They can be used to display information in real time on that age, from news to stock market information and weather reports.

There are currently 47 different speed dial extensions available on the Opera Addons page. This includes only English addons, additional addons are available for other languages.

I looked through all available extensions and have compiled a list of extensions that I consider to be the most useful. Obviously, you may have different requirements and expectations. I suggest you look at the extension listing after reading this article to see if there are other extensions that you might want to install.

• Stocktwits: Display trending stocks based on social chatter.
• Speed dial countdown: Add a timer to Opera which you can use as a reminder for instance.
• Analog Clock: Displays a basic analog clock on the speed dial page.
• The Weather: Displays a weather report for a location of your choosing.

• Photo Tagger: Tag photos on the Internet. Those appear then on the speed dial page. You can open the images at anytime once they are tagged.
• Live News Feed: Display the latest news of your favorite website on the speed dial page.
• Webcam Viewer: Display a web cam feed on the new tab page.
• Calendar: Display a calendar on the speed dial page.

• Currency Dial: Display currency conversion rates on the speed dial page. You can select two currencies in the preferences.
• Stay Secure: Select programs and software that you want to be informed about security vulnerabilities.
• Flickr Photostream: Display photos of a Flickr user on the new tab page.
• IcoLog: Display favicons of visited websites.

Those have been twelve interesting speed dial addons for the Opera 11.50 web browser. With the final release of the browser, it is likely that the count will go up considerably. Have you tried Opera 11.50 yet? If so, what is your impression of the new version?

Speed Dial basically displays a thumbnail list of the user’s favorite websites on the new tab page. This improves the usability and accessibility as it is now possible to open those websites with a single click on the new tab page.

The new and improved speed dial is “more fluid, dynamic and easier to use” says software developer Cezary Kułakowski in a blog post over at the Opera Desktop Team blog.

What does he mean by that? Probably the biggest difference is that website thumbnails are now placed dynamically on the new tab page, they adjust their size and position automatically based on the open Opera window and user preferences.

Opera has also done away with the hard coded website limit which means that it is now possible to display more websites on the new tab page. A scroll bar is automatically added when the size of the website thumbnails exceeds the available window space.

New websites are added to Speed Dial with a click on the plus icon on the last website thumbnail on the Opera Speed Dial page.

Users can add websites that they visit frequently (top ten) or open websites. An option to add sites from the bookmarks would have been handy.

Users can furthermore configure Opera Speed Dial by right-clicking on the page and selecting Configure Speed Dial or Appearance.

The Configure Speed Dial menu offers options to hide speed dial, change the background image to a custom one from the local computer and select the way the thumbnails are displayed on the page.

The new Opera Speed Dial will be integrated into the upcoming Opera 11.10 and future versions of the web browser. Interested users can download the latest snapshot of Opera 11.10 from the Opera Desktop Team blog posting. They should check the known issues first before they update existing versions of Opera. It is however possible to install the snapshot build in a different location. The snapshot of the browser is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The thumbnails that are used to represent the websites in the Speed Dial form are taken directly from the website. The best way of identifying the website is probably the title of the website which will be displayed below each thumbnail. The thumbnail itself is usually to small to be helpful in quickly identifying the website.

Tamil who runs a blog at the Opera website posted information on how to exchange the automatically generated thumbnails with custom ones that make it easier to identify the websites. The alternative thumbnails have to be created in png format with a suggest size of 256×192 pixels or less.

The default thumbnails are stored in the Opera profile folder. Windows users can locate that folder at Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\thumbnails. The available thumbnails are randomly named. The only way of identifying the websites is to open them in an image viewer. All that needs to be done to exchange the thumbnails is to copy the name of the default thumbnail and name the new thumbnail identically. Once that is done the thumbnails can be exchanged. It should be noted that Opera has to be closed during the file operation.

Two thumbnails have been exchanged in the above example. This makes it easier to identify websites in Speed Dial. It is easy to undo the changes. Pressing F5 will automatically generate new thumbnails of the website replacing the existing ones.