It is a pretty solid walkthrough that unfortunately lacks images to go along with the article. The tips and tweaks are divided into these five subjects:

• Give tabs more space
• Prevent unwanted close
• Change tab logic
• Use hotkeys
• Show tabs in full screen mode

Most of the tips and tweaks describe Opera settings and options that can be changed to make it easier and more convenient to work with many tabs in the Opera browser. Probably the most useful tip for a “minimal user interface” type of user like me is the description of how to remove interface elements from the toolbar to provide more space for the tabs.

The article is worth a read for all users who work regularly or partially with the Opera web browser.

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Speed Dial is displaying nine website thumbnails in a 3×3 matrix. Some users of the Opera Internet browser might want to change the speed dial size to display additional (or less) website thumbnails. This can be done by editing the speeddial.ini configuration file that is found in the Opera profile folder. Windows users find the file in the Application Data folder.

All that needs to be done to change the speed dial size is to open the speeddial.ini file and add the following three lines to the end of the file.

[Size]
Rows=x
Columns=y

where x and y are the number of rows and columns that should be displayed.

4×4

8×8

Some sizes are obviously to large to offer the benefit that Speed Dial is supposed to offer to the Internet user. It might however still be interesting for some users who want to increase the speed dial size slightly.

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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.

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Both the bookmarks and notes will be backed up in the Opera profile directory in the newly created backups directory. Windows users find the Opera profile folder in the hidden Application Data folder of their user profile.

Opera launcher has a few additional options that can be checked. It can disable the crash startup dialog and delete the quick find search history. The small tool has to be placed inside the main Opera directory. The easiest way to work with the program is to create a shortcut to the launcher and place it in the start menu or or on the computer desktop.

Previously created backups can be recovered by moving one of the backups into the main profile directory and renaming it to opera6.adr or notes.adr depending on the file.

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The menu itself in Opera is a little bit hidden. The easiest way to get there is to hit the keyboard shortcut [Shift F12] and click on the Find More Skins box when the Appearance window pops up. This opens an interface that is divided into the four tabs Popular skins, New skins, Editor’s picks and Top rated.

The layout of each tab is similar. They all contain lists of themes that include the theme’s title, the author, a screenshot of the theme, information provided by the author, a link to comments and the download button.

A click on the Download button will automatically download and activate the skin and the user will be asked if he wants to keep it. Clicking Yes will move the skin to the installed skins.

The Show Installed Skins menu in Appearance contains a list of all downloaded skins. Selecting a skin in the list will automatically change the Opera theme. A click on OK will make the selected theme the default theme in Opera.

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The Opera Password Manager on the other hand is only protecting the data from being entered automatically if it has been set this way. There is no obvious way to look at the usernames and passwords that have been stored in Opera. Tamil over at Opera did post a workaround for that problem.

So the major problem if the Master Password in Opera has been forgotten is that Opera will not fill out the username and password of sites that have been stored in Opera.

Tamil comes again to the rescue by providing a guideline on how to reset the master password in Opera.

If Tools → Preferences… → Advanced → Security → Use master password to protect saved passwords is not enabled, delete opcert6.dat from profile after closing Opera.

If Tools → Preferences… → Advanced → Security → Use master password to protect saved passwords is enabled, delete/rename opcert6.dat & wand.dat from profile after closing Opera.

The process does involve deleting (or renaming) files in the Opera profile directory (located in Documetns & Settings by default). The file opcert6.dat has to be always deleted or renamed while wand.dat only needs to be removed if the option Use master password to protect saved passwords is enabled in Opera.

Please note that deleting wand.dat will remove all stored passwords from Opera Wand.

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First you need to download the Greasemonkey script that you would like to use in Opera. You may need to rename that script so that the file ends with user.js if that is not already the case.
Now open Opera and go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content and click on the JavaScript Options button.

There is a form at the end called User Javascript Files that points to the directory that contains all the custom Javascript files. If you got more than one put them all in that directory. I suggest you create a new folder in the Opera directory and name it Javascripts or something like that.

