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Jun 22

Helpful Tip: Add More Speed Dials in Opera 9.5

Posted in: Features, Newly Released, Opera, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on June 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

Win; Mac; Linux
I never thought Opera was going to make this possible, but I’m pleased to say that in the new Opera 9.5 you can actually customize how many Speed Dial entries are shown at any one given time! They are so incredibly useful that I’ve found myself needing more than the nine that comes standard in the browser. I will say that the Opera team could have made it easier for users to customize how many Speed Dial entries are shown at a time, but I’m just grateful that in Opera 9.5 this can now be changed. Here’s what you need to do:

Note the path to the Opera Preferences (type about:opera into the address bar to find it). Also, make sure you have at least one site added to Speed Dial already.
Close Opera. This is important to prevent Opera from modifying the configuration file we’re about to edit.
Open speeddial.ini file in any text editor from the Opera Preferences directory that you found Step 1.
Add the following lines (somewhere near the top is fine), and adjust number of rows & columns to meet your needs. I’ve got the speeddial.ini file open in the background in the screenshot above, and you can see that I set the number of rows and columns to 5.
[Size] Rows=5 Columns=5
Start Opera.

You’ll need to play around with the number of rows and columns until you find something that fits your screen well. In my example I added five rows and five columns, but you’ll notice that some of the rows don’t show up. Opera requires a minimum size for each of the Speed Dial entries, and if they don’t all fit they will simply run off the screen. Once that happens there’s no way to access them since scrollbars aren’t shown.

Options like these would probably be better served in the opera:config advanced options area, but hey, I won’t complain. Speed Dial is Opera’s most useful feature for me, and having more of them makes it even better.

One thing that you should note is that Opera Link will keep your Speed Dials synchronized across multiple computers, but it will only do work for the first nine entries you have. So don’t expect to all 50 of your Speed Dial entries to appear on all of your computers running Opera. Sorry, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.