Use Opera to Fix the Web’s Biggest Annoyances

Few month back, Lifehacker had published a great article on using Firefox to fix the web’s biggest annoyances. This article is obviously inspired by Lifehacker’s efforts. With a little bit of effort Opera users can easily achieve most of the stuff mentioned by Lifehacker. So, without wasting more time let’s get started.

Blocking Unnecessarily Obnoxious Ads

Opera comes pre-loaded with a content blocker. In order to trigger it right click on an empty spot on any webpage and select “Block Content” from the context menu. You can manually block any element by simply right clicking on them. However, manually cleaning up the entire web is a tiresome job. Fortunately for you, other people have already done the hard work and there are plenty of filters available for Opera. If you want a comprehensive and regularly updated filter you should check out pgl.yoyo.org and fanboy.co.nz/adblock/. Both of them support Opera’s Url Filter format. You need to simply copy the contents into a text file and save it. After that, mention the path to your URL Filter file over here.

Having a large Url Filter has its own side-effects including increased start up times. If you notice any significant performance degradation try using Tamil’s optimised urlfilter.ini, instead of the aforementioned filters. Another simple option is to use the Adsweep UserJs.

If you are prepared to do a little bit of work you can take a look at Ruzanov’s brilliant Adblock Plus add-on for Opera. It’s the closest analogue to Adblock Plus available for Opera.

Turn Off Auto-Playing Sounds

LifeHacker suggests using a flashblocker to disable those annoying and loud flash advertisements. Luckily for us, there is a FlashBlock add-on available for Opera. It relies purely on UserCSS and UserJS and was developed by Ruzanov. Download the Zip File and extract the FlashBlocker.css file to your user styles folder like profilestylesuser. The FlashBlocker.js should go to your UserJS folder. If you haven’t yet specified a UserJS folder you can do so from here. Keep in mind that the actual location of profile folder depends on whether you installed Opera in single user mode or multi user mode. Click here to find out where your profile folder is located.

If you are on a slower connection and regularly use Turbo then you need not go through all this hassle. Opera automatically blocks all Flash content in Turbo mode.

You can also directly disable Sound in Webpages from Tools –> Preferences –> Advanced –> Content.

Prevent Sites from Resizing Windows and Disabling Menus

You can easily disable JavaScript annoyances such as raising, lowering, resizing and moving of windows (tabs) from Tools–>Preferences–>Advanced–>Content–>JavaScript Options.
As far as disabling those “Disable Right Click” scripts is concerned, you need not bother. Almost all such scripts don’t work in Opera, as Opera is designed to ignore them.

Disable the Blink Tag

The <blink> tag has to be one of the silliest features ever. Its serves no purpose other than annoying the hell out of a reader and giving him a headache. It’s beyond me why Netscape even added this feature in the first place. However, even more bewildering is the fact that other browser manufacturers deemed it to be a good idea and followed suit. Fortunately for us there is a simple bookmarklet called Stop Blink, which can instantly kill all blink tags in a page. There is also a userscript for disabling the blink tag, but I don’t know if it works for Opera.

Click, Click, Clicking Through Multiple Pages

The Opera equivalent of AutoPagerize for Firefox is oAutoPagerize. oAutoPagerize consists of a couple of UserJS scripts. If you prefer to do this using bookmarklets, PageZipper is another pretty good option, which works on a large number of sites. Of course the AntiPagination bookmarklet mentioned by Lifehacker also works in Opera.

Block Animated Favicons

I have never been really troubled by animated favicon. But if you loath them as strongly as Lifehacker, you can try this UserJs/UserCSS, I haven’t tested it personally, but the developer promises that it would work in Opera also.

Stop Pages from Auto-Refreshing

This isn’t a very common phenomenon, but sometimes web pages misuse the meta refresh tag to automatically refresh the page and increase the page-view figure. You can easily block the Meta Refresh tag by disabling Client Refresh or installing the No Meta Refresh UserJS. Thanks to Tamil for this tip.

Greasemonkey and Stylish Can Handle the Rest

Indeed they can. Greasemonkey’s abilities are present in Opera out of the box. In fact many Greasemonkey scripts are fully compatible with Opera. As far as Stylish is concerned, you can employ UserCSS to do most of the task. Check out my earlier article on Stylish for Firefox and Opera for more information.

Did you find these tips useful? Do you have any more Opera tips? Don’t forget to let us know.