Enhancing the Opera experience

Keyboard shortcuts and undocumented
secrets in your favorite browser(opera)?

=> There are several functionality
enhancements to the new free Opera web
browser, which can supercharge your web
browsing experience. Let’s step through
the most useful of them:
Surfi ng full screen: For those of you
who use lower resolutions, you might want
to use the full screen functionality of Opera
to display as much of your web pages as
possible. Once you enter the full screen
mode by hitting F11, there are several
other keyboard shortcuts that you can use
to show and hide various aspects of the
screen and to navigate through your web
pages. To show or hide the menu bar, hit
Ctrl-F8. Pressing F4 will display the pane
and to display the scroll bar, hit Ctrl-F7.
When it comes to navigating in full screen
mode, use the Shift-Z and the Shift-X key
combinations formoving backwardand forward
through yourpages respectively.Another cool
capability is theability to recover a
window you might have accidentally closed
while in full screen mode—simply hit Ctrl-Z
and Opera will recover the web page you
mistakenly closed.
Spell checking in Opera: Even though
Opera does not come with a spell checker
of its own, you can install a free tool
like Aspell, which lends spell-checking
capabilities to your Opera mail. In fact,
it also works in other fi elds such as blog
or forum postings. All you need to do is
download the program from http://aspell.
net/win32. After installing, you’ll see the
‘Check spelling’ command in your emails.
Sensitivity for your mouse gestures:
As you might know, mouse gestures give
you the capability to control your browsing
experience by moving your mouse in
pre-defi ned motions. However, you might
fi nd that the sensitivity is sometimes too
high (or low) for your liking. This would
especially be noticed if you are using a
laptop touchpad as your pointing device.
The good news is that this sensitivity
can be changed. You will need to edit
the ‘opera6.ini’ fi le in Opera’s program
directory. Under the [User Prefs] section
add the value “Gesture Threshold=10”
(without the quotes). The number in this
setting specifi es the number of pixels
over which a mouse movement will be
recognized as a gesture. In this case, a
mouse gesture will be registered
if you move the mouse pointer greater
than 10 pixels.
Caching secure web pages: It’s usually
not possible to save secure web pages
to your hard disk for later viewing.
However, Opera can let you do that with
a little tweak.
You will need to open the ‘opera6.ini’
fi le found in Opera’s program directory.
Navigate to the [Disk Cache] section
and add the line “Cache HTTPS=1” to it.
That’s it—from now on you will be able
to save secure web pages along with your
conventional web sites! However, be aware
that this is a potential security risk as you
could wind up storing sensitive web-based
information on your hard disk. So use it
with caution.