Opera 9 changed the way that it saves passwords, or, more accurately, changed the User Interface.

The new change annoys me. But as much as I might hate it — and I do, like sitting on a dull throbbing tack which randomly heats until I smell my own flesh start to burn — that isn’t enough to make it a bad change, or a good one.

Screenshots For Everyone

Given that I use Opera more than any other browser, I realized that I needed to look at how other browsers do this. I had never paid attention before this, which is sort of the point: with Opera’s previous behavior I never had to think about it.

So here they are, in all their glory, screenshots from Internet Explorer (not IE for Mac) to Firefox to Camino to OmniWeb to Safari… and of course Opera 8.5 and 9.

Note: It may be helpful to simply scroll down the page to get a sense of how all of the dialog boxes look, and then come back here to read more.

Password dialog in Internet Explorer 6

Weighing in at 34 words and the second smallest dialog (only Firefox on Windows is smaller). It is simple enough, assuming you can read it. It defaults to “No” and has an option not to save any more passwords.

Simplicity, however, loses you some of the options which will become clearer as we go on. But don’t worry, there’s a new, hip, stylish version of Internet Explorer coming for Windows (XP and higher only) which is super updated for the new millenium. For you, Constant Reader, I downloaded and installed this browser which is currently in beta, to give you a sneak peak at what Microsoft has been working on for the past 6 years:

Password dialog in Internet Explorer 7 (beta)

Wow. But IE7 does have tabs. So, you know… welcome to 2001. This dialog window has an additional 10 words — because if we’ve learned anything in the past 6 years it’s that people on the Internet really like to read instructions closely before clicking stuff.

Still they are sticking with the Yes/No answers, and No is the default. Their options, although limited, are crystal clear…as long as you don’t want to decide later. What happens if you press “No”? Will it ask again later? The checkbox will disable passwords entirely.

There’s also no option for “Save this password for the entire site” which you’ll probably miss. But if you are still using Internet Explorer you’re giving up so much else that it’s hardly worth bothering trying to explain it to you.

Firefox

Password dialog in Firefox (Win)

Password dialog in Firefox (Mac)

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p> These two screengrabs show two three four several important things:

• Mac OS X prompts are much larger (well, except for Opera, which we’ll get to in a minute)
• The OS X prompts are much nicer looking (well, except for Opera). They use the application icon for each, which is a nice touch.
• The layout of the buttons is different. Windows puts the equivalent of “No” is on the right edge, Mac OS X puts “Yes” on the right edge
• Windows gives you quick keyboard shortcuts for their options. Anyone who has used Windows for more than a few minutes knows that the underlined characters can be used with the alt key to choose that option without requring the mouse. Mac users are stuck using their mouse or tabbing around until they get the right tab selected.
• The default (Not Now) is the same for Windows and Mac OS X
• The order is different. “Never for This Site” is in the middle if you use Windows and on the left if you use Mac. I imagine this would be confusing if you frequently switch between Firefox on Windows and Mac.

Camino

Camino (my second favorite browser on OS X) is based on Firefox but designed specifically for OS X. Note the changes in the way that it prompts the user:

Password dialog in Camino

That’s a whopping 54 words (compared to 16 for Firefox) but really the important part comes in the bolded words at the top. The key work “Remember” is used in the title and in all 3 choices. “Remember Password” is the default (note this is the only current browser which defaults to save passwords).

The words in that middle paragraph do a quite excellent job of describing what will happen, how to fix it if you save a password you don’t mean to, and why you might choose “Never”

But the really nice touch (and what I think all browsers should do) is that when I hit esc, Camino assumed I meant “Don’t Remember” aka “Skip it this time, ask me again.”

“Never Remember” is nicely consistent but it doesn’t make it quite clear whether you are saying “Never” for the site or just that particular page. I suppose someone might even think that “Never Remember” could mean “Never Remember Passwords on Any Page on Any Site” which it doesn’t but wouldn’t be an outrageous assumption.

Safari

Let’s see how Apple designed their password dialog in Safari:

Password dialog in Safari

An ecnonomical 30 words (by the way, I am counting the words in the buttons as well as the title bar, if any) but the real problem is that both “Never for this Website” and “Yes” appear to be highlighted.

What happens if you press esc? Nothing. You can an error beep, Mac’s way of saying “No you can’t do that” which seems like very bad user interface design. esc is one of those keys which should always work, and in this context it should definitely be assumed to mean “Not Now”

That said, Safari’s simple “Yes” is somehow very appealing, visually. It’s the simplicity again, I believe.

