Update: Earlier Query and Opera 9.5 Alpha
By Giania • Sep 4th, 2007 at 9:34 pm • Category: Browsers| Hot: |  |  | | | |
Earlier today I posted the following question:
Incidentally, if anyone can help me figure out how to get my panel display to look like the one shown at the Breeze skin creator’s site, please let me know. I’ve poked around and haven’t found anything like what they’re talking about.
And then I answered my own question by downloading the Kestrel Alpha! The positioning of Panel shortcuts above the mini-browser area is a 9.5 feature, not a hack that I couldn’t figure out. Scratch that! It was merely a feature I had overlooked until now.
To get the Panel display to look like the one below, do the following:
1 – download one of the Breeze skins for Opera
2 – go to Tools > Appearance
3 – in that menu, go to Toolbars and click on the area which contains your panel links.
4 – Select “Placement” as Top
5 – select “Style” as Text Only
6 – Select “Wrapping” as Wrap To Multiple Lines
Hit OK and suddenly you have nearly 25% more width to your panel viewing area!
So the links shown here, like “bookmark”, “mail”, “contacts”, etc are all panel shortcuts, and can all be displayed above the panel display area by a simple display change in the new Opera! It’s a really nice way to conserve screen width, and it doesn’t really cut into the vertical view at all, except on the mini-browser area. Since panel content is generally designed to fit in small spaces anyway, this shift doesn’t hurt at all. If anything, it helps for certain sites which aren’t necessarily meant to be panels, like BugMeNot.
More feedback on Kestrel as I have a chance to play with it. Edit: Hopefully with better information, and not just gross oversights!
Breeze is really a great skin. Although I decided to go for maximum platform integration instead by using Mirage Vista. I’ve also tried to get the toolbar layout as close as possible to IE7. But don’t get me wrong. I still don’t like IE nor do I intend to keep Vista for a long time.
I’ve preferred that panel layout for a long time, except with icons instead of text. And you can do it in almost all versions of Opera. This isn’t a new feature in Opera. If you want to know which features are new, have a look here.
Here’s a screenshot of my custom Opera install:
Setting up Opera to be like that is really complicated. Once I’ve perfected it I think I’ll share the .ini file. Here are some of the things I did. I customized some menu buttons from here and added icons from Opera to them. I used a custom button from the same page to toggle the menu bar off. I enabled my main bar and Shift + dragged all the contents to it. Then I disabled the unused address bar.
If you ever need to know something about Opera, ask me or ask in the Opera IRC channel on OperaNet.