YuMDaP.net's blog

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.

I just went to shockwave.com respectively atomfilms.com because I really like some stuff there. I wanted to try it with Opera, since the old Opera didn't work and the new Opera can completely cloak it's real identity.

The Problem the site has is that nothing happens when you hit the Play game or Play movie buttons. The pop-up with the game/movie just doesn't show up. Is this a javascript problem with Opera? Let's see:

The first thing I tried was just identifying as Mozilla and allowing all pop-ups (F12). When there was no change at all, I thought they might have a browser-detection scanning for the word Opera ("Opera" is still appended to the browser-id when identifying as Mozilla). Now Opera 8 allows 100% cloaking against specified sites, so now I opened the ua.ini (located in you profile directory) and appended the following two lines:

shockwave.com=4
atomfilms.com=4

Setting it =4 means identify as Mozilla (regardless of the F12 setting) and cloak (meaning the string "Opera" won't be appended anymore). When I went back to shockwave the games still didn't open. I thought this is really an Opera problem, until I found out there is still a way to detect Opera. Opera is the only browser adding itself as a property to the javascript window-object (window.opera). This is of course detectable. Opera's new user-javascript allows us, to remove this object. Get the fixoperacloak.js from here (mirror here) and put it into a subdirectory of you profile directory (I called it userjs). Now open the preferences (ALT+P) and go to Advanced -> Content -> Javascript options. The path were you saved the file to has to appear in My Javascript files. Confirm with okay.

Now when you go back to shockwave.com Opera is 100%ly undetectable... and voila... everything works. This means Opera is completely capable of handling the site. For some reasons the people at shockwave just don't want Opera users using their site. Usually I would boykott, but some flicks at atomfilms.com are just too funny or visually impressive.

Peace out
Matthias

FINALLY! Opera 8 is out and waiting to be downloaded. Unfortunately, nowadays alot of people have prejudices against commercial software like Opera and consider Firefox to be the Holy Grail. I really do like Firefox. If you need a simple and plain webbrowser and don't have much expectations in usability this is your browser of choice. I actually recommend it to non-experienced computer users (i.e. my parents). But there are people who expect more. People who appreciate speed, simplicity and all those nice features improving the web experience without bloating the software. I know you want this but I also know that Opera - in it's default configuration - might be a little detering. This article is supposed to help you get started with Opera and learn to see what surfing the web is supposed to be like.

If you live in Germany or have access to German magazines you should listen. Go and get the current issue (8/2005) of the c't magazine. The CD that comes with it gives you a code which allows you to get a free license key for Opera 7.54u2 (the current version). You get 3 keys for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You are allowed to use them on as many copies as you like inside your own household.

Opera 8 is announced to be out very soon. So it's very nice that the code from the CD will allow you to buy Opera 8 for EUR 8,- instead of EUR 34,-. So alltogether you will get a nice and legal Opera 8 for EUR 11,- (the 3,- for the c't included). A very good price for a great piece of software.

As you might already assume I'm a big Opera fan. I'm using it since version 6 and can't imagine an internet life without it :-). It's the smallest (just 3.4MB), fastest (see these benchmarks) and most feature-rich browser on earth. It was the first browser to introduce real tabbed browsing (and still the only one with a useable implementation) and the first to introduce mouse gestures. I haven't seen the latter in any other browser to work as good as in Opera. I could sum up all of Opera's wonderful features now (mail, rss, irc, ...) but someone else did that already: Why Opera

Just a last note of claryfication. I like Firefox, too. This is what I install on other people's computers. But I want more for myself. For me the difference between FF and Opera is like the difference between a Java 1.3 Swing GUI and a native Windows GUI. It just feels awkward.

Cheers
Matthias