OmniWeb

The latest OmniWeb, based on WebKit (Web Kit?) which makes it similar to Safari (excuse the gross simplification, but for my purposes here it’s close enough) and the dialog here is indeed similar:

Password dialog in OmniWeb

The fine folks at OmniGroup went with the more common “Save” and “Don’t Save” which users are no doubt familiar with from most other apps. The problem is that “Don’t Save” sounds like a permanent decision, but it is not.

They also managed to get the word count down to 26. My guess is that they are used to a slightly more advanced group of users (they are using a Mac-only browser with no free version, so you’re talking a few percent of the few percent) and they can get away with assuming that their users will know that “Don’t Save” means “Don’t Save This Time”

Compare That To Opera

Technically, Opera’s Wand is the most advanced of all of the password managers. It will let you easily manage multiple logins to each site (most of the others will only remember one per page).

Graphically, Opera’s Wand may be the ugliest of all of them. The Windows Wand dialog uses some colors which remind me more of Opera7 the rest of Opera9’s User Interface.

First let’s look at Opera 8.5, both on Windows and Mac. Note that Opera 8.5 had a dropdown selector for different choices. Screenshots are show for both the regular and expanded states:

Password dialog in Opera 8.5 (Windows)

Password dialog in Opera 8.5, Expanded (Windows)

Password dialog in Opera 8.5 (Mac)

Password dialog in Opera 8.5, Expanded (Mac)

Now it’s more difficult to give a word count for these, given that there is a dropdown, but just taking the default option gives us 30.

But it’s hard to ignore that dropdown selector. No one else has it, and it must have confused people because it is gone in Opera 9. However, note that Opera 8.5 (and before) defaulted to saving the password for the current page.

Password dialog in Opera 9 (Win)

Password dialog in Opera 9 (Mac)

The word count is now at 36 (counting the URL as one word) but the dropdown is gone. Unfortunately, so are the keyboard shortcuts for WinOpera. “Save” and “Never” and “Not now” do not have any underlined characters, so you can’t use a shortcut to jump to them (you can use tab to move around of course). Likewise the option to save choice only for the current page (and showing that current page) is great, but it too should have an accelerator keyboard shortcut.

Kudos for explaining how to trigger the Wand auto-fill feature in the future (using ctrl (or cmd) + enter.

Notice that both the Mac and Win dialog boxes refer to the “Wand button” but only the Windows one actually shows the icon. Mac users hopefully will be able to tell that the little icon up near the address bar is the wand button.

Mac Users note: Sadly MacOpera does not (yet?) support Keychain.

Opera’s dialog boxes are the most similar between Windows and Mac OS X (compare them to how different Firefox-Win and Firefox-Mac (above) look, and you’ll notice Opera’s uninformity. However this is probably one of the reasons why people who “like but don’t use” MacOpera dislike it — the dialog box feels like it is a Windows app ported to Mac OS X.

While I love the change which assumes people want to save the password for the entire server (there are just too many sites which give you crazy login URLs to do otherwise), I really dislike the fact that the new version defaults to “Not Now” rather than Opera 8.5 which defaulted to Save, but just for that page.

Why does this bother me? Because it is inconvenient. The previous one was inconvenient in that I had to press the down arrow and then press enter… BUT! I could easily do that by the keyboard.

In MacOpera, I have much more trouble using the keyboard for it now.

My only option in OS X is tab. The first tab takes me to the check box next to “Save choice for this page only” The second tab takes me to “Save” and then press shift…

Note: If you press enter (aka return) it will select “Not now” This took me awhile to figure out, and now I have to think about it… and I don’t want to have to think about my browser, I have plenty of other things to think about.

Who Gets It Right?

I believe Camino does the best job. When the dialog comes up, enter will save the password and esc will not. That makes the most sense, seems to be the most intuitive, and requires the least amount of effort (one key).

Conformity

I like Opera for not being like other browsers. If I liked the way other browsers worked, I would use other browsers.

I understand why Opera made this change, because it puts Opera closer in line with the other major browsers out there, and makes it less likely for people to make a mistake (albeit a mistake I feel is rather astoundingly minor).

One of the reasons I think Opera ought to default to “Save” is that Opera makes it so easy to disable Wand: Preferences → Wand and then uncheck “Let the Wand remember passwords.” Look here:

Opera already prompts the user the first time they do a mouse gesture:

What would prevent a similar dialog to be shown the first time Opera discovers that there is Wand data to be saved?

