My Firefox love was short and intense, I’ve abandoned it because of the large number of vulnerabilities. Also, its startup is very slow.
So now, time for Opera! I like it already but I can’t figure out any way to customize the interface, the way I wish. I want to maximize the work space, by e.g. placing the buttons and address bar at the same bar as the menus or the tabs.
Any ideas? For other tips and tricks, this thread may be useful to post in.
Thanks,
/LA
First, let me welcome you to one of the best browsers (:HUG) (:CLP)
Second, let’s start with a picture of what you can do to really maximize the available screen ;D
Third, right-clicking is one of the key tricks in the Opera GUI because you’re guaranteed to always open up more options than you realize. If you right-click on the GUI you’ll see Customize…(by default anyway, because even that menu can be customized :o). Once in there go to the Toolbars tab at the top and from here you can hide/show what bars (each one can be customized to your liking). I’ll explain what I did to get the address bar to be in the same bar as my toolbar. I have Main bar, Status bar (optional if you prefer popup tooltips instead then you don’t need it), and Tab bar enabled. I almost forgot - each time you select one of the bars in the Appearance screen, you can place them at the top, bottom, left, right, etc.
This is just the beginning. There are tons of other options I’ll explain as we go on.
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How I got the address bar to be in the same toolbar:
If you enable (check) the Address bar in the Appearance screen, it’ll open another bar below that with the address bar item itself, which you can drag and drop into the toolbar. All this takes practice and getting used, of course. Once you customized it to your liking, you can disable (uncheck) Address bar.
I have the following links bookmarked on Opera, which is a collection of references to how I got Opera’s layout the way I want:
http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#security → Create your own button (which can be clicked on to be created, and then it’ll appear in the Buttons tab in the Appearance screen (which once again, can be accessed if you right-click on the GUI and then Customize…).
The Opera Blog - News | Opera → Some Opera FAQ’s
Browser Problems? We can help you! | Help & FAQ | Opera → What the settings mean
http://homepage.hispeed.ch/ttt-opera/button/h-bu-browser-adv.html → More button creations & explanations
One more neat thing that you’ll find familiar as you did with Firefox is Opera has its own configuration, which can be accessed by typing in the address bar opera:config. This opens almost all the options that you won’t find by right-clicking on the GUI and such.
So far this is just on the looks. There are many other things you can customize for convenience, such as the right-click menu depending on what you click on. By default, there are way too many sub-menus that I never used and I get to create neat shortcuts (some were very difficult to find on the net).
If setting all this up is a pain (depending how far you want to go, it can be), I can upload my keyboard, context menu, GUI, etc. setting files if you want.
A thousand thanks for your replies! Now I’ll go through them (been away for the last twenty minutes).
(:AGL)
LA
Alright, I’m getting closer 
Now I mainly miss that bookmarks button you have, the big panel that comes in from the left side is alright but I’d prefer a more simple bookmarks menu like the one in the menu bar - which I removed with config:opera
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(:AGY) I accidentally closed the post I was about to make for you. It had quite a bit of info on it too (:AGY)
Anyway, to get the Bookmarks button, you have to create it. It’s real easy (if you know where to look):
http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#security → If you do a Ctrl + F (find) on “Bookmarks list dropdown button without image”, that’s the one I used. Just click on the button on that site and it’ll create it for you. Then access Appearances option screen, go to the Buttons tab at the top, go to My Buttons at the bottom. Click, drag, and drop that button icon to whereever on the Opera GUI.
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Sorry about that. :-\
Actually, I did exactly what you suggest. But the button you have opens the panel, just like the thin border on the left side. The “house” on the other hand - the Home button - obviously works as the bookmarks menu I desire. Not completely logical that it’s called Home. Furthermore, the links are opened in a new tab, but I can live with that.
Thanks again, I have quite a lot to look forward to here! Miss the Adblock Plus addon to Firefox though. 
/LA
About what? Me making a mistake on my own? lol
I’m a little confused. Maybe you clicked on the wrong button. I think it’s easier that I upload my setting files. You can replace them with yours, and from thereon you can customize it if you want.
Hold your horses - the post that I was making was all about ad blocking… And now for some magically reason it returned! (:KWL) In Opera (at least up to v9.23), there are 2 ad-blocking modes. I call the popular on the fake one, in which it has its own block mode and you can simply click on objects to cross them out in red. I don’t use this one other than to check out certain ads and flash content’s url so that I can block them using the real site blocker. Anyway, here’s my original post:
You can use the built-in Block mode and then click individual objects to block such as the url to www .ads.com/ads.gif (this is just an example, I’m not intentialling pointing out any site). But what if there are a hundred of other sites that also contained ads.gif? That would be inconvenient. Luckily Opera has real ad-blocker built-in called Blocked content, which acts like your HOSTS file, but must better because it actually prevents the site/url including any site from popping up (not that I’ve seen any in a verrry long time :)). Furthermore, you can take advantage using wildcards (*) that can’t be done with a HOSTS file. E.g. if you put something like xxx in your Blocked content list, any url containing “xxx” can’t be loaded at all. You’ll only notice the split-second hour-glass to recognize this. Normally, to access Blocked content, you have to navigate through all these inconvenient advanced options. I found that quite annoying, so I created by own right-click context menu (when clicking on a webpage document) as a shortcut to (and this was the hardest one to find). If you can access Advaned Options/Preferences (an item I use the most often, so I added to my context menu also) to open Blocked content.