Opera needs to be restarted so that the scripts can be loaded once the folder has been selected. After that it’s just a matter of testing the scripts on whatever website they are working on.

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Pritesh pointed out that there is a way to run the Opera Mini browser on a normal computer by following instructions found on the Java on Mobile Devices website. It’s a bit complicated but doable for anyone with a technical understanding.

A user basically needs to download the Java SE Development Kit (JDK), the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5.2 for CLDC, the OperaMiniLargeDevice configuration created by the author and obviously the Opera Mini Browser.

Start by installing the JDK and the Wireless Toolkit afterward. Now extract and move the OperaMiniLargeDevice folder to the wtklib\devices path of the Wireless Toolkit and choose it as the default service in the start menu. Now run Run MIDP Application from the same start menu entry which will load Opera Mini if you select the JAD file that you have downloaded earlier.

The author provides two additional screen resolutions that provide support for the Asus EEE PC and the HTC Shift. The latest updated files are available at this post.

The main advantage of using Opera Mini is the compression in my opinion and probably the low resource usage of the browser. Setup is slightly complicated but once everything is running you can be sure that you are using a low resource and low bandwidth browser, probably as low as it can get.

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The situation however is a bit different if you compare Firefox and Opera. Firefox users can install several extensions that help them save bandwidth while Opera users have to rely on the build in features and options offered in the preferences of the browser.

We make use of two methods to change configuration settings in Opera. The first is the Preferences menu which can be accessed from Tools > Preferences.

Check that images are only loaded if they are already in the cache by clicking on the Web Pages tab in Opera. It should display Cached Images next to the Images setting.

Now head over to the advanced tab and click on the Content entry in the left menu. Now disable animated images, sound in Web-pages, Javascript, Java and Plugins in that menu and add exceptions for the websites that you visit and require some of these. Most likely it will be Javascript that will be required.

You can add exceptions by clicking on Manage Site Preferences and adding websites that you want to configure individually.

Now click on History and change the interval that Opera uses to check if a new version of a document or image is available on a server. I suggest to change at least the image setting to 24 hours and the document setting to every hour. You can still force the check by hitting F5.

You can also disable favicons under browsing. Now download the Flashblocker file from Opera to replace flash content with a button that only loads that content if the button is pressed.

Make sure you read the instructions. You have to copy two files into different Opera directories and activate the Flashblocker in Opera.

Now head over to another userscript that blocks Javascript popups and make sure you read the instructions carefully.

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The advantage of Opera Link is that it is build into Opera like many other features that can only be added to Firefox with add-ons. Opera Link can be used to synchronize Bookmarks, Notes, Speed Dial and the Personal Bar with an online storage at Opera. That storage can be accessed by other Opera browsers including Opera Mini. As a bonus the personal data can also be accessed directly on the Opera website which is excellent if you access the web from a computer that has no Opera browser installed.

Using Opera Link could not be easier. The feature can be accessed in the File > Synchronize Opera menu and requires an account at Opera. The account can be created right from the menu and the only data that is required is a username, password and email.

The transfer of the data is fast and I was not able to witness any delay in the process. The data will be continuously synced with Opera Link until the user decides to turn that feature off again.

Bookmarks and the other data will be synchronized with every browser that activates the sync feature and provides the same user data that has been entered during account creation.

The online version provides access to the bookmarks and Speed Dial links and even has an option to add new bookmarks.

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That’s an rather unusual layout at first and many users will be devastated once they realize that they cannot change the order of the toolbars in Opera. It is still possible to arrange the elements of the toolbars but not the toolbars themselves. That’s the whole trick. To do that right-click a toolbar and select customize from the menu.

The Appearance menu opens showing the active and inactive toolbars among other things.

The first step is to make sure that the Main Bar, Personal Bar, Tab Bar and Address Bar are checked in the Appearance menu. This adds another menu called Main Bar on top of all other toolbars. The layout should now look like this: From Top to Bottom Main Bar, Personal Bar, Tab Bar and Address Bar.

