Seeking detailed info about caching options in v. 12.14 and earlier

A Former User

As a Linux user and long-time Opera customer whose browsing habits and preferences are apparently incompatible with what Opera is becoming, I'm looking here for information about the old versions I hope to keep using, from people who've known Opera for a long time, in case I can find what I need to know before it disappears down the memory hole.

I got busy with other things a few years ago and started losing track of details that don't seem to be spelled out in the changelogs or help files, and of new locations to search for what I used to be able to find easily when I was keeping up with it. Nonetheless, Opera had been so familiar and so friendly for so long that I let a big pile of annoyances accumulate when upgrades kept bringing changes that made my usual preference settings inadequate for my own purposes.

But now, on a 64-bit system with ample hardware resources and multiarch support that lets me run several Windows 32-bit executables on WINE simultaneously, in addition to keeping 'opera' and 'opera-next' Debian packages on hand, I have the means to compare several obsolete Opera versions to decide which one to use for what, and may luckily even have the time to focus on that task for a change. Caching options are far from being my only concern, but those particular annoyances are among my first priorities.

I fear I'll be getting too long-winded, but I should explain my information needs in case anyone here can pinpoint what's going to meet them.

One of my favorite things about Opera was that it let me retrieve files from a big disk cache and reserve my dial-up connection for files I hadn't yet downloaded. I like to use Opera to load and stack three-digit (!) numbers of static documents (only from sites that don't force me to enable JavaScript or plugins just to be able to read them; when some do, Opera often eventually monopolizes some part of my hardware--sometimes the audio, sometimes the CPU or RAM--until I sic xkill on it or send it a signal 9 to loosen its grip, but I keep returning to Opera for that purpose anyway because it's still a gazillion times more convenient than any other browser I've seen).

I finally gave in and got wireless Internet access after buying this slightly used laptop less than a year ago. Its dial-up modem hates 3.x Linux kernels; and after futzing around getting phone jacks working all over this big old house only a couple of years earlier, keeping my favorite machine tethered to my only ethernet hub just to get on line was driving me berserk. I'd wanted a good laptop so I could have, for example, ten newly found recipes handy in the kitchen on demand, when coming in from the back yard after loading twenty sources' assorted advice on insect identification and organic garden pest control, and then sit down in the living room after dinner with a choice between re-reading something about cooking or gardening, or taking a short break from meatspