Recently I read an article on The Register about Google chrome adding a Bluetooth API which could effectively allow websites to query your Bluetooth devices through the browser. Now, I'm not worried about Opera, even if it is build upon Chromium, because Opera has stopped plenty of other nastiness (personal opinion!) in the past already.

However, it did make me curious about possible options to reach certain specific settings. For example, I trust we all know about the opera://flags shortcut? Warning: Be very careful with that and do not "just" change stuff in there! (pay attention to the warnings it shows).

So I started experimenting, and I came across some interesting shortcuts which I'd like to share (and why I think they're interesting). I discovered tons, but I'll only be sharing those which are relatively harmless or those which I think could be important for you to know.

opera://dns

I really like this one, it shows you the DNS queries which Opera has performed. For example, I'm currently active here and when I refresh this page I can clearly see that Gravatar is being used, Cloudfront, the Opera website (obviously) and so on. The reason I like this is because this shortcut can also give you a nice impression of inner workings (for example when a plugin is accessing or using an web resource).

opera://inspect

You probably need to be careful with this one, but I was happy to learn that Opera/Chromium even seems capable of automatically detecting USB devices. There are probably some legit uses for this, but I prefer turning the whole thing off. I also suspect that if the bluetooth API does find its way into Opera then this is probably to place to expect it.

opera://gpu

It doesn't do anything but it gives you a good overview of the features which your Graphic card provides and which ones Opera uses.

opera://media-internals

The last on the list. It gives you an overview of all the media players (players, audio and video capture) which Opera detected. Doesn't add too much but I still think it's interesting to know about its existence.