Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 06, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Firefox is a big topic here at CyberNet News as many of you have probably realized by this point. I do, however, receive emails quite frequently asking why I don’t write more about Opera. There are actually two reasons and the main one is that I don’t use Opera as my default browser. It is great to use from time to time because of the large number of features but too many Google services lack complete compatibility with it.

The other reason that I don’t write about tweaking Opera is because an amazing wiki already exists that has just about everything I would be able to tell you. If you’re an Opera user then you need to bookmark that page. The list of bookmarklets that they have is absolutely insane!

That wiki is so extensive that I won’t really be able to cover anything new, but I can let you know a few of the speed tweaks that I have found to be useful. Alright, here we go…

Every time you start to type something into the Address Bar Opera goes out and looks for a networked machine with that name. I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t use Opera for searching for a networked machine. This just makes your computer do even more unnecessary work so I went ahead and disabled that feature:

1. Open your Preferences by either pressing Ctrl+F12 or by using the Tools menu.
2. Navigate to Advanced -> Network -> Server name completion.
3. Uncheck the box that says Look for local network machine.
4. You can also uncheck the Try name completion which will try to find the address your typing in your bookmarks and such. This can also cause more CPU usage.

After using Opera for awhile I start to notice that it takes longer to load. You can solve this issue by having it remember fewer addresses that you visit:

1. Open your Preferences by either pressing Ctrl+F12 or by using the Tools menu.
2. Navigate to Advanced -> History -> Addresses.
3. Change the value to 100.
4. Press the Clear button to reset the list.

If you are constantly opening a ton of tabs then they will probably load the sites slowly. It isn’t because Opera can’t handle the load but it is that the number of connections that Opera can make is limited. By default they only want you to make 8 connections to a single server and 20 connections total. That is probably good for dial-up users but if you’re on broadband then you should try increasing it:

1. Open your Preferences by either pressing Ctrl+F12 or by using the Tools menu.
2. Navigate to Advanced -> Network
3. Increase the Max connections to a server value (I use 64).
4. Increase the Max max total connections value (I use 128).

Okay, so those are the tweaks that I have applied to my Opera installation. Let me know if you come across any other helpful options to change because I love trying to make things faster! 🙂

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