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The context menu is actually the hardest I found to customize and I’ve spent considerable time on this one the most to get rid of the useless (to me) menus.
standard_toolbar (1).ini → This is my Customized toolbar file located at C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\toolbar
standard_menu (1).ini → This my Customized right-click context menu located at C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\menu
standard_keyboard (1).ini → This my Customized keyboard hotkeys file located at C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\keyboard
If you do use (any of) them it’s important that Opera be closed before you overwrite your existing files.
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Again, thanks a lot.
Yes.
I clicked the wrong button, but I tried it again before you uploaded the files. So now the GUI setup is really good, the bookmarks are easy to access. I’ve also added a shortcut to the menus. The context menu - I’m not sure if I need any at all. Yours is better than the default one, though (I even changed advaned to advanced, you misspelled ;)).
As for content blocking, I think I understand the concept. But that vast list of yours, did you build it up manually by clicking on a website for every rule? Seems to be a lot of work, or have I misunderstood?
/LA
You’re just about ready to graduate from my class (:NRD). It can be tedious to manually add blocked site entries, but there are lots of sites that have pre-defined lists. Good news is I haven’t added new entries to block in a long time because I don’t need to! I can provide my own list for you if you want. It certainly saved my a$$ lots of time more than most anti-bad security software has and also speeds up browsing. The urlfilter.ini file is located at C:\Program Files\Opera\profile.
Note: This one blocks a lot of content on this forum because I wanted it to condense things. (V)
Then there’s other miscellaneous tweaks to improve performance, but that’ll take me ages to explain some stuff in opera:config because I forgot what I did to a lot of it as well as in Advanced Options. If you visit one of the Opera pages, they explain all that.
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Can’t thank you enough for this, almost embarrassing to download your file. (:SHY)
Very glad to be an Opera user now, slightly more unique than the FF users - and way more unique than the IE users. Let’s keep on spreading this on the forum. 
/LA
EDIT:
Found it in Documents and Settings***\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile
Can’t be worse than that event.
That’s odd. The default installation of Opera has always been C:\Program Files\Opera\profile for me. Are you running the new 9.50 alpha by any chance?
PS: Don’t forget about Gibran’s user javascript thread in the you-know-what board
LOL! Not worse ;D
No, version 9.23. If I was bold enough for an alpha I’d tell you, Master Soya!
I think I remember: In Opera’s installation, there’s a choice between using one profile or separate profiles for Java files. Or maybe that was CCleaner? I do know there’s more than type of installer. The classic one is recommended, ah forget it. It’s not important at this stage anymore.
Since Soya is answering EVERYTHING ;D , LA what FF security holes? ???
PS you will enjoy Opera, it’s a great browser.
I found an article (sorry, can’t find the address, and it was not in English), stating that IE7 has ~50 vulnerabilities (during the last year perhaps? not sure what time scale they meant), and FF 2 had the same number plus one. Also, I remember from many weeks ago, that Opera is claimed to be the most secure browser. This was the main reason why I changed.
As for the FF addons, I no longer used NoScript because it was too much work to allow every trusted site. The same goes for cookies. So summarizing, I didn’t need any addons (well, except for adblock). Thus Opera was interesting to try out, not the least because Soya uses it. I think he’s skilled and experienced in security, and probably general system/program tweaking as well.
A nice bonus is that Opera launches faster.
I still miss the FF adblock very much. If FF 3 turns out to be lighter (and with less security holes, even though I think it doesn’t matter with NoScript and normal internet habits), I may switch back…
I guess you use Opera, Pedro?
/LA
I’m not surprised that Firefox is has more vulnerabilities - its popularity or population of usage is higher than Opera’s. It’s a common fact that hackers are more interested in popular programs so that they can exploit and target more computers. Another reason is probably because Firefox is open-sourced, meaning hackers have access to the program’s code…
I knew this would start another browser debate/topic ever since LA decided to put in that first paragraph 
True, that’s how it works, Microsoft is the best example… on the other hand, IE should have more vulnerabilities because it is still much more common than FF.
Also true, but on the other hand, isn’t there a good point with open source - it is open for all (not only hackers) to discover vulnerabilities?
Do you mean this one:
then it’s surprizing that it took so many posts before anyone (Pedro) reacted!
/LA