Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

As we’ve shown before, Opera is an extremely customizable browser, but it does so much that it can be difficult to remember it all. Then again you would have to know what it does in order to remember it. 🙂

Today we want to walk you through a dozen tips and tricks that will inch you closer to becoming an Opera grand master. So lets go ahead and jump into it, and as always, hit us up with your tips in the comments!

–Bookmark & Folder Nicknames–

Opera has a nickname feature for bookmarks that I’m guessing most people use. With it you can enter in an abbreviation for a bookmark that can quickly be typed into the address bar to pull up a particular site. One thing that you may not have realized is that the nicknames can also be assigned to entire folders of bookmarks, and entering that into the address bar will open every site within that folder:

–Bookmark & Open Multiple Links–

Let’s say you’re on a sight such as Digg, and you’re trying to quickly go through all of the news. Enter Links Panel! The Links Panel (a.k.a. sidebar) will let you handle hyperlinks throughout the page in bulk. You can Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click to select multiple links from the current page. Then just choose the bookmark or open the option from the right-click menu.

–Click to Save Images–

Do you find yourself frequently saving images from websites? Instead of right-clicking on an image to save it each time, just Ctrl+Click on it. You’ll immediately be prompted with a Save As dialog box for you to enter in the name, or you can just press Enter to use the image’s current name.

[via Opera Watch]

–Customize the Browser’s Name and Icon–

Did you know that you change the name of the browser, and even replace its icon with your own? Yep, that’s all built-in. To change the icon you’ll need to enter opera:config#UserPrefs|ApplicationIcon into your address bar, and then provide the location of the icon you want to use.

To change the browser’s name, just enter opera:config#UserPrefs|Title into the address bar, and in the box type the name you want to appear. Additionally, you can use these combinations to insert dynamic items:

• %t for page title (entering just %t in the box will remove the browser’s name all together, which is what I currently do)
• %s for build number
• %v for version number

In this example I choose to display the browser’s name before the title of the page:

[via Tamil]

–Detach/Move a Tab–

Want to open a tab up in a new window? Just drag it onto the title bar of the browser. You can also move tabs between multiple windows simply by dragging and dropping them from one tab bar to another.

–Fast Navigation–

If you’re trying to open several links on a page, you should try using Shift+Arrow keys to move between the hyperlinks on the page. The nice thing is that this doesn’t jump back up to the beginning of the page where the first hyperlink appears. It starts with the first hyperlink in the area that you are looking at.

Shift+Ctrl+Enter will then open the currently selected link in a background tab.

–Fit to Width–

When you come across a site that requires horizontal scrolling, why not try and enable the Fit to Width feature (located in the View Menu, or press Ctrl+F11). The site will be adjusted so that no horizontal scrolling is necessary, and for the most part it won’t look all that bad.

–Hide the Menu Bar–

I hardly ever need to use the Menu Bar, and it takes up more room that I’m willing to part with. So what I do is I add a button that will remove the Menu Bar, and at the same time provide all of the menu options in a single condensed drop-down list. Just click here to add that button, and for more menu buttons visit the Opera Wiki.

–Hide the Tab Bar for a Single Tab–

In Firefox when you only have one tab open, the tab bar is not visible, and there is an option in Opera to do the same thing. Just right-click on the Tab Bar, choose the Customize option, and then check the box that says “Show only when needed.” The tab bar will now be hidden anytime only one tab is open.

–Right-Click Address Mapping–

It’s super easy to map any address on a site using your favorite map service. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Open up your favorite map service (ex. Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps).
2. Right-click in the service’s search box, and choose the Create Search option. Enter in a keyword (it’s required by Opera, but isn’t used in this trick), and then press Save.
3. The next time you see an address on a site just highlight it with your mouse, right-click, and then go to “Search with.” You’ll see a list of all the possible search engines that you’ve added to Opera, and all you have to do is select the mapping service.

–Promptless Downloading–

If you’re like me you probably save all of your downloads to the same folder so that you don’t end up with things scattered all over your computer. In Opera you can set your default download location in the Options, and then when you right-click on a file or image, there will be a “Save to download folder” option. Clicking on that will initiate the download without prompting you for any information.

–Speed Dial Homepage Button–

This is something that I was yearning for, and luckily the Opera Community came through. For reasons unknown to me, the Opera developers never associated an address to the Speed Dial page. That meant you couldn’t assign it as your browser’s homepage, but dragging this button onto the address bar will do the trick. It will take on the look of the homepage button, but it will actually open the Speed Dial page.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Opera is taking the mobile market by storm with its mobile browser. In July Opera Mini users browsed their way to nearly 1 billion pageviews, and it currently occupies about 0.24% of the total browser market according to Net Applications. That’s not too shabby since it’s being ranked among desktop browsers.