Conclusion

It seems that Opera made this change to be more like other browsers, and perhaps feel like they are being a bit safer to those users who click blindly at any dialog box which jumps in their face.

But those of us who have been waiting for improvements to the Wand see this as a step backwards. What I wanted to see was the ability to say either: 1) Set the default to save for the entire site, or 2) Don’t even prompt me! Just save all my login data! With the advent of the new opera:config (disclaimer) I sincerely hope that Opera will give its power users the power to control their Wand experience.

Footnotes:

1. MIT tells me that IE on the Macintosh does not have a preference setting to not save passwords. I don’t know if that’s true, but who am I to disagree with MIT? ↩
2. Before some of you you start (and you know who you are), yes, Opera did indeed add opera:config after Firefox had the same feature. Even a blind dog finds a bone every now & again, right ;-? ↩

Keyboard Shortcuts

Almost everything you can do in Opera, you can do with the keyboard. You’ve already seen some, such as F2 to open the “Go to URL” prompt, F12 to bring up the Quick Preferences, and ctrl + Enter to trigger the wand. You’ve probably noticed some others as you have used Opera. We’re going to review some of the most important ones near the end of the series (Day 28: Keyboard Shortcuts).

But what if you want to know now?

Or what if (*gasp!*) you’ve found one that you don’t like? What if you keep pressing a key and expecting that it will do something, and it does something else?

Well, then don’t just sit there complaining, fix it!

Open up the Shortcuts preferences and double click on the “Opera Standard” entry under “Keyboard setup” and then just type a word or a keystroke. For example, type F4 and you will see all the keyboard commands which contain F4 as part of it (i.e. F4 by itself will open the Hotlist, shift + F4 will open the panel selector, alt + F4 will close the window, and so on. If you’re a heavy-duty keyboard user, you owe it to yourself to take a look through there (also take a look at the help files).

Say, for example, that you often go to press alt + F3 (View Source) but instead accidentally press alt + F4 (which exits Opera). In most browsers you’d just be out of luck and have to try not to do it again. In Opera, you can just go in, press Duplicate (you should preserve the original Opera Standard in case you ever want to go back to it), and then open up the duplicate, double click the entry for “F4 alt” and either change it to something else (“F12 alt” would make it a lot less likely to accidentally press it). Or just delete the “F4 alt” entry and close Opera another way.

As always, experiment! You won’t know what you can do until you try.

See also: Custom Keyboards @ my.opera.com

Mouse Shortcuts

In the same way, you can edit the Mouse Gestures (which I realize we also haven’t talked about much yet, but stay tuned for Day 15: Mouse Gestures to see more about that).

For some reason I found that I kept overlooking the button marked “Middle click options” (maybe because for the longest time I didn’t have a way to middle click). Opening that brings up this panel

where you can customize the middle click action.

You can look for Custom Mouse Gestures @ my.opera.com.

• Custom Toolbars @ my.opera.com
• Custom menus @ my.opera.com

Please note that it may take a little while before new setup come out for Opera8. However, you can start making your own customizations to the keyboard layout right away.

By the way, for more about the toolbars themselves see Day 21: Toolbars.

“Server name completion” is useful if you want to change how Opera behaves if you type in a word without anything before or after it. For example, if you type in “google” into the F2 or Address Bar, Opera will automatically change that to “www.google.com”. However, you might not want “.com” to be the first choice, especially if you live outside the USA; you might want “.de” or “co.uk” or some such. However, since most web users have grown accustomed to the automatic “www” and “com” most users will want to leave this alone.

You can enter several suffixes, and Opera will try them in order.

One thing that I do suggest that most users turn off is the option to “Look for local network machine” unless you routinely load web pages from machines on your local network. This will make Opera a little faster as it can skip that step.

“Encode international Web addresses with UTF-8” should be left on.

“Enable referrer logging” is a little feature that I like quite a bit. When you follow a link on a website, the browser tells the site where you came from. For example, if you go to http://www.example.com/page1.html and follow a link from there to http://www.example.com/page2.html, then http://www.example.com/page1.html is the referrer for http://www.example.com/page2.html. Again, 99% of the time this is not a big deal, but being able to turn it off does give you a little more control over your browsing experience. (Note that some sites use referrer logging to allow access to certain pages, so if you turn this off you may find some sites don’t work as expected.) Folks who come to this site from a link at http://my.opera.com are automatically given a link back to my.opera.com, which is done with a little PHP magic involving checking the referrer.

