Found this useful tip on how to add a ping shortcut to your Firefox address bar over at Lifehacker. I love its simplicity. Pinging servers is a great way of finding out if they are currently up and running. The time it takes to receive a response is measured in milliseconds and a timeout is returned if it takes to long.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 4
Opera History Search
The Opera team is constantly adding exciting new features to the beta version of the upcoming version of Opera that is competing against Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8. One of this new features is the Opera History Search which is a full text search over all of the items stored in your history. The [...]
Opera’s progress bar in detail
After installation Opera’s default settings show the progress bar which displays information about how the current page is loading in its simplest form – as a small rectangular bar that only appears when a loading process is active. This bar however is not revealing enough information for advanced users who are interested in what exactly is going on when a website refuses to load.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 4
Change the Source Viewer in IE, Firefox and Opera
The default source viewer for all browsers mentioned in the title is not optimal and sometimes posing more problems than solving them. Mozilla Firefox is displaying the source in a new stripped down Firefox window, the Internet Explorer is using Notepad and Opera is displaying it in a new Opera tab.
Make use of Opera’s chameleonic features
As a proud Opera user, you probably let your browser identify itself as Opera browser by default. Although most websites do work and display more or less properly in Opera, there are still many of them which don’t comply with the standards and contain many non-standardized code segments (usually working in IE only) thus confusing the standards-based browsers which leads to improper appearance of the site in the end.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 6
Automatically download files with Opera
If you do use Opera you might have noticed that Opera seems to always bring up the save to dialog and you have to browse to the download location even if you downloaded a file of the same type just a minute ago. The line “Remember choice and do not show dialog again” is grayed out and can’t be checked as well.
Speed up surfing by using Nicknames in Opera
A great feature called SpeedDial has been recently added to Opera. It’s a solution providing quick access to your “Top 9″ websites and it’s faster than using Bookmarks. However the limited number of sites that you can add does not make it a universal feature to speed up surfing in general.
- Author: Martin Brinkmann
- Comments: 44
10 Tips to speed up Opera 9
Opera is already a very fast browser, but if you would have the choice between fast and faster than fast, what would you choose ? I took the liberty to compile a list of 10 great tips that speed up Opera in several unique ways. Many of the settings can be changed by simply going to Tools > Preferences in Opera but some can only be used by accessing not so obvious ways like ini files.
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.