30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover

Don’t care what my favorites are, or want to know more? Press Ctrl (or for Mac) + B to open opera:/help/keyboard.html.

Mac users: Unless otherwise noted, replace ctrl with below.

Shortcut involving F9, F10, or F11 are changed on Mac to avoid conflicts with Exposé.

Combining Shortcuts for Easier Reading

It seems that every read the number of un-readable pages vastly outnumbers the readable ones. It almost seems like this trend is stopping, and in my most optimistic days I think it may even be getting better, but there are still a large, large number of sites out there using 3 column table layouts with a narrow band of text in the middle surrounded by two columns of ads or “related information” (so they claim).

Opera makes it easier to read almost any webpage. Here are 3 techniques from easiest to most complex (even the most complex one is fairly easy, and all of them highlight abilities which are present in Opera and not (to my knowledge) present in other browsers.

CSS Based Printer Friendly Pages

Excellent web designers will include stylesheets which will format a web page for printing. This usually removes all extraneous information (navigation links, ads, etc).

Yes, I ought to add printer friendly CSS to this site. Once the series is finished that is one of my goals.

How do you take advantage of this feature? Simply press shift + p for Print Preview and Opera will display the page as it would come out from the printer. The only problem? Often web designers will set print fonts in pixels, often 12 or even 10 depending on how good their eyes are. Solution? Press 8 and Opera will increase zoom by 100% and then press 9 (decrease by 10%) or 0 (increase by 10%) as needed. If you get a horizontal scrollbar, press ctrl + F11 for Fit to Window Width.

Other Printer Friendly Pages

Many webpages don’t have a CSS printer friendly page, but do have a link which leads to a different, printer friendly version of the page. Here’s a keyboard trick, type this: , (pause briefly) and type print.

What will that do? The , will trigger Opera’s “Search for Link Text” feature and then the letters “p-r-i-n-t” says “Look for links on the page which contain the word “print” such as “Printer Friendly” (which is what most of the pages use for link text). Once the link is found, press enter to select the link, and then press 8, etc to increase the zoom (see above) as needed.

Entirely Non-Printer Friendly Pages

Ok, what about the vast number of pages out there without CSS based printer friendly stylesheets or alternate printer-friendly pages? This is where Opera really shines.

What will really save you time is if you combine several different, separate keyboard commands. Imagine a page like this: 3 columns, with the middle column being actual content, and the left and right columns being excessive ads or crosslinks. It can easily be overwhelming. Opera’s built-in features are ideally suited for this problem.

What you will need to do is combine several keystokes. You may not need all of these, and some of them may require you to make sure that you have pre-configured them to give you the options you want. But once you have set these options the way you want them, they will save you a lot of time in the long run. (This is one of those features of Opera which is hard to explain to new users, but experienced users miss whenever they try another browser.)

Ok, here is a complete set of commands which will render almost any page highly readable:

1. shift + g (toggle user/author mode) [needs to be configured, see below]
2. 8 (increase zoom by 100%) [if needed]
3. ctrl + F11 (toggle Fit to Window Width mode) [if needed]
4. space (scroll down) [if needed]

That seems like a lot of commands, but once you are familiar with them, you will be amazed how easily you can execute them (mouse users should also remember that Mouse Gestures are also available and customizable). You may need to adjust the zoom in step 2, but I find that most times 100% is a good, comfortable amount.

Now some people will say “But this makes the text fill up the entire width of the page! That’s not readable!” Well that’s why I recommend using Fit to Window Width mode, because you can then (if needed) resize the window to whatever width you find most readable. Personally I have no problems reading long lines of text, in fact I prefer it.

Now, to make the above sequence truly useful, you have to do some initial configuration of Opera. This only has to be done once, and we have covered the necessary steps in previous days. Most specifically you have to have configured Fonts and User Mode so that when you press shift + g and go from Author Mode to User Mode, the fonts will be what you prefer. If you set a large enough font, you may not even need the Zoom step at all.

So what seems like 4 steps may only be 1, if you configure Opera as you prefer it. From then on, any page can be instantly rendered more readable for you. I am not aware of any other browser which puts such power in as little as one simple set of keystrokes.

So the next time you come across one of those web pages with multiple tables for layout in 10pt font, don’t get mad, let Opera serve it up your way!

F12

One of Opera’s unique and most useful features is the F12 menu (Mac: alt + F12). By default it contains the following entries:

• Open all pop-ups
• Open pop-ups in background
• Block unwanted pop-ups
• Block all pop-ups
• Enable GIF Animation [note: also controls SVG animations]
• Enable sound in Web pages
• Enable Java
• Enable Plugins
• Enable JavaScript
• Enable Cookies
• Enable referrer logging
• Enable proxy servers
• Identify as Opera
• Identify as Mozilla
• Identify as Internet Explorer

Want to change one? Make your own? See Shortcuts for Keyboard or Mouse.

Did I forget one of your favorites? Add it below in the comments (wrap keyboard commands in <kbd> tags to style them as I have them).

See also: Using Opera without a Mouse (opera.com).