Browsing Preferences

Cycle Pages, Loading, Page icons, New Pages, and some other misc. options.

Cycle Pages

Cycle here means “Switch back and forth” so what this preference is asking is “How do you want to switch between pages?”

How do you switch between pages? you ask. Excellent question! Of course you can switch between them by clicking on them with the mouse. But Advanced Opera8tors (my cute nickname for advanced Opera users…) may want to use their keyboard shortcuts or use mouse gestures.

For example, if you press ctrl + tab (or, if you use a mouse with a scroll-wheel, hold the right button down and turn the wheel), Opera will show a listing of the currently open tabs, like this:

By using the “Cycle Pages” option, you can choose how this feature works:

1. Cycle in recently used order (default, and my recommendation)
2. Cycle in page bar order
3. Cycle without showing list

The first says “Switch back and forth between pages using the order that I have used them” on the theory that the pages that you have recently looked at are the most important ones to you.

The second says “I am very neat and orderly, and I want to switch beween pages in the order that I created them.” In reality, few people actually are that linear, especially on the web.

Number three is good for those of you who are paid by the millisecond and have a fast graphics card. You don’t have any time to waste with a list popping up and choosing something, you just jump in with guns a-blazin’. It will switch to the previous page without a popup list at all.

Loading

Ok, minor nit: This ought to be called “Redrawing” because all the options are about when Opera should redraw the page. The good news is that in most cases you won’t ever need to change this. The default (1 second) should be fine, unless you have a slow computer and a slow connection, in which case you may want to adjust the settings and see if Opera seems to respond better.

Redrawing does take CPU time, so if Opera feels a little sluggish on page loading, try tweaking this. You might find the overall experience feels a little faster, even with the redrawing is slowed. If you have a fairly recent computer and decent graphics card, you can remove the delay entirely. Play around with it. You can always change it back later.

Don’t be afraid of changing settings in Opera. Play around with it. Change a setting, and then see how it works. There’s a lot Opera can do, but you’ll never learn what it can do without a little tinkering around. I’m not so much an expert as I am someone who has poked around a lot.

Page icons

3 options

1. Embedded icons and favicons (default, and best option)
2. Embedded icons only
3. Show no icons

Again, I don’t know of any good reason to use #2. You’d only use #3 if you had some strong personal distaste for favicons, which I can’t really understand, they make it a bit easier to identify pages/tabs. (Hrm… that reminds me, I need a favicon for this site.)

If you’re thinking that turning off icons would save you some room on the Tabs, sorry it does not. You just get a little generic icon instead. If Opera did remove that icon, then I could see a minor argument for disabling icons. But really, just leave them alone.

(However, if you do want to turn off the icons on the page bar, you can do that. Simply right click on one of the tabs, click “Customize” and then look for “Style”… choose “Text Only” and then click “OK” and the icons will be gone from the tabs).

New Pages

Now here are some fun new options to play with (although you’ll probably want the default at the end)

1. Remember last size
2. Always maximize (default, keep it)
3. Always maximize, including pop-ups
4. Always cascade
5. Tile all automatically

Ok, if you want a few seconds of “Pure Geek Fun” ™ then set your preference to “Tile all automatically” and then start opening new pages. It’s a very cool effect, with almost no practical purpose at all.

“Always cascade” might be cool if you are a super-hardcore MDI geek. If you don’t know what MDI is, you probably won’t care at all about this option.

“Always maximize, including pop-ups” is a bit confusing if you think about it, since “always” would seem to include all types of pages. But pop-ups are a different case. If you were to choose any other option than ”Always maximize” I think this would be it. Why is this useful? There are several sites out there (CNN.com comes to mind) which open “printer friendly” versions of their pages in a new page, not maximized. If you are going to read the printer-friendly version (as I prefer) then you may want to set that option. On the other hand, if you generally work with something like weblog software that uses a small pop-up window, you should leave it on the default.

More Options

A few of these options are very important to people, and a few of them are completely unimportant to people. The trick is that people disagree on which are vital and which aren’t! So I’ll give you my take on them and you can decide for yourself

Reuse existing page (default on; TjL prefers off)

To me this is an absolutely essential setting that I immediately set whenever I install a new version of Opera. The default is on and I turn it off. I like working with a lot of pages at once, and I see no reason to reuse a page when I can use a new one. After all, they are a completely renewable resource, so why not splurge a little :-?

Note: Bookmarklets/Favelets on the toolbars will not work if this is turned OFF. This has been filed as a bug. See comments below for some workarounds.

Why do I turn this off? Because when it is off, I can easily choose whether or not I want to reuse an existing page. How? Simple. Say I goto a page such as “www.opera.com” and then I decide I want to go to “my.opera.com”. There are two ways of doing this via the keyboard: F2 (which will open a small “Go to page” window where you can enter an URL) or press F8 which will take you to the addressbar.

With “Reuse existing page” turned on, both F2 and F8 will cause the new URL to be loaded in the same page.

With “Reuse existing page” turned off, F2 will open a new page and F8 will reuse the existing page.

Of course you can also choose File > New Page or click on the “New Page” button regardless of the preference setting, but why would you use the mouse when you can use the keyboard ;-? Press ctrl/ + n to open a new page.

(Note: this setting has no effect when clicking on links which are designed to open in new pages, either through HTML or JavaScript. It only controls the behavior as described above.)

Open new page next to active (default is off; TjL prefers on)

This one is a little hard to explain, but let me try to give an example. Assume you have three pages (tabs) open: Google, CNN, and Wired. And let’s assume that you are reading CNN when you see a link to another page (which we’ll call “CNN1”) that you want to open in a new page. So you shift+click it (or right click and choose “open in new page”). Normally, the new page would be opened next to the Wired page, so the order of the pages would be: Google, CNN, Wired, CNN1, as shown here:

However, with this option turned on, the new page would be opened next to the existing CNN page (since that one is active), and the order would be: Google, CNN, CNN1, and Wired, as shown here:

I prefer this method because it keeps related pages next to each other.

Show scrollbars (default on; TjL prefers on)

Rather self-evidently, this option lets you turn the scrollbars (horizontal or vertical) on or off. I can’t think of a good reason to turn this off, but if scrollbars offend you, now you will no longer have to see them.

Smooth scrolling (default on; TjL prefers off)

With this option on, Opera makes scrolling… um… smoother. (Ok so you probably didn’t need me for this one.) I know I’ll shock people when I say this, but smooth scrolling always distracts me, whereas un-smooth scrolling acts exactly as I expect that it would. So this is probably a case where I disagree with the majority, and that’s ok, because Opera gives me the option to turn it off. Find a long page and turn this option on/off and use your page up/down buttons to scroll and see which you prefer.

Show window size (default off; TjL prefers off)

With this on, Opera reports the size of the page (note: it’s the page size, not the window size. That’s a minor error in Opera’s user-interface if you ask me). The sizes are reported as two 3-digit numbers, measured in pixels. This feature is handy for web designers who are trying to make sure that a page will render properly at certain sizes, but most people will safely ignore this option. (Note: the size will be shown in the window bar at the top of the main window.)

Show tooltips (default on; TjL prefers on)

As much as some people love smooth scrolling and can’t imagine why anyone would turn it off, I feel the same way about tooltips. Opera will show tooltips when hovering links and so forth. Tooltips offer very valuable information (Title and address of link, for starters) and I highly recommend you leave this on. If you decide to turn this off, you may want to turn the Status Bar on by going to View > Toolbars > Status Bar. Better still, turn the Status Bar on and leave the tooltips on.