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p>FYI: Your web browser did not report a referrer when you came to this page.

Similarly, “Enable automatic redirection” is also a little feature I’m glad to have. When you follow a link, websites can tell your browser “Oh, I know you think you were looking for this page, but I’m going to send you to that page.” On reputable sites this is used if they have redesigned and something has moved, or if they have given a shorter version of a longer URL. For example, I setup http://tntluoma.com/ddoe to automatically direct to http://tntluoma.com/ethan/daily/ because “ddoe” is easier to remember (especially if you know that it stands for the “Daily Dose Of Ethan”).

While there are many legitimate uses, some websites use automatic redirection to take you from site to site while they bombard you with ads, etc. I see this less frequently these days, but again, having the option to better control your browser is A Good Thing. If this option is disabled and Opera finds a page which wants to be redirected, it will try to provide you with a text link that you can manually click on to go to the new page.

“Max(imum) connections to a server” tells Opera how many times it can connect to a specific website. Opera will try to make multiple connections to speed up browsing, but this can be undesired, especially if you are on a slow connection. If Opera tries to exceed that number of connections, it will wait until the other connections have closed.

Similarly, “Max(imum) total connections” tells Opera how many connections to make to all servers at once. This too is useful on slow connections.

“Browser Identification” I won’t take the time, right now, to go into the historical reasons why Browser Identification is needed (we’ll talk more about that when we talk about the new UA.ini file). However, some sites will not work unless they think that you are using Mozilla or Internet Explorer. You can set the Browser Identification for all sites here (you can also quickly change it using F12.)

The default is set to Internet Explorer for the simple reason that most of the broken sites out there claim to only work for Internet Explorer, and setting the default ID to Internet Explorer means that the average user will be able to use most sites with the least amount of inconvenience.

In early 2005 there was a lot of news about a spoof that made it possible for a site to claim to be another site by using international characters which browsers would render as plain English. The most famous of these made it look like you were at PayPal via https! This was no ordinary phishing expedition, this could have fooled just about anyone.

The Mozilla folks claimed they had a fix in 12 hours. What they really had was a CVS checkin that would allow people to turn off IDN support. (So people would have to wait for the code to appear in a build and then manually disable IDN.) That was roughly the equivalent of saying that you had burglary-proofed your front door by bolting it shut. Sure, the front door is secure, but it’s no longer usable.

At the same time Mozilla released some public builds with a fix, Opera also released their response. Now when you go to secure sites (https), Opera will display the company name in the address bar:

Clicking on the padlock icon will also bring up a security report:

Sites which use low-levels of encryption are shown with a partially locked padlock. If you do not see a padlock or a yellow security field in the addressbar, Opera does not consider that site to be secure!

Opera ASA also said that they (or any web browser) could only be part of the solution. The main problem was domain registrars who allowed for these spoofed domains to be set up in the first place. And no browser can anticipate every possible scheme that will come along. Users will always have to take some responsibility for themselves.

Security experts will tell you that the best security is a combination of appropriate measures and ease of use. Opera’s response to the IDN spoofing attack illustrates their commitment to providing security and features (rather than disabling features to provide security, which both Internet Explorer and Firefox have done or suggested).

Master Password and other options

Opera has a few more tricks up its sleeve. The first is the Master Password. This protects you from unauthorized access to your email (assuming you check the box to use master password for email and wand). You ought to set this, if for no other reason than someone could come along, see that you did not have a password set, and they could create one for you! (Of course, if that happened to you then you need to ask yourself how they got access to your account in the first place, and you probably have more problems than just this one!) You can also set how often Opera will ask you for the master password. I recommend Once Per Session if you are disciplined enough to quit Opera when you walk away from your computer, otherwise I would recommend using “Every time needed”.

You can safely uncheck both of the other options (about submitting a form and validation). Neither holds a significant risk. I say that assuming that you would never submit a form with any private data on it (credit card information especially) except at a secure site.

“Manage certificates” and “Security Protocols” are also safely ignored. If you know what a personal certificate is, this is where you use it. If you receive a warning about having disabled security protocols for low encryption levels, click that button to examine the settings.

One more thing

You’ve probably noticed the trash can on the toolbar where the tabs appear. Clicking the icon will let you re-open previously closed pages. For maximum security, be sure to click on the trash can and select “empty trash” after visiting secure pages. We’ll talk more about security when we look at the Tools Menu, specifically the “Delete Private Data” option.

