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Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko —  — Software — hotkey, opera, tweak

Speed dialing sites in Opera

Opera Is he doing that on purpose? :) Martin of gHacks had posted today about Firefox plugin to load sites with hotkeys and complained that no web browser is offering such feature natively.

“Opera could so this like forever” time!

Speed dial

Speed Dial is nifty Opera feature that places search bar and big 3x3 grid on blank page. Some argued that purpose of blank page to be blank, but really its purpose is to be starting point for opening some site. And since it’s likely to be often-visited site why not make it easy to jump there?

opera_speed_dial

opera_speed_dial

There are plenty (more than I know probably) ways to populate your Speed Dial, try clicking blocks or dragging links on them from your bookmarks.

Thumbnails preview

For each site there is thumbnail generated. These are not dynamic but can be refreshed with pressing Ctrl+R or right-clicking and choosing Refresh or Refresh every . Not really RSS but also easy way to see what was updated with quick glance.

Number of blocks

I don’t think this tweak was even officially released but is widely known and used:

  1. Locate Opera profile folder (Help > About Opera if you need hint for that).
  2. Locate speeddial.ini file.
  3. Close Opera and add following to the file:
[Size]
Rows=3
Columns=3

Change numbers to those you need.

Search bar in Speed Dial is not really useful and eats screen space. On the positive side it makes Opera developers some money so they can keep developing. If you want to disable it:

  1. Go to opera:config#UserPrefs|SpeedDialSearchType
  2. Replace scary-looking line of text with 0 (zero).
  3. Press Save in the bottom of settings page.

Launching with hotkeys

Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 will open Speed Dials of same number. I advise to set most visited site to 5, that way it’s in the center of the screen and Ctrl+T (open new tab), Ctrl+5 works really fast because buttons are close.

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2 Comments

  • The DataRat #

    And, of course, you ~don't~ need to hack the ini file to change the number of Speed Dial buttons in Opera 10. Now "Configure Speed Dial" allows up to 25 buttons ...and also your own personalized custom background ! Speed Dial is ANOTHER Opera first the other browsers just imitate. Customization being what recommends Opera, and working the way you want to work the reason for using Opera. Sure, it's not as fast as Chrome. But vis-a-vis personalization and feature set, Chrome is ~primitive~ ! ( Opera is still something like four times faster than Internet Explorer. So it ain't exactly slow. ) The DataRat .

  • Rarst #

    @DataRat Yep, post is back from time when this was unofficial hack. It is indeed awesome just how simple idea is and how many years we spent staring at blank and useless new pages. Opera excels at fresh ideas, part of what makes it such a great browser.