I selected the customize option again and dragged the address form to the main bar (on top) and removed any other element on that bar afterwards by right-clicking the element and selecting Remove From Toolbar from the menu.

After that I dragged the Back, Forward, Reload button and Search Form to the Main Bar as well and disabled the Address Bar in the Appearance Menu. I now had all the functions of the Address Bar on top and the Bookmarks Bar and Tabs below it.

If you have any questions about the procedure let me know please. If anyone knows how to reduce the size of the bookmarks toolbar let me know.

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Google is using some kind of browser check to determine if the link to the new version is shown. It does not even help to mask or identify as another browser in Opera, the link will still not be shown.

Ryan from Cybernet News found a way in and I really have to thank him for finding the following url: mail.google.com/gmail?nocheckbrowser If you load Gmail using the parameter nocheckbrowser Gmail will not try and identify the browser and display all the contents in Opera as well.

That’s a pretty handy trick if you want to access the new Gmail interface with Opera. The best practice would be to add the url to your bookmarks in Opera if you use Gmail regularly.

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But back to the topic. The following keyboard shortcuts are all that is needed to use Opera without the mouse in most situations including the aforementioned way to open search results in Opera without having to use the mouse. This way is unfortunately not as precise but it is speedy enough to use it instead of the mouse.

It is possible to flip through links in Opera using the Shift + Arrow Keys shortcut. The up and down arrow keys switch to the first link in the previous or next line while the left and right keys jump to the previous or next link no matter where it is located. The first result of a Google search can be selected by using the Shift Arrow Key Down shortcut three times. The link can then be loaded with the Enter key which would open the link in the same tab, the Shift Enter combination which would load it in a new tab or the CTRL Shift Enter combination that opens the link in a background tab.

Here are the important shortcuts for keyboard only navigation in Opera:

• Shift + Arrow Key UP – Jumps to the next line above the current cursor position that contains a link selecting the first link in that line
• Shift + Arrow Key DOWN – Jumps to the next line below the current cursor position that contains a link selecting the first link in that line
• Shift + Arrow Key LEFT – Jumps to the first link before the current cursor position.
• Shift + Arrow Key Right – Jumps to the first link after the current cursor position.
• Enter – Load the selected link in the same tab.
• Shift + Enter – Load the selected link in a new tab.
• Ctrl + Shift + Enter – Load the selected link in a background tab.
• Ctrl + Shift + S – Save the selected Link Target.
• F2 – Enter a URL
• Ctrl + Tab – Cycle to next tab.
• Ctrl + Shift + Tab – Cycle to previous tab.

Maybe Tobey our Opera geek can comment on other options or a faster way to open the search results in Opera just with the keyboard.

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Every now and then I switch the current presentation mode in my browser to make an unsuitably designed page (too low or too high contrast, badly styled elements, etc.) draw in a way that ensures a good readability at all times. Whether your reason to change the style of websites you visit is to make them more legible and accessible, ease the strain in your eyes caused by bright backgrounds for better comfort or just make them look as fancy as possible, it can be easily achieved by using custom or even pre-arranged CSS files that come with Opera.

The two basic modes between which you may switch at will are called the “Author mode” and “User mode” while the former mentioned is according to its name a mode where the original stylesheet file bound to that particular website is used, whereas the latter mentioned doesn’t have a solid form since its appearance depends which custom stylesheet is used. For a good start, you may want to give it a try by simply pressing the Shift+G trigger hotkey which immediately switches from Author to User mode and vice versa. You can see some significant changes taking place among the contents of that website and the point is these changes can be simply adjusted to suit your ideas and requirements.

