FAQ
FAQ
Opera specific terms
Turbo mode
Turbo mode allows rendered images in the current document to be cached into RAM, so that other documents can display them more quickly. If disabled, images will be cached to disk and take longer to appear since Opera has to access the hard drive and decode the images again each time they're required. Disabling Turbo mode may cause Opera to take slightly longer to render documents however RAM consumption will be lower and more data will fit into the RAM cache.
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Document mode
While in Document mode (the default), Opera will usually download and apply the CSS created by the page author, rendering the document as intended. You can however change the Document mode preferences and allow Opera to filter or ignore parts of the authors stylesheet (fonts, colours, etc), or even augment the intended display using your own CSS file.
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User mode
By default, User mode ignores the author's CSS and other styling information (such as colour attributes and font tags), and renders the page as a very plain document. By changing the preferences you can choose whether User mode ignores colours, fonts, link colours, all author CSS, or even table layouts. Disabling tables may be very useful for pages that use large fixed-width tables which cause Opera to side-scroll. After tables have been disabled, the contents of each cell will be rendered in a normal block, similar to a paragraph, so that text may wrap to fit your screen.
Another powerful option is to apply your own stylesheet, either to supplement the authors CSS, or completely replace it. This allows you to override font sizes, colours, remove background images (for smoother scrolling), or dramatically alter page presentation to improve accessibility/readability.
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Offline browse mode
This prevents Opera from automatically connecting to the internet, or to a remote server over an already established connection. If Opera is in this mode and you click a link, load an image, or submit a form, etc, a dialogue showing the URL will appear and ask permission to connect. Clicking Yes disables Offline mode for all windows/documents.
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RAM cache
This is a part of your computers internal RAM which is used to store temporary Internet files before they're moved to the Disk cache on your hard drive. By caching to RAM, the data is stored and retrieved notably faster, allowing other pages that share cached files (images, applets, etc) to render faster.
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Disk cache
Opera's Disk cache is a part of your hard drive which contains saved temporary Internet files. Caching is useful because it allows shared files such as images, stylesheets and Javascripts to be downloaded once, and then simply reused when other documents on the same site require them. Because Disk cache files are saved to a drive on your computer they can be kept after you close Opera and used again during subsequent browsing sessions. Alternatively, you can choose for Opera to delete all cache files on exit.
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Progress bar
This information/statistics bar appears at the bottom of the screen and tells you the current URL, which Image & CSS modes are currently in use, whether a secure connection is being used, and in Opera 5 and above, the current zoom level.
While a document is loading, the bar will change to display progress and status information including download speeds/times, the number of images in the page, the size of the document, etc. When loading has stopped, these figures will dissapear and be replaced with the Address bar/history list.
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Global history
In addition to the short history list available from the Address bar, Opera also records all URLs entered over the last few days. This Global-history list can be viewed at any time and is not disclosed to Opera Software or any third party.
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Name completion
Name completion allows the user to enter partial or incomplete URLs into the Address bar and have Opera complete them automatically. This feature is based upon a list of strings defined by the user (such as www and com, etc), so by entering only symbian, Opera could automatically change the address to http://www.symbian.com/
and load that page.
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Skins
Skins are a way of allowing the user to customise the visual appearance of an application's user interface. On the desktop versions of Opera, skins may include custom buttons, colours, toolbars, background patterns/images behind the windows & toolbars, and so on, however this feature is not available in the Symbian release of the Opera Web browser.
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Zooming
Zooming allows Opera to redraw the page at a specified scale anywhere between 10–1000% (in 10% increments). Text, graphics, and any embedded objects are resized, so the feature can be very useful when viewing pages that poorly adapt to smaller screens, or to try and fit more information onto a PDA screen.
Zooming does consume extra memory and slows Opera down, but on a screen which is 640 pixels wide, zooming to 80% will roughly emulate an 800px display. Zooming to 60% will cause pages to render in similar proportion to a 1024×768 display, however text often becomes illegible at low zoom levels.
