar appear at the bottom of your browser, just above the status bar (if enabled).

Either way, you come to a state where your progress bar reveals lots of information at once. You get a graphical and percentile view of document/code loading state as well as loaded/total number of pictures in the site along with the info of how much KBs were downloaded so far in total, the current speed of downloading (KB/s), time consumed by loading the page.

Last but not least, you obtain overall information about what the core is doing at the moment (requesting connections, sending/receiving data, looking up hostnames) so that you can easily determine what causes the problem when a website stops loading or doesn’t start to load at all.