Take the built-in “High contrast W/B” stylesheet for instance. You get a dark-room-like environment with well visible elements atop it where especially longer texts are far easier to read. Now it’s possible to simply copy the contents of %Opera_root_folder%\styles\user\Contrastwb.css, paste them into the default CSS file used by “User mode” which can be found in %Opera_root_folder%\styles\user (after making a backup) and perhaps even mess with the code a bit to make it better for your needs. Of course you have the opportunity to start from scratch and code your own User mode design entirely by yourself, just don’t forget to use the “!important” statement with your definitions to avoid any interferences with the original css used for websites. The possibilities are virtually limitless.

Just a note that the following under View > Style > Manage modes… should be checked in order to make your stylesheet affect the display method correctly:

• My stylesheet
• My fonts & colors
• My link style

Check out the example below (download in case you don’t wanna bother making your own CSS):

User mode (customized)

Happy customizing.

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The installation nevertheless will go through and OperaFly will become available in the Windows Start Menu. It tries to automatically detect the correct Opera directory during first start, if that is not successful you need to manually locate the correct directory. Once that is out of the way you can specify a directory to save the backups in and what should be included in the backup.

By default everything will be backed up including bookmarks, cookies, mails, news and site preferences. All in all 29 different items can be included or excluded in the backup.

The backup itself can be initiated by right-clicking on the OperaFly icon in the system tray (Start Backup Now). Backups can also be scheduled by using the OperaFly Schedule Editor which offers options to create backups as often as you like.

I had some trouble with some of the options though and would like to describe them right now. The first thing that I noticed was that the integration in the Opera Tool menu did not work. Not a huge problem though. Far more problematic was that OperaFly did not recognize my version of Opera 9.5 although it was running. It was telling me that Opera was not running although it identified the Opera directory correctly in the options.

I guess that it was related to the automatic update problem. OperaFly has a option to automatically backup the Opera profile whenever Opera closes. This did not work on my computer and I think it is related to the problem that OperaFly did not recognize Opera although it was running.

Last but not least the right-click menu in the system tray was returning a blank menu whenever the main program window was open.It did turn back to normal once the window was closed.

OperaFly could become an essential tool for every Opera user if the author manages to get rid of the bugs that I encountered. As of now it’s great for manually backing up Opera.

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I’ve always thought highly of surfing in fullscreen which is in some way more comfortable. Besides, using Windows’ cool-switch feature ensures ease of switching to other apps w/o any problems. However, there had always been a drawback making me put this feature aside a bit. The thing is that Opera with enabled tabbed browsing won’t display the tabs panel when in fullscreen mode, making it quite confusing and more difficult to keep order in websites you have open in all those tabs and control the amount of active tabs. Fortunately, there’s a rather simple way to resolve this problem.

You can easily force Opera to display various bars in fullscreen by editing the action taking place after pressing the F11 key. To do this, you’ll have to open the Advanced tab in Preferences window (Ctrl+F12) and continue to the Shortcuts menu. Here, you can edit the default keyboard layout. In the editing dialog, paste the string “Platform Windows-Unix-MCE, F11″ into the search field and double-click on the right side of the appropriate line. Now you can add a short statement to achieve desired result:

original action definition: Enter fullscreen | Leave fullscreen

altered action definition: Enter fullscreen & View page bar, # | Leave fullscreen
# determines the position of that particular panel on the screen (1-4 for left-bottom)

Additionally, you may want to add another statement with the string “status bar” instead, to display, surprisingly, your Status bar which also provides useful info (targets for anchor links, etc.) or quick access to custom buttons.

If you’re still not satisfied with the final result you got, try to take a look at some excellent ready-made custom buttons @OperaWiki.info offering even more advanced solutions for customizing fullscreen browsing in Opera. Just remember that you can copy & paste the code of these buttons to make the F11 key adopt that customized behavior rather than having to use a separate button to achieve the same result. Also, access to the sidebar is still enabled in FS by pressing F4 key.

Inspiration:

Have fun making your browser more OPERAtional :)

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Now I’m sharing the little knowledge I’ve gathered with all Opera-mates.

Issue #1: How to view my transfers in a regular tab, instead of an illegible overview sqeezing in the toggle sidebar.

