Network Preferences

This panel mixes some basic and advanced features. “Proxy servers” are used on some networks (and by some ISPs)f to provide a faster browsing experience or to tunnel all connections through a single machine. Ask your systems administrator. Clicking on the button will bring up a panel to fine-tune proxy settings or enter the path to an automatic configuration file. Most users will not need this.

“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.