As I consider myself some kind of a hardcore minimalist I want to share with you the last optimizations I did to Opera. In an older article I already wrote about my basic Opera setup.
What I changed now is removing the menu bar (since I don't use it too much anyway) and adding a toggle, to get it back. I also added usercss based ad blocking, which works really good.
Lets start with the menu bar: Click this link to add the menu toggle button to the buttons available in the appearance dialog. Now click on the sunglasses to open the view bar and right-click the view bar to customize it. In the appearance dialog go to Buttons -> My buttons. Drag & Drop the new Menu button to the far right side of the view bar. Now to make it even easier to enable/disable the menu bar we are going to activate the keyboard shortcut for it. This shortcut has been disabled in Windows for reasons which are obscure to me. Press CTRL+F12 to get into the preferences dialog and go to Advanced -> Shortcuts and edit the current keyboard setup. Use the searchbox to locate the string "menu bar". In the result change the string "Platform Unix, F11 alt" to just "F11 alt". Now you can use ALT+F11 to toggle the menu bar. If you forget this shortcut you still have the visual toggle in the view bar.
For CSS based adblocking I use a slightly modified version of Jordi Kroon's AdBlocker.css. Create a subdirectory to you profile dir called styles and save either his or mine inside this directory. To activate it go to Advanced -> Content -> Style options. Activate My style sheet for Author mode and choose the AdBlocker.css file. This is a rather dirty solution, but okay if you use no other user css. To get more control over your style sheets read this fine article over at nontroppos Opera Wiki. The article also has nice visual step-by-step guides.
Finally it is a good idea to do URL filtering, too. This way ads getting past the CSS will be blocked by the URL filter. Get a good (and regularly updated) filter.ini here and look here on how to use it.
Have a fun and "clean" time surfing the web,
Matthias
Hey, just found this entry through Google. Glad the files work for you.
Just wanted to let you know I have an update for Adblocker.css and filter.ini uploaded.
Big thanks! I have the most minimal theme and my button (etc.) placment is the most minimalistic that can be (for me :P) - just see: http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/227/021720060048521nh.png . With your add block info (great! even on polish webpages) the web has a really new look ;) so clean...
The menu bar hidding button is also grat ;]
CSS based adblocking?! What a nice idea. Thank you. I would've never thought about it!
You're welcome. This entry is quite old, but I still update the linked file and it still works great for me. Now it is even easier to use the AdBlocker.css stylesheet. You just have to copy it to styles/user in your profile directory. Thats it, it will be available right away.