Solution #1: Go to the Appearance dialog (Shift+F12) > Buttons tab and select Panels to see a small square button with two arrows pointing to the right (> >). Now toggle-open the sidebar, choose Transfers here and drag & drop that lil square button between the label Transfers and the close button (x). From now on, enlarge any sidebar panel, including Transfers, into a nice wide tab by simply hitting the 2-arrow button.
Solution #2: Use Opera’s built-in hotkey Ctrl+Alt+T (editable in Preferences) to quickly access Transfers in a tab.

Issue #2: On active transfer, open Transfers tab in background, rather than in foreground.

Having Transfers tab open with every single transfer may get pretty annoying, especially with multiple downloads at once. It took me quite some time to re-discover this option after reinstalling Opera some time ago, although the place to find this setting is so much obvious. Simply go to transfers tab (Ctrl+Alt+T, see above) and in the View menu (glasses) select the desired option. Simple enough, huh?

Issue #3: I want “Open folder” item back in my context-menu !!!

Have you noticed the disappearance of “Open folder” item in Transfers’ context-menu? I did because I used it quite often before it disappeared from Opera, usually when I wasn’t fast enough to click the “Transfer complete” pop-up quietly sinking into taskbar. Disabling this feature seems to have been just a side effect of adapting Opera to Unix environments.

Nevertheless, you can fortunately get this useful feature back by editing one *.ini file. Close Opera, go to defaults folder inside Opera’s root folder (Program Files, most likely) and open “standard_menu.ini” file (after backing it up, just to be sure). Here, edit the original line 1627:

Platform Unix, Item, 69697 = Open transfer folder

to make it look like this (w/o the first string):

Item, 69697 = Open transfer folder

Restart Opera and enjoy the good old “Open folder” option.

Thanks for this tip goes to Tamil. Happy surfing, OPERAtors ;)

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Fortunately, Opera is clever enough to handle this in most cases by applying a disguise against the web server, it just needs to be triggered the right way. To make it identify as another browser however, you need to press F12 and go to “Network” tab in the “Site preferences” menu first and select “Identify as Opera (IE, Firefox)”, which is rather impractical. How lucky we are to have another, much simpler solution to this.

The solution starts with enabling the Status bar through View > Toolbars menu if you haven’t done so earlier. After that, either press Shift + F12 or select Customize after right-clicking the Status bar (at the bottom of the screen) to get to the Appearance window and then choose Buttons tab in the opened window.

After selecting the Status category, you’ll see “Identify as” button among several others. Drag this button, drop it over your Status bar, align it anywhere you want and don’t forget to confirm the actions by clicking OK in the Appearance window. Since now, you can switch your browsers identification by a single click on the “Identify as” button sitting in Status bar. Simple enough, huh?

Of course, thanks to Opera’s flexibility, you can locate this or any other button (Clock, Progress bar) to a different place besides Status bar. Yet, Status bar appears to be the best place for it.

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Please note that everything that I’m describing here worked fine on my computer. It speed up Opera and increased my browsing experience with it tremendously. While most tips will work for any users no matter their connection to the Internet some tips might only increase performance for broadband users.

• Disable Name Completion and local network lookup

Whenever you enter a single word into the address field Opera will look in your bookmarks for that name and try to find a local network with the name as well. Server Name Completion tries to append prefixes and suffixes to the name automatically. While this feature might be great for some users it uses time and cpu and should be turned of for faster browsing.

Click on Tools > Preferences, select the Advanced Tab and choose Network from the left menu. Click on Server Name Completion and disable Look for local network machine and try name completion, using.

• Increase the time cached images are used before checking for new versions

Opera downloads images to its cache to be able to load them faster (from your hard drive) the next time you visit the website. By default Opera checks every 5 hours if a new version of that image has appeared on the website. If you increase this time you increase your overall performance.

Go to Tools > Preferences and click on the Advanced Tab. Choose History from the left menu and select Every 24 hours or even every week for image checks. You can always refresh the cache manually by typing F5 while visiting the website.