It’s not surprising that Opera continues to work heavily on the Opera Mini browser to pack in even more great features. Now Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 was just released earlier this morning, and with it comes dozens of improvements and bug fixes.

Two of the more notable features with this release is the ability to browse sites horizontally (pictured to the right), and the option to change your search engine. Now you can use Google as your default search engine instead of Yahoo. Here’s a quick look at everything that’s new, and it appears that there was some tender love and care given to Blackberry devices:

• Customized search engine – now you could put Google Search on the start page. You can also create a search from any search field.
• Shortcut keys
• Browse in landscape mode – view the Web on a wider screen (hit "*" then "#" on your phone)
• Native menu for BlackBerrys and several other optimizations.
• Content folding – Collapses long menu lists (like those found on sidebars of webpages), so you don’t need to scroll through them to get to the page content. Note: This only works in “Fit to width” mode, not desktop.
• Supports secure connections for banks, eBay, etc.
• Small fonts have been enabled
• Improved image quality
• Added ‘Full screen’ mode
• Web-2.0 looking dialogs
• Fixed a ton of bugs

For those of you wondering there will be at least one more Beta release before it hits final form. I also received some good news today, and it’s that the problem rendering our site’s navigation bar has been confirmed as a bug. Now they are working on a fix for it. 🙂

Kudos to Opera on yet another fine pre-release, and I can’t wait to see what Opera 9.5 Alpha will bring on Tuesday.

Get Opera Mini 4 Beta 2
Sources: Opera Watch & Opera Press Release

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

In August Google pushed out an update to its Chrome Beta channel that included quicker access to search by image via a long press or right click along with a slew of other features. Today, version 30 of the browser is hitting the stable channel, along with its revamp of gestures for the Android version. Over the coming days, users will receive an update on their handsets and tablets that moves all the gestures to the toolbar: swipe down to open the tab switcher and flip through open tabs by running your finger left or right. Chrome 30 also includes a host of backend improvements and access to new APIs such as MediaSource and DeviceMotion, for better integration between webapps and your handheld hardware. For more details about all the changes to both the mobile and desktop versions of Chrome, hit up the source.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Google

Comments

Source: Google Chrome Blog

This article was written on December 15, 2009 by CyberNet.

Our internet connections have become faster over the years, but with that our need for speed increased too. And sadly, having a fast internet connection does not mean the server you’re downloading from gives you the speed you pay for. That’s where download managers come in. One of their more interesting features involves speeding up your downloads. So how exactly do they do it?

Getting the software
Before showing you the tricks, let’s have a look at some good download managers. If you’re a Windows user, I’d recommend Free Download Manager (freeware) or GetRight (shareware that never expires). Another big name in the download manager business is Download Accelerator Plus, but I advise you to stay away from that one because it is ad-supported and tends to slow down your system.

Trick 1: chop the download in pieces
How long does it take to transport 20 people from point A to point B with one taxi? A lot longer than when you have multiple cabs at your disposal. It’s just like that with the internet: in most cases one connection is doing all the work, even though your pipe can handle more than one. When you let a download manager chop your download in segments, simultaneous connections with the server are established that enable you to download different parts of your file at the same time. Often referred to as segmented downloading, this technique can greatly increase your download speed.

I put this to the test by downloading Internet Explorer 8 (16.1MB) using Firefox and Free Download Manager. It took my browser around 47 seconds at an estimated average of 343 KB/s to download the entire file. FDM did it in a whopping 21 seconds, which accounts roughly for an average speed of 767 KB/s. These calculations are not fully accurate, but the difference is clear. Keep in mind however that your mileage may vary depending on your connection and the server you’re downloading from.

Trick 2: using download mirrors
A second trick to speed up your downloads is using mirrors. The idea behind this is that you download a file from multiple sources at once, combining the speed from these servers to get faster downloads. Both FDM and GetRight have a feature for automatic mirror search, but from my experience they don’t find any as soon as you download something that’s not on the list of the top 15 best-known programs.

You can however choose to enter mirrors manually. Whenever your download is bigger than 500MB and the site you’re downloading from offers alternate download links, it doesn’t hurt to enter them. A good example of when you’d want to use this is when you’re downloading Ubuntu‘s install CD.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Mozilla has recently put out a call for those willing and able to test a preview build of Firefox. This build is designed for Windows 8 tablets and is touch-friendly and sporting what is described as being a tile-based Firefox Start Experience. And in addition, this build of Firefox is offering support for Windows 8 […]