I’ve been using Opera as my main web browser for many years, since the 5.x version. A lot of the features we take for granted today were either popularized or invented in Opera. And despite great progress in the field of browsers , I still find that Opera still is the one that meets the most of my needs.
Despite all that, there are a couple of things I find annoying with the last few releases. After installing version 10.5 and today, 10.51, I have found that the status bar on the bottom of the page is losing my settings. I like to have the status field on the bottom in the status bar. The status field shows the user what web site a link points to when you hover over the link. I never click on an unknown link without looking at the status field to see where it is taking me. So, it was very annoying when Opera 10.5 decided I didn’t need that on the status bar. I manually added it back. To do so, follow these steps.
- Right click the status bar.
- From the Customize menu, select Appearance…
- Go to the Buttons tab, and on the Category list, select Status
- Now find “Status Field” and drag it to your status bar.
- Click OK when done to dismiss the Appearance dialog.
The other annoyance is the Opera red “O” icon appearing in the system tray. I don’t need this icon as I don’t use Opera for email. To get rid of this, find the shortcut you use to launch Opera, right click it and select Properties. To the Target, after the endquote as a space following by: -notrayicon
Be sure to include the dash. Click OK, and then exit and relaunch Opera. It should load without the tray icon.
The only problem is, every time you update to a new version, you may have to repeat both of these sets of instructions to fix it again.
While Opera has a low market share (and has fallen behind Google‘s Chrome in fact), it still has a loyal following. One of the advantages of Opera is the fact that I don’t think anyone has ever crafted an exploit that is specific to flaws in Opera. Hackers would rather target browsers with more market share.