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p> Note: There are some privacy options in the Network Preferences which you may also want to look at if you are concerned with security issues.

There are two kinds of cookies. “Normal” cookies are those which are sent back to the server. For example, if you fill in the “Comments” section of this website and check the box to “Remember My Information” the site will request to store a cookie in your browser. Many, many sites do this and they are safe 99.9% of the time. Any time you go to a site and they automatically log you in or remember your username, they have most likely set a cookie.

Third-party cookies are those which are set by another server. These are generally, but not always, advertising sites. Now I don’t have anything against advertising per se (ahem), but if those ads are delivered with cookies, companies can track your shopping habits and possibly (just possibly) connect your surfing habits with your personal information.

You can choose different options for Normal and Third Party cookies. Your options are:

Accept all cookies

Anyone who wants to set a cookie can, for however long they want.

Let me decide every time I receive one

Opera will prompt you to accept or reject cookies every time a site tries to set one.

Treat as specified in Server Manager

Once you make a decision about cookies for a site, tell Opera to remember that selection

Refuse all cookies

Don’t allow any site to set cookies

Accept only cookies sent to the server itself {only exists in “Third Party Cookies” options}

Do not accept any third party cookies.

Now those are the theoretical categories. I’ve often tried to be vigilant about my cookies, but it never lasts long. Setting “Refuse all cookies” will cause some sites to fail. Setting “Let me decide every time I receive one” quickly gets annoying, as some sites are very persistent about trying to set cookies.

A practical compromise is to set “Normal” cookies to “Accept all” and set “Third Party” to “Let me decide every time I receive one”.

Select a cookie to examine, edit, or delete it.

You can view or change information here, such as the expiration date.

There are some enhancements that I would like to see Opera offer. They offer an option to “Delete new cookies when exiting Opera” but I would like to see another option to delete only new third party cookies when exiting Opera. I would also like to be able to decide the maximum life of a cookie. Some sites want to set them to expire in 30+ years! Personally I don’t see any reason to have them that long. I’d like to be able to say “Accept all cookies, but limit their life to X number of days or a year” (similar to what we do for History settings above).

I usually enable “Accept cookies with incorrect paths” and disable “Warn me about incorrect cookie paths”. I’ve never seen any examples of why I should care about incorrect paths.

Finally, I recommend that you enable “Use cookies to trace password protected pages” unless you do not have administrative control over your computer (i.e. if you use it in a school or business setting). Even then it’s probably being a bit paranoid to worry about any real security risk, and it makes life a little easier to have it enabled. Folks who are concerned for the highest levels of security should leave this turned off and should probably set Opera to delete cookies when exiting.

Typed in Addresses

Set Opera to remember 0, 10, 50, 100, 200, or 500 typed in addresses. These are the URLs which are typed in (as opposed to links clicked) in either the F2 prompt or the Address Bar. Personally I wish Opera would let me choose my own number here between 0-999, but they offer some reasonable defaults. The Clear button will immediately delete stored addresses.

Visited Addresses

Store 0, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, or 10000 visited addresses. These defaults seem a bit arbitrary. There is a large gap between them. That said, I generally leave mine set to 5000.

Memory Cache

This is the amount of RAM that Opera will use. Choices include: Automatic (default), 4MB, 10MB, 20MB, 40MB, 60MB, and Off. In a day when I’ve got 1GB of RAM in my laptop, 60MB doesn’t really seem like a lot. But since the Opera developers are the ones who put these options in, and I doubt they did so arbitrarily, it seems best to trust them. I generally leave this set to “Automatic”.

Disk Cache

Opera stores web pages to the disk for fast retrieval, and can be set to use 400MB, 200MB, 100Mb, 50MB, 20MB, 10MB, 5MB, 2MB, or 0. (Note: even if you set the disk cache to zero, currently opened pages will still be cached while open.) Again, my first response is that in this day and age when I have an 80GB drive in my laptop, 400MB seems rather tiny. However, I really can’t think of a lot of good reasons to store old pages on your hard drive when so many of them will be out of date next time anyway. Also note the “Empty on exit” box which tells Opera to delete the disk cache when Opera exits.

Check documents/images/other

This tells Opera how often to check a web page for a new version. Options include: Never, Always, Every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, every 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours, 24 hours, every week. If you run into problems with seeing out of date information on cached web pages, consider lowering the time or setting to “always”. In my experience, Opera8 does a much better job noticing when I have updated CSS pages without having to force a reload, even with the default setting of “5 hours”. Note also that the server can send cache information to the browser, in which case Opera will follow the server’s instructions (as they have generally been set to how often the site actually updates, and avoids overloading the servers).

