Today’s subject is anatomy - but Opera anatomy is very different from human anatomy, because the kneebone doesn’t necessarily connect to the thighbone - you have the option of connecting it to the neckbone if that’s what works for you. But there are some rules, and it will help to follow them if we learn some names.
Space race
Height of User interface in a new Windows installation:| Opera 7.23 | 207px |
| MSIE 6 | 185px |
| Opera 8 (with ads) | 143px |
| Mozilla Firefox | 143px |
| Opera 8.0 (Registered) | 113px |
Over the years, Opera has added a number of UI features and places to hold them, until by version 7 it had more bars than a red-light district. Through versions 7.5 and 8 there has been an effort to simplify the default interface, and a number of toolbars are disabled by default. The result is that on first launch, Opera 8 has more than 60 pixels more height free for displaying pages than 7.23.
Title Bar
Always on. Default position: Top
The title bar is the least configurable piece of screen real estate. It follows the UI conventions of the OS Opera is running on, typically containing the current page title, the name of the browser, and a set of standard window controls. It cannot be disabled.
Menu Bar
Want the disable menubar shortcut in O8 for Windows? Tools → options → Advanced → Shortcuts: Search for F11 and edit the entry for F11 Alt by removing the “platform Linux”. Mac users will have to sort out a clash with another definition for this key.
Default postion: Top (Immediately beneath Title Bar).
The Menu bar which, not surprisingly, contains menus, also looks and behaves like that of most applications. It may only contain menus. The menus have seen some radical changes in O8, with a reduction to only six main menu entries at startup. The Navigation and Windows menus have been removed. However, you get back the Windows menu plus the windows controls (mimimise,restore,close) for maximised pages if you uncheck “Show close button on tabs” in Preferences.
Personally, I don’t see the point of minimising the menus. There’s nothing else that can go on that bar, so the free space is wasted, and I’ve always believed that almost all of a program’s functions should be accessible via the menu system. If you agree, you can or Opera staffer Rijk van Geijtenbeek has an excellent one .
In Opera 7, there was a keyboard shortcut to turn off the Menu bar, but this caused quite a few posts such as “My cat walked over the keyboard and now my menus have gone!” (yes, that was real) in the support forums. That has been removed for Opera 8, except on Linux where it has changed to Alt + F11.
Main Bar
Default: Dependent on advertising choice or registration. Off (now that ).
The only way you will see the Main Bar in a fresh installation of Opera 8 is if you opt for banner ads. If you choose google rads or register Opera, it is turned off. This behaviour was introduced in Opera 7.5, but at that time the main bar still contained navigation buttons, leading to some snarky reviews. My theory is that the developers were so taken with google ads they forgot that some people might still opt for banners.
The default contents of the main bar are:
- Open
- Used to Open an html file on your own computer.
- Save
- Save the current web page to your computer. Note that the save dialogue now has a dropdown with options to save just the html file, html plus images, or to save the text of the page only.
- Print, Find, Home
- These three are pretty self-explanatory!
- Panels
- Toggles the panels (including the panel selector) on and off.
- Tile, Cascade
- Respectively tiles and cascades all the non-minimised windows. (I’ve yet to see the value of tiling more than two windows, but the ability to tile two pages side by side to compare them is a really powerful feature which “tabbed only” browsers can’t achieve.)
- Voice (Windows only)
- If you don’t have voice installed, this will prompt you to download the voice plugins. If you do already have it installed, this makes Opera start listening. You’ll have to wait for the article on voice to find out what that means!
Address Bar
Default: On, RG Prefers: Off
The address bar is the nerve centre of Opera 8. It contains the navigation buttons and the all-important address field. Lets look at the buttons first:
- Rewind
- This is one button users migrating from another browser won’t be familiar with. Say you are following a series of links through site X. Then you move on to site Y in the same page, and after a few more pages you move to site Z. Then I decide I want to go back. One click on Rewind takes me back to the last page I visited on site Y, a second click to the entry point of site Y. Two more clicks get me to where I started out. Much simpler than trying to figure out which page you want from History, especially as so many sites insist on using the same title on every page.
- Back
- There’s one thing you’ll notice about the back function in Opera: It’s blindingly fast. Opera uses the page in the rather than re-fetching the page from the server. This makes it much faster than IE and Firefox (although I have heard that Firefox is now copying this feature for future releases).
- Forward
- Once you’ve gone back, you can go forward again
- Fast Forward
- On properly marked up pages, Opera can try to guess what the next page would be. If enabled, this button will bring you to the next page in a series
- Stop/Refresh
- Stop the page from loading or reload it
- Wand
- Control Opera’s nearly magical
Status Bar
Default: Off, RG prefers: On
Now I would have considered a status bar to be a pretty fundamental necessity in a browser, but Opera seem to think that having a smaller interface than Firefox is more important, so it is disabled. They could have at least enabled it in registered versions. If you do enable it, the default content is only a status field, but there are lots of other handy widgets you could drop on here, as this is oneof the bars which can accept anything - buttons, fields and shortcuts.
Navigation Bar
Default: Off, RG Prefers: Show when necessary
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p>The navigation bar is Opera’s means of implementing the very useful HTML <link> element, which langushed unsupported by any significant browser for years. Link allows a page author to establish relationships with other pages, such as previous and next in a cycle, next level up, and links to copyright and glossary pages etc. Since not all pages use these elements, setting the bar’s display to “Show when needed” seems a sensible option. I have customised my navigation bar to include a link to the first stylesheet in a page, although this does mean the bar displays with everything else greyed out on many sites. One bug is that the bar doesn’t seem to respect shift-clicking or the “reuse existing page” setting - the stylesheet always replaces its parent page.
View Bar
The View bar is new to Opera 8. Although you can set it to be permanently on, it is designed to be toggled on and off when needed via the view button (a pair of spectacles) at the extreme right end of the address bar.
The view bar contains two groups of controls - on the left are the Find in Page searchbox and Find Next button, and on the right a group of buttons which control aspects of display:
- Voice. (Opera really doesn’t expect you to turn on the Main bar, do they?)
- Style. Indicates and toggles Author/User mode and has a dropdown menu with user and page stylesheets.
- Show Images. The famous three-way image mode toggle.
- Fit to Window Width Trigger Opera’s nifty new rendering modes.
- Zoom Control. Select your viewing size, from microscopic to Mr Magoo.
The end, for now
Okay, that’s the anatomy and physiology, on our next day we’ll cover surgery 101 - just how to mix and match all the User Interface items to build your ultimate browser.
(Reminder: feel free to post comments/questions below.)