Impressions of Opera 7.5

I've been running 7.5 for a couple of weeks now and am mighty impressed. Every now and then 7.23 would semi-crash on closing out. Hasn't happened once with 7.5. 🙂

I'm running pretty much the default set-up for browsing (I don't use Opera for mail or newsgroups, as I've already invested too much time in setting up Pegasus and Agent for those). But one thing was bugging me… I use several sites fairly regularly which are slowed down hugely by heavy advertising content. Opera blocks pop-ups fine, but loads of places are now using embedded ads, including BTYahoo mail. Could Opera helps? You bet it can.

A quick search on the forums took me to this thread where I grabbed the instructions for editing the Opera6.ini file (actually it seems it's the OperaDef6.ini file in 7.5), and then it was simply a matter of adding a separate filter.ini file. The whole process took about two minutes and worked first time. Now I've got the bug I'm going to explore those files a bit more. (By the way: that URL is from <http://tinyurl.com>. It converts hugely long URL's into something somewhat easier. The real forum link was 111 characters long; the version I've posted is 24.

I also popped over to the Custom Buttons page at <http://nontroppo.org/wiki/CustomButtons> and added some buttons to call up the delete private data tab, to close the current page and to 'view source'. Should really be default choices. I did a minor edit of the toolbar ini in the profiles folder to get the status bar display to indicate what was happening. Anyway if you've not been there it's worth a visit.

Next projects are getting my head around css for my web site (should save a lot of hand-coding in the long run) and figuring out how to customize skins. My one effort (which works) was pretty much trial and error. But I have managed to create a couple of customized buttons by writing over what was there.

Anyway, I'm using 7.5 all the time now and couldn't be happier 🙂