Mac users: the default text editor in OS X, cunningly named TextEdit, will try to render HTML, and is therefore a poor choice for viewing source, where you presumably want to see the markup itself. I highly recommend that you install TextWrangler or BBEdit.

Next is the “protocols” option. Protocols are things that you don’t really care about, like MIME types, that browsers do care about. It is a way that they talk to each other. By specifying an application to handle a certain protocol, you allow Opera to utilize different types of links by handing them off to different applications.

Again, in simple language: this is how you get Opera to work with iTunes and AIM. It’s not hard, really.

Now some would argue that Opera ought to support these two “out of the box” and it would be nice if it did. Those two protocols are basically de-facto “standards” and are becoming more and more popular. But do not despair! You can add them yourself, and having accomplished that will fill you with the warm glow of self-satisfaction once reserved only for those who knew how to tune-up a car in the driveway on a Saturday afternoon. Or not. But it’s fairly easy once you know how.

And you don’t even have to change into work clothes.

Note: Adding AIM support is done exactly the same as iTunes, just type ‘aim’ instead of ‘itms’

To add iTunes support to Opera, simply click the “Add” button in the Programs preferences screen. Type ‘itms’ into the Protocol field. If iTunes is installed, then Opera should automatically fill in the information in the ‘Open with default application’ field. (If iTunes isn’t installed, one might ask why you are bothering to add protocol support in Opera?) Be sure to check the radio button so that it looks like this:

Select “OK” and presto whammo, you’ve done it!

Default Browser (Windows Only)

If you want Opera to be your default browser, you can tell it to check on startup to make sure it is. If it isn’t, Opera will prompt you to set it as default. The “Details” button will let you select the types of files and the protocols (there’s that word again) that you want Opera to be responsible for.

(Mac users: open Safari’s preference to set the default browser. Linux/FreeBSD users are on their own :-)

The simple part is where you can define a default download directory. This is where Opera will assume you want to save files for regular or Quick Downloads.

The slightly more complicated part is the MIME types. To make a long and technically tedious story short, whenever you go to a website and request a file (web page, image, MP3, etc), the website tells the browser (Opera) what kind of file it is through something called a MIME type.

The only reason for the average user to possibly care about this is because you can tell Opera to respond to certain MIME types in certain ways. Which is to say: you can tell Opera to always download a certain type of file (for example, an MP3) into a specific folder. And I will explain how using a real life example from my own Opera usage.

I recently signed up as a subscriber to Salon.com after reading about all the free music available to Salon.com members. I had a special folder where I wanted to save these, but I didn’t want to have to tell Opera every single time, and I didn’t want to change my default directory for all downloads. So I used this feature to tell Opera where to put MP3 files. Here’s how.

Of course I first went to the Downloads preferences window, which looked like this:

Then I typed “mp3” into the “Quick Find” box, and saw that the corresponding type was “audio/mpeg”. (Note: I also made sure to UN-check the box which says Hide File Types Opened By Opera):

Note: notice the box next to “Hide file types opened by Opera” is not checked.

I double-clicked on the “audio/mpeg mp3,mp2,mpga” line and a new window appeared. I selected the radio button for ‘Save to disk’ and then checked the box for “Do not ask for folder but save directly to” and then chose the folder where I wanted them to go. The end result looked like this:

Now whenever I click on an MP3, it automatically gets sent to that folder.

I hate it when PDF files are shown in the browser window. I prefer to download them and read them with the viewer of my choice. You can do the same for PDF files using the same method described for MP3s.

As you can see there are other options available to you as well (have the file opened by the default application, or another application; or have the file opened when the download completes, etc), but this should cover the most common usage. It’s not quite a download manager (which is a frequently requested feature) but it is very powerful and can save you a lot of time if you download a lot of a certain type of file (MP3s or PDFs or PowerPoint, etc).

Two minor notes: 1) if the website is misconfigured and does not send the proper MIME type, Opera will try to make an educated guess. But if it doesn’t work on a specific server, it is probably misconfigured. If it doesn’t work on any servers, check to make sure you chose the right MIME type. 2) If you ask Opera to “Open” a file, Opera saves the file and then opens it. The files are saved to the default download folder and are not deleted later. Some browsers use a temp file and/or a temp folder. I consider this a feature (I like the way Opera does it) but it does surprise some people.