opera plug

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Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2006-11-29 00:42:22

i just "discovered" (i.e. used for the first time) opera's content-blocking feature. boy, is it amazing! i've always hated the tall ad on the right side of arstechnica.com articles, and the large ad that appears between a slashdot blurb and the comments. but now, thanks to opera's amazingly easy-to-use content-blocking thingamajig, they bother me no more!

on a related note, opera mini 3.0 is out for those of you who like surfing on your cellphones. and it now supports content folding, which is really cool. around 70-80% of most webpages is usually just bloat - layout and navigation bars and those cute/annoying little icons and sidebars and footers and stuff. the real "meat" of the page (i.e. the thing you went there to see) is almost always less than 20% of the html that gets downloaded. content folding detects all the bloat (which is a non-trivial task - believe me, I know) and folds it away under a little "+" sign. the end result is much faster and a much cleaner surfing experience on a cellphone. kudos to the opera developers for getting this working.

Posted by Eric at 2006-11-29 09:34:35

Adblock + Filterset.G, my friend.

Or you can be like my desktop and use the old-school CSS blocking dating from the Firebird days.

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Posted by stak at 2006-11-29 19:36:05

But why go to the trouble of installing extensions that may or may not work with each other, when the most useful features come built-in?

Also, firefox doesn't do tabs. Regardless of what everybody claims, the fact that I have to install an extension to catch new windows and shove them back into the same original window is NOT tabbed browsing.

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Posted by Eric at 2006-11-29 20:22:23

It's really a philosophical decision. Firefox is SUPPOSED to be the really lightweight thing people make into what they want via extensions (whether or not it succeeds at this is debatable).

Opera plays by much more of a "batteries included" model (a la python).

Me, I like Firefox, but that's because I know how to make it do exactly what I want.

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Posted by stak at 2006-11-29 23:28:33

I think it's more religious than philosophical :)

As for the supposed lightweighted-ness, I just checked Firefox v2.0 and Opera v9.0 download sizes for Mac OS X: Firefox is 18 MB compared to Opera's 13.2 MB. I pity tha' fool who thinks Firefox is cool. But meh, go with what you like best.

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Posted by Eric at 2006-11-30 09:25:22

Sure thing.

And since you brought it up, on Windows, the size is 6.3MB for Opera, and 5.6MB for Firefox.

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Posted by stak at 2006-11-30 18:49:23

Touche. Apparently I can't do accents on the BlackBerry keyboard. Damn.

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Posted by Eric at 2006-11-30 20:31:24

I seem to recall rolling the scroll wheel and possibly holding ALT will do it for you.

It's in one of those "Welcome!" messages that appear on the device when it gets reloaded.

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Posted by stak at 2006-11-30 23:11:54

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Posted by varun at 2006-11-30 11:54:08

??

You sure? If anything my experience has been reversed - on FF2 (x86/x64/Mac), clicking on a link that opens a new window creates a new background tab, whereas on Opera 9.02 (x86/Mac) clicking on the same link creates a new foreground tab. For me that makes Opera unusable for things like Google Reader.

BTW - I like the new captchas. This I don't mind ;)

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Posted by stak at 2006-11-30 19:18:11

You can force opera to bacground the tab by ctrl- or shift- clicking on the link. I forget which it is.

Also, I think I experimented with the tab/window behavior before, and iirc, the javascript function for opening a window forced a window in firefox, but the target=_blank opened a new tab. Both were tabs in opera.

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Posted by varun at 2006-12-01 00:26:58

shift+click, if i remember correctly.

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