(Summary: Bandwidth still matters. Speed still matters. Size matters. When viewing a well-designed website, Opera makes it easier for me to read what I want to read while avoiding what I want to avoid.)
Note to all websites that want me to read what you are writing:
Give me a printer friendly version, or I’ll probably move on.
Why? Here’s why:
Reading on the screen is hard.
My eyes are only 31.9 years old, but it’s hard to read stuff online. Yeah, I could print it out, but that’s annoying too.
I have a lovely monitor (Dell 1704FPV) running at 1280x1024. Very crisp, very clear. And yet, print is still fairly small.
So here’s what I type when I hit a page that I want to read:
, [tells Opera to get ready to search for links on the page]
print [tells Opera to look for links on the page with the word “print” like “Print” or “Printer Friendly” or “Print This” etc]
[enter] [tells Opera to follow the link, presuming it has found one]
8 [tells Opera to bump up the zoom to 200%]
Read.
On most good sites, that will do it, but of course it doesn’t work for every site. Some use images that say ‘Print’ which of course is really dumb. I can’t search for text if the text is an image. Sure I can click on it, but first I have to 1) turn on images (I surf with them turned off, for speed), 2) find the right image, 3) click on it.
3 is the real efficiency killer, because I have to reach for the mouse. Everything else I can do with the keyboard (turn on images = ‘g’ in Opera)
The other option I have is to turn on User Mode in Opera.
Preferences -> Page Style -> Configure Modes
User Mode lets me override the page style that the author has set. I generally uncheck all of the options for User Mode.
In Opera 8beta1, use the “View Toolbar Dropdown” (click the slightly creepy eye icon on the right hand side of the addressbar), and choose ‘disable tables’
While not as good as real printer friendly page, it works fairly well.
Another option is to press ‘p’ which will invoke Print Preview mode in Opera. This generally gives a highly-readable black-type-on-white-background page which can also be zoomed. Press ‘p’ again to get out of Print Preview mode.
If you zoom a page and it creates a horizontal scrollbar, use Fit to Window Width (also available on the View Toolbar). That reminds me, I need to add a keyboard shortcut for that command.
For those of you who want to add your own, here’s the command you want:
Enable mediumscreen mode | Disable mediumscreen mode
It’s called “Fit to Window Width” in the GUI, but “Medium-screen Mode” is the official name. (NOTE: Opera will not expand to fit a window, just shrink. That may be obvious to everyone else, but it wasn’t to me at first.)
Now some may question the ethics of this practice. Printer-friendly windows are generally ad-free (except for a few sites like C|Net). Avoiding ads is not my primary reason for using printer-friendly pages, but it is a reason. Although, since I surf with images and plugins disabled (quick F12 in Opera will let me re-enable them if I want to), I don’t see many ads anyway.
You know what kind of ads that I see, which are often useful, and which have often led me to buy things (at least as often as any other kind of online advertising)?
Text based ads.
Not some obnoxious Flash ad, not some annoying animated GIF, but simply a little text box. So I know what you’re thinking, “Wow, you must like Google Ads then!”
Well, I would, except that they seem to be loaded using JavaScript, and oh-did-I-mention that I usually surf with that off too?
What can I say? I’m a text kinda guy. If I could use my mouse with I probably would. Nah, Opera, as I have it configured, is probably every bit as fast as Lynx, but it gives me the option to easily enable the things I have disabled by default when I need them.
And once we get per-site-settings (all I want for Christmas, but before Christmas), I won’t have to toggle the settings nearly as often as I do now.