Archived copy of A Swedish wolf in Norway

Miscellaneous technobabble from a Swede in Norway.

Tweaking preferences in Opera 9

Published: 2005-10-20 20:10:38

[http://my.opera.com/nafmo/homes/blog/operaconfig-400.png] Another addition in the Opera 9 technical preview is the addition of opera:config, a tweaker editor for the Opera preferences (opera6.ini). Yes, this was inspired by the about:config (that address also works, as an alias for opera:config) in Firefox, but is implemented wholly using HTML, JavaScript, Web Forms 2.0 and a special DOM interface.

There's nothing magic, just do a ViewSource and you'll see exactly how it is implemented. Well, except for the part that actually generates the document, that is. The HTML code is generated from the internal list of settings that is embedded in the binary, the same list that is used to actually read the preferences from disk when starting Opera.

And don't worry, there's no security risk in using a JavaScript to read and write preferences, thes DOM interfaces used (opera.getPreference(), opera.getPreferenceDefault() and opera.setPreference()), are only available from the opera:config document, and nowhere else.

This is not a replacement for the preference dialogue you get when selecting ToolsPreferences, see this is a simple editor for the ini file. For help on what the individual preferences do, please see the on-line opera6.ini documentation.

Enjoy!

Tags: browsers opera

Comments

Thanks Peter!

Looks fine, i would like to have a short explanation (e.g. as a tooltip) what every setting means. Most of it looks familiar, but something is new or foreign to me.

Great work so far. Thx

kaonashi: The documentation is available on-line (the plan is to link to it from the help documents). We have not included the descriptions in the binary since it would increase the footprint quite a lot. Plus, if you want a readable preference dialogue, you should use the one under Tools → Preferences. opera:config is not a replacement for that, it is just an INI file editor.

I have a wish regarding opera:config, allowing URL parameters to perform a search etc.:

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=108463

Great job by the way! :)

peter@softwolves.pp.se

This was originally posted on My Opera at http://my.opera.com/nafmo/blog/show.dml/47693
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