Opera Hacks

Posted by tech master  |  at  5:05 PM No comments

1. Fighting Ads using Opera's Filter

Ads are everywhere on almost any site you visit. Firefox may have Adblock Plus, but Opera has its own ad blocking system in place. The file urlfilter.ini in
C:\Documents and settings\Your_username\Application Data\Opera\profile
(where C:\ is the drive in which Windows is installed) contains a list of sites to be blocked. Add site addresses and wildcards such as "*" (the star) to block sites. There are several such lists available on the Internet ready for download. One such good list can be found at www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/. Just download the Opera list and copy the file to the given location or its contents to the file that already exists.


2. Modifiying Tab width range

Tabbed browsing is a boon, but the use of too many tabs in Opera causes the names to be cropped off. In Opera, you can set a limit to how small and how wide a tab can be allowed to be. Extract the skin.ini from skin.zip from
C:\Program Files\Opera\skin (where C:\ is the drive in which you have installed Opera)
Open skin.ini in Notrepad and modify these lines

Pagebar max button width =
Pagebar min button width =

to suitable values. If the lines aren't present, create them and then save the file.Add the edited file back to the skin's ZIP file. Restart Opera and select skin from Tools > Appearance.


3. Adding shortcuts to execute programs

Keyboard shortucuts can be used in Opera to quickly start programs to go to a particular site. The trick is to add shortucuts to the shortcut.ini file located at C:\Documents and settings\Your_username\Application Data\ Opera\Opera\profile\keyboard. Open it in Notepad. Creating shortcuts is done in manner similar to this:G, G="Execute program, "c:\WINDOWS\Notepad.exe"

Here, typing [ G] [ G] will start Notepad. In similar manner, the path of the program can be replaced with a site url, for example, ="Execute program, "www.myproblog.blogspot.com". Opera will load the site when you use the shortcuts.