I am sure if you scour my site enough, you will read copious amounts of glorification for the Opera browser. I don't hide my love for it. But sometimes when I am surfing I end up doing something that makes me joyful, and feel the need to spread the joy. Today is one of those days, and I am going to talk about four things, two of which I am fairly sure you can't do in other browsers, one you might be able to, and one you kind of can in Internet Exloprer.
So I sit down at my desk, fire up my browser, and hit my link list everyday. I keep up with friends, family, tech, and humor with it. Ninth on my list right now is Lushbaugh's page and the first page of the day I normally have to use one of those Opera specific features: Fit to window width (they have a better name for this, but this is what the button says and I am too lazy to go look for it). A while ago Mike posted some pics of his cat trying to take over his shoulder. Cute cat. Anyways, the images are a little big in width, stretching the comments past the edge of the right side of the browser, which makes you have to scroll to the side to read everything. A click of the "Fit to window width" button and the images scale and everything fits so there is no more side scrolling. Now all modern browsers have the option to auto-scale the images to fit the window, and 99.9% of the time I hate that feature, but this does more than just scale images. It will make intelligent line breaks, proportionally shrink margin space and white space, and a few things I am sure I have missed it doing all to make the side scroll bar become a thing of the past.
A little further down the links page, I come to digg.com. Normally, I am fairly good about keeping up with the stories, but from time to time new post pop up like crazy and I end up with page after page of random posts that I feel obligated to sift through and here I introduce the Fast Forward (my favorite) and Rewind buttons. These are Opera specific, and seemed really wierd when they first added them, but they are cool. Opera guesses at what the logical next page you would visit from your current page. Now it usually just looks for a 'Next' link and goes with that, but sometimes it pulls links from other places (and sadly, it does not always work). On digg.com, it corretly picks up the next page and I don't have to actually look for the link on the page and just press the forward button (or do one of the myriad of available forward options). The Rewind button comes into play once I have buried myself in the site, or even better, buried myself in the site then caught a link to another site I buried myself in. Sure, to get back to my page, I could the back button x number of times or I could pull the back history down and select the page I want and hope it is within the first ten links, but why do that? I can click the rewind button and it will take me to the entry point of the page, hit it one more time and it takes me to the entry point of the previous page, and so on. You really have to use it for a bit to see how that is really handy, but it basically makes quicker work of the Back button than the Back button does.
The next two come hand in hand for me, so that is how I will present them: the notes window and text selection. The notes window is exactly what it sounds like, a little area in the browser where you can put whatever text you feel like putting there. I use it for anything that you might fire open notepad for while surfing, all the very temporary stuff I am not commiting to disk, but I also use it for info that is specific to surfing. Kinda going along with the notes window is how Opera does text selection. If you double-click on a word you highlight that word, much like all browsers. A third click in Opera selects the sentence the word is in. A fourth click in Opera (what IE does on a third click) selects the paragraph. Opera will also pop up a context menu with all the available options you can do with that text, such as copy to note.
Sure they might not sound like much, but they are part of the reason I love Opera. Give yourself a warm, fuzzy feeling out of your browsing experience and give it a try.
