Opera: Please Fix The Opera Extensions Page
If you have followed the news surrounding the Opera web browser lately you know that the upcoming Opera 11 browser features an extensions framework, much like the one used by the Google Chrome web browser. (for the nitpickers, I'm not saying it is the same, I'm saying it looks similar from a user perspective).
The first alpha version of Opera 11 has been released a while ago, and first extensions have been developed and are available at the official Opera Extensions gallery.
The count of all extensions offered is at 40 right now, a manageable number. If you take a look at the extensions page, you notice a few problems that may not be apparent right now, but will prove to be a problem once the extensions count grows in the hundreds or thousands.
Opera users have options to search for extensions, filter by categories, popularity, recommendation, rating or alphabetical order.
The first thing that strikes me as missing is a listing of new or recent extensions. If I want to know what's new I have to look through everything, which is not comfortable at all, even at only 40 listed extensions. Imagine having to discover new extensions when the number has reached 500 or more. I like to discover new things (hej I make a living out of it) and the current layout makes it extremely hard to do just that.
The second problem is the actual display of the extensions on the page. Opera lists ten extensions on the page. If you look closely you notice that the title of the extension gets cut off after 16 or so characters, which means that some extension titles are not displayed completely.
There appears to be enough whitespace to give the title its own row in the listing, and move the description below that.
In addition, there is no indicator of an extension's version on the page, or a changelog or history for that matter. Not everyone may need these on the other hand.
There do not seem to be tags or another form of classifications other than selecting a category for the extension. This makes the search less effective as it could be.
It is likely that the current page is just a temporary solution, to have a location for all extensions that get developed.
If I had to pick one of the missing features I'd like to see a recent filter added to Opera Extensions, followed by the display of the full extension title.
Have you been playing around with Opera 11? What's your impression so far?
Advertisement
I’m a big fan of Opera’s RSS reader, but I agree it could do with some work! Having the option to detach the Feeds list from the mail reader would be a great start.
You can however change the update frequency by right clicking a feed in the panel and going to properties.
Mike you are right about the update frequency. It is not really reasonable for me with hundreds of feeds though. Is not there an option to change the frequency for all feeds at once?
For updating all the feeds at once the only option that comes to mind is
editing the “index.ini” mail file when opera is not working (remember to do a backup before attempting this) )and doing a multiple replace on the “Update Frequency” line, you can find one feed with the update frequency you want (Update Frequency=10800 is three hours) and one with the old update frequency and multiple replace all those values.
Filters are called “Labels” now since Opera 11 I think, you can again right click on them, select properties and set the settings you want.
As for autohiding read messages you just depress the “Show read” button in the toolbar above the feed view, if its not there right click the toolbar and select Customize -> Appearance -> Buttons -> Mail view and drag that button on the toolbar.
And a word of warning, Opera for some time now uses a single file per message (because antivirus programs sometimes block or delete the whole mbs file when finding a virus – the previous version did the weekly per account so you could theoretically lose the whole month of an account). It is however not very efficient and can cause you defrag program to take much longer to finish a defrag.To return to the old type mail store you can enter opera:config#UserPrefs|DefaultMailStoreType in the address bar and select 1 as the value. Do this before subscribing to any feeds because any old feeds already subscribing will retain the previous format.
I have hundreds of feeds in my Opera reader and I love it.
If the mail is not configured (no email account) then there is a button on the read toolbar that says “Update all”. But when you config the email client, this button disappears and a spacer appears. I have not figured how to get it back. I do not see any “update all’ buttons anymore.
Opera 11.11 ,Build 2109, XP, no plugins.
PS This browser is so far ahead of any others. Amazing.
Check out Feedbro: fast, easy & feature rich feed reader as #Chrome extension to replace Google Reader.
Feedbro has an integrated Rule Engine for filtering and highlighting, tag support and many advanced other features.
Feedbro can also automatically convert Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages into feeds and has super-easy feed autodiscovery builtin.
Feedbro also has Opera RSS reader style 3-column view (+ Google Reader style views).
http://nodetics.com/feedbro