Hi fellow Opera users. Are you aware of all the things your address bar can do? That, for example, to search for “Cecil Adams” on Google’s search engine one only need type, “g Cecil Adams”? Without the quotes, of course.
Well, you can. You can also edit the file that governs this behavior to make it work with the world’s best message board, so that to get into MPSIMS one need only type, “sd 4”. Yes, it does require that you actually know the forum’s ID.
To do this, you need to edit a file in your Opera directory named “search.ini”.
Here’s the portion I edited:
[Search Engine 9]
Name=Straight Dope Message Board
URL=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?&forumid=%s
Query=
Key=sd
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=utf-8
Search Type=10
Verbtext=17063
Position=-1
Nameid=0
Of course, you don’t need to overwrite the [Search Engine 9], you can make a new entry at the bottom of the file.
I suppose it should be noted that I’m using Opera 7 though I’m fairly sure it should work with 6 as well.
Further customization details can be had here though it seems to be dated to Opera 6.
Are you using the later version 7 betas? There’s a definite speed improvement and a lot of nice little touches. 7.20b8 is the most recent, but a final 7.20 is expected very soon.
Crusoe, I don’t know exactly, my version info just says 7.0 but I seem to recall that the marquee tag (gag) was added in a beta and that works. I downloaded it from the site and haven’t done anything since so I doubt I have it. A speed improvement? I can’t imagine it… it is already as fast as I’ve seen a browser be.
eris - if you click Help > About Opera, the version number should be present, but the beta number won’t be. Mine currently says “Version 7.20 Build 3087”, which I think is Beta 7. They’re currently on Beta 8, but at the current rate the new final version should be out any time now. The betas are fairly polished, and mostly contain bugfixes, although there is a definite speed improvement, and better support for JavaScript. Beyond that I’d recommend waiting for the new final one.
Holy crap! You ain’t kidding about the speed boost! I just installed the latest version and it reminds me of going from a 586 machine to a 686 machine in terms of performance.
I use opera, but not on forums… 33,64,77,85,99, then 100% loaded is what I get. The gosh darn page loads three or more times!!!, (granted I am on dial-up, till I resolve a battle with SBC, bastards…)
Am I doing something wrong? I get much better speed with Mozilla, or “yech” I.E.
You must be, I’ve not had any problems with Opera and message boards. You should check out Opera’s forums and see what they can tell you. I’m by no means an expert at the software.
Or conversely, you can use the Google search that’s half an inch to the left of the address bar and save yourself an extra keystroke…
Was there ever actually a chip named a 586 or a 686? I don’t remember either one.
I hate to sound like I’m coming into this thread just to piss everywhere so…go Opera! My one and only true love in the realm of browsers.
The 586 was the original Pentium generation (the 60 MHz Pentium to the 200 MHz Pentium Pro). The 686 was the next Pentium generation (the 300 MHz Pentium III to the 1500 MHz Pentium 4).
The name Pentium is an obvious play on the number 5 (penta, get it?), and it came about because Da Courts decided that Intel could no longer copyright numbers. Of course, the natural progression is from penta to either hexa or, even worse, sexa. The Sexium might have appealed to the Lonely Geek contingent, but it would have given Marketing fits. So Intel wimped out and began to add modifiers and numbers (first Roman, then Hindu-Arabic) to the base name. Typical bloody Intel pigheadedness, if you ask me, but that’s another thread.
That’s what I thought…at the time of the first Pentium a lot of people still hadn’t heard of it so I would often just call it a 586 for simplicity but I was pretty sure there was never a chip officially called a 586.
But the name is very common, and there’s wide agreement on exactly which class of CPUs it refers to. For example, nobody calls a Pentium 4 an i586. It might be a term supposedly internal to Intel but widely leaked, or it could be an external tradition of keeping the x86 naming conventions alive as long as the architecture is. I’m guessing the former.
What, and use the mouse? Are you kidding me? The more I can do without having to move the stupid cursor around the better. F2, “g Cecil Adams”, enter; voila. Besides which, it was meant to be illustrative more than anything.
What version of Opera are you using? Some of the older versions don’t like load vBulletin pages. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that if the Boards are “wonky” the pages will have trouble loading, and that the longer I use an install of Opera, the better it gets at loading pages. Why this might be, I’ve no idea.
I tried out the latest version of Opera a few days ago, having never used it before. I found it mildly amusing that the default list of bookmarks had categorized the Straight Dope under Fun and Games (as opposed to Fighting Ignorance, or Kampf gegen Unwissenheit, as it is called in my bookmarks).
