Domain of the Diplo

Opera Tools
Update June 2006

UPDATE: Since the advent of Opera 9 my tools are no longer necessary as Opera now, at last, has these features built in. Whilst you are still welcome to download the tools I would recommend that you download Opera 9 instead (it's a free download).

Opera Browser Tools

Opera Logo The Opera web browser is extremely flexible and powerful. However, some of Opera's more advanced features don't have any simple user interface to implement them. This is why I developed the following tiny Windows applications that provide a simple GUI interface to implement two useful features outlined below:

Opera Ad Blocker

My Opera Ad Blocker provides a front-end to Opera's inbuilt URI filtering. For a long time Opera has had a little-known facility to block URI's that are defined in a file called filter.ini. An example of this file is shown below:

; filter.ini
; This file is part of the Opera browser.
[prefs]
prioritize excludelist=1
[include]
*
[exclude]
http://adserver.*
http://doubleclick.net/*
http://imgserv.ad*
http://*sexcookie*

What it alows you to do is right-click an image in Opera and automatically add it to the filter file via a simple interface (as shown below):

Opera AdBlock Download

Yes, it's now really that simple! Don't take two browsers into the shower, just click and block...

Opera User Agent Editor

One of the useful things Opera has had is the ability to change it's user agent string (the text string that browsers send to identify themselves to websites). For instance, your browser is currently sending the following user agent string:

CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)

However, before Opera 8, you could not do this on a per-domain basis. Now, though, Opera utilises a new file called UA.ini which is a simple list telling Opera which browser to 'spoof' for any given domain. This is useful for sites that discriminate against Opera due to poor browser sniffing. Now you can get notoriously difficult sites such as msdn.microsoft.com to work properly with Opera.

However, manually adding enteries to your ua.ini file is a pain, which is were my Opera User Agent Editor comes in handy - simply right click a page and up pops the following tool to make adding enteries simple:

Opera UA Editor Download

Now you can decided on a per-domain basis how Opera identifies itself. Nifty, eh?

Technical Info

Both applications are contained in the 35Kb download.

They were written in visual C# utilising the Microsoft .NET framework
(which you will need to download and install prior to running them).

Full instructions on how to install and use these tools are included within a readme file contained in the zip file.

Thank you to nontroppo's Opera Wiki and the MyOpera Forums for invaluable technical information. 

These tools have been downloaded 52214 times. Cool.
Web Developer Menu - New!

Wev Developer Menu Screenshot I've also added my Web Developer Menu to my site, which you can download and install automatically to Opera by clicking the link below. The menu adds lots of new context-sensitive options to Opera for validating your pages, tweaking forms and finding out info about the domain you are viewing. In fact, all the things that budding web developers would find useful! See the example screenshot for an idea of what it can add to your Opera.

[ Download Opera Web Developer Menu ]

NB. I can't take credit for all the options in the menu since many were 'borrowed' from ideas I read on the MyOpera Customisation Forum. Thank you to everyone there for your contributions. If you require crediting please contact me.

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