Remove the Opera title bar

The title bar in Gnome 3 is redundant: a waste of valuable space on modern wide screen monitors.

Gnome 3 applications will eventually lose it: the Gnome browser Epiphany already has.

Opera users can get rid of it by right clicking on the tab bar and unchecking "Show border", as described on My Opera.

Remove the Opera tray icon in Gnome 3

The Opera icon doesn't really belong in the Gnome 3 messaging tray.

My Opera explains how to remove it.

Opera in Fedora

It may not be open source, but I like Opera, and like to install it on Linux. I'm using Fedora 15 at the moment, and Opera is a manual install, and must also be updated manually when updates become available, but it's not hard to do. If Not True Then False has a guide.

Intelligence quotient and browser usage

OR: Correlation is not proof of causation.

New online study says Internet Explorer users are dumb, smarter users use Firefox, even smarter users use Chrome, but the smartest users use Opera.


Internet Explorer users confirm they are dumb by threatening a dumb lawsuit.

I think the Internet Explorer 6 result may have something to do with my previous post. Does the daily tedium of office life for civil service and other corporate users of IE6 decrease IQ with time?

(Story first seen on the Debian Forum.)

Update: The BBC has the story.

The findings have been treated with scepticism by Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory: "They've got IE6 users with an IQ of around eighty. That's borderline deficient, marginally able to cope with the adult world.

Just for fun, I tried searching Google for an image of an Internet Explorer user to see if it matched the description.

LOL.

Image: shoutEx.

Update 2: The story seems to have been a hoax, according to the BBC.

Firefox 4- needs polish

Firefox 4 is out. There are plenty of comprehensive reviews out there, so I'm just going to look at a couple of features that caught my eye. These are features Opera has had for a while, so I'm going to compare Firefox 4 to Opera 11 (on Debian Squeeze)- it's FOSS Vs. Proprietary.
Firefox 4 has removed the menu bar and replaced it with a drop down menu button in the tab bar- this is certainly an idea I like as it gets rid of some wasted screen real estate. This is how the Firefox 4 and Opera 11 implementations compare.


I think Opera has the edge here- its menu button is neater, and the tabs more readable on a dark theme. (The Firefox menu button doesn't seem to give access to all the options present in the menu bar, for example View>Sidebar, so it looks like it's functionally less polished as well.)

Firefox 4 also introduces tab management, called Panorama- a feature Opera 11 already has in tab stacking. Here's how they compare:





For me, the Opera method is better. Firefox's Panorma requires you to fiddle around with the size of tab group windows, whereas in Opera's tab stacking, thumbnails are automatically grouped and displayed when hovering over a tab stack. Tab stacking is also more immediate in that you can just flick one tab on top of another, without changing window.
A big problem with Firefox's Panorama window is that thumbnails are very low resolution, and when clicking on a thumbnail, that thumbnail is maximised to full screen to become the web page depicted, but intermediate images are just the low resolution thumbnail magnified, which appears ugly, even disconcerting.
Opera's implementation is more polished; Firefox's functional but visually cruder.
Firefox 4 needs more polish: automatic sizing of windows in Panorama, and a smoother change from thumbnail to full screen browser page.

Bucky balls & browsers

It was the the 25th anniversary of the discovery of fullerenes today and Google marked the occasion with an interactively rotatable fullerene C₆₀ molecule as the second 'o' in their logo.
The animation was done by a large javascript on the Google homepage, which proved very CPU demanding for some users. Hardly surprising as the animation contains 60 points in 3D space, making up 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons with all the connecting lines involved.
Interestingly, Firefox seemed to struggle the most with the animation; Opera and Chrome handled it with less effort.

Firefox CPU usage:


Opera CPU usage:


Chrome CPU usage:

Ad blocking in Opera

Yes, I know they pay for sites, but ads are just too in-your-face, irritating and dumb. Not on all sites, but blame the sites that have flashing ads, video ads, ads for junk, even ads with sound. Here's how to block ads in Opera.
Go to Tools>Advanced>Blocked Content. Now all you have to do is enter some of the most common ad server web addresses. Addresses have to be entered one by one. Blogote has a short list that doesn't take too long to enter and seems to be effective.
Opera stores the web addresses in a file called urlfilter.ini. A longer list of ad server addresses can be entered into this file. Tamil has A full description and a list of ad server addresses.
urlfilter.ini does not exist by default. Use the first method to add a few addresses and Opera will create the file. The longer list can then be cut and paste in, making sure addresses follow the same format.

Update: Opera 11 now has extensions- and there are a couple of ad blockers available, so this post is now redundant.

Opera on Ubuntu

Opera is a great browser for Windows, and it works on Linux too. In Ubuntu it's available in the Canonical Partner Repository (free software that is not open source), so no need to use an installation file, and updates will be available through Update Manager.
However, updates can be slow to appear. Opera has its own repository, to which updates are added much more quickly.
I'd been using that repository for quite a while, when I began to get messages from Update Manager that the repository could not be found- some research revealed it had been moved. I couldn't find the new location, so just removed the repository.
With the release of Opera 10 recently, I was impatient to try the new version on Ubuntu, but the Canonical repository still had the old version. I searched again for the location of the Opera repository, and found it- but this time I just couldn't get the key to work.
I found the solution here- the answer was in this comment. Copying and pasting the key had transformed an emdash into a hyphen- to the eye, the same thing, but in a Terminal command, very different.
Thanks to Kyle Baker and greenpossum.