• Remove unneeded and duplicate plugins

Type opera:plugins in the address bar, this should display a list of plugins that are currently installed. Take a closer look and see if you find plugins that you never need. For instance if you never use Realplayer streams in Opera you should deactivate it.

To deactivate them open the file plugin-ignore.ini located in your Opera main directory and add the filename of the plugin that you want to disable to it.

Another problem are duplicate plugins that are caused by loading the plugins from Firefox as well. This happens of course only if Firefox is installed on the same system. You can disable this easily by typing opera:config in the address bar. Navigate to User Prefs > Plugin Path and delete the Firefox reference there.

• Rebuild your profile if you have upgraded Opera (a lot)

This is only for users who upgrade Opera a lot. I for instance was using Opera since version 6 and always upgraded from the old version to a new one. This could mess up the ini files, especially the opera6.ini file which is still used in all versions of Opera. This could lead to all sorts of problems (slow page loading, high cpu usage)caused by obsolete or incorrect entries in that ini file.

The easiest approach would be to backup the file opera6.ini in your profiles folder of your Opera installation and delete it afterwards. Please note that Opera has to be closed before you do this. Restart Opera afterwards and it should automatically create a new opera6.ini file without all those old entries.

You will loose the personal information if you entered them in Opera and also all tweaks that you might have applied are gone too. It is however not a big problem to enter them again using the Preferences for the personal information and about:config for the latter.

• Disable Turbo mode

While this might sound a little bit strange at first to disable turbo mode and present it as a tip to speed up Opera it becomes clear soon. Turbo mode means that Opera pre-draws any image which means that you see part of it although it is not fully loaded. This uses CPU and memory and could increase overall performance especially on slower computers. It should not be noticeable on fast computers though.

Type about:config and enter Turbo into the search field. Disable Turbo Mode and click on save.

• Increase the number of total connections

If you happen to load many tabs at once and like to read websites more or less simultaneously you might want to increase the maximum number of connections. This should have a drastic impact on loading times if you use a broadband connection. It should not make a big difference for users with slow connections, such as 256K connections or less.

Type about:config and enter connections into the search field. Change the value of Max Connections Total from 20 to another value, I suggest 32 or 64 connections. The Max Connections per Server setting should remain as it is. You might even want to test a lower setting, for instance 4 connections there.

• Reduce the amount of visited pages in history

Opera keeps track of the last 500 visited websites. The benefit is that Opera displays all urls that fit the string that you enter in the address bar. You can then scroll down and load the website without entering the url fully. This can however impact the time Opera needs to startup.

A temporary fix would be to clear the history manually, a better solution to reduce the amount of websites that Opera stores.

Click on Tools > Preferences and then on the advanced tab. Select History from the left menu and either click on Clear next to Addresses if you want to test if this solution really speeds up loading times or reduce the number of stored addresses in the history right away. I never use that feature and set it to 0. You might reduce it to 100 for instance.

• Change Expiry Settings

Some Webmasters want you to load their website anew every time you visit it to display new ad banners for instance. This has the effect that Opera will not use the files stored in cache to load the website but request the complete website again from the server increasing load times.

We are however able to ignore the Expires meta tag from websites by changing two settings in the Opera configuration.

Write opera:config in the address bar, hit enter. Search for expiry and change the settings for Check Expiry History and Check Expiry Load to 1.

• Save Images Faster

This is probably more a usablity tip than a performance tip but I think it is still nice enough to be included. Instead of saving images by right-clicking on them and selecting Save Image you can simply press CTRL and left-click the image. The download window appears and you can save it then immediately.

• Delay mail and rss connections at startup

Opera prioritizes mail and rss accounts during startup. This could mean that you could witness lots of disk activity during startup which could slow down Opera significantly. It is possible to delay each account individually to prevent that Opera slows down during startup.

Locate your accounts.ini file which should be in the Opera mail folder. Every account should have an entry Initial Poll Delay=X where X should be set to at least 60 (seconds) and the rss feed to something like 120 or more.

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