History Preferences
Originally posted on Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Tell Opera how much it should remember about where you've been surfing.
Opera gives you memory control. Unfortunately, Opera8 does not give you as much control as previous versions did. Instead of providing with input boxes with a maximum and minimum range, Opera gives you various preset defaults. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the defaults are fairly logical and most people probably won’t need to change them. Note: Setting a large history may cause Opera to open slightly slower while the stored information is loaded. If you want to maximize your startup speed, minimize your history settings. That said, how fast the browser launches doesn’t matter much when you can just keep Opera running in the background.
- Typed in Addresses
- Set Opera to remember 0, 10, 50, 100, 200, or 500 typed in addresses. These are the URLs which are typed in (as opposed to links clicked) in either the F2 prompt or the Address Bar. Personally I wish Opera would let me choose my own number here between 0-999, but they offer some reasonable defaults. The
Clear
button will immediately delete stored addresses. - Visited Addresses
- Store 0, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, or 10000 visited addresses. These defaults seem a bit arbitrary. There is a large gap between them. That said, I generally leave mine set to 5000.
- Memory Cache
- This is the amount of RAM that Opera will use. Choices include: Automatic (default), 4MB, 10MB, 20MB, 40MB, 60MB, and Off. In a day when I’ve got 1GB of RAM in my laptop, 60MB doesn’t really seem like a lot. But since the Opera developers are the ones who put these options in, and I doubt they did so arbitrarily, it seems best to trust them. I generally leave this set to “Automatic”.
- Disk Cache
- Opera stores web pages to the disk for fast retrieval, and can be set to use 400MB, 200MB, 100Mb, 50MB, 20MB, 10MB, 5MB, 2MB, or 0. (Note: even if you set the disk cache to zero, currently opened pages will still be cached while open.) Again, my first response is that in this day and age when I have an 80GB drive in my laptop, 400MB seems rather tiny. However, I really can’t think of a lot of good reasons to store old pages on your hard drive when so many of them will be out of date next time anyway. Also note the “Empty on exit” box which tells Opera to delete the disk cache when Opera exits.
- Check documents/images/other
- This tells Opera how often to check a web page for a new version. Options include: Never, Always, Every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, every 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours, 24 hours, every week. If you run into problems with seeing out of date information on cached web pages, consider lowering the time or setting to “always”. In my experience, Opera8 does a much better job noticing when I have updated CSS pages without having to force a reload, even with the default setting of “5 hours”. Note also that the server can send cache information to the browser, in which case Opera will follow the server’s instructions (as they have generally been set to how often the site actually updates, and avoids overloading the servers).
