Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

If you have decided to give the new Opera 9 a shot then you might have been wondering how you can add more features to it. Opera isn’t exactly like Firefox where you can add extensions that other users have created in order to get the features that you want. It may sound like a downfall to Opera but it actually isn’t. While using Opera you will find that many of the extensions you sat there downloading in Firefox are implemented right out of the box. Pretty nice, huh?

If that isn’t enough for you then you can get bookmarklets/buttons that will make using Opera a little easier. Bookmarklets are snippets of JavaScript code that you can place on a toolbar to perform an action. There literally hundreds of these bookmarklets that people have come up with to help save you a little time. Here are some of the ones that I found to be useful:

• Subscribe to the current site’s RSS feed in Bloglines
• Identify the browser as Internet Explorer
• Google PageRank button

Those are just a few of the bookmarklets that I use in Opera. You can really make your browsing experience quicker by looking through the lists of bookmarklets and finding tasks that you constantly perform. Here are three of the most useful sites that I found:

• Opera Browser Wiki Buttons or Bookmarklets (hundreds of bookmarklets available)
• UserJS.org (some unique bookmarklets like one for Bug Me Not)
• Phil Burns (not many bookmarklets but some may be useful to you)

If those bookmarklets and buttons still aren’t enough then you will find this guide very useful for tweaking Opera. It has many tweaks and walks you through them step-by-step. They will soon show you how customizable Opera really is (especially if you haven’t gone to Opera:Config in your address bar).

Overall Opera is a great browser and the features that you receive are amazing. I would use it as by fulltime browser if they had complete compatibility with Google services, but I think Google is to blame for that one. The Opera Desktop Team is really dedicated to giving you the best experience possible, and it is only fair that you give them a shot. If you don’t want to install Opera then you can always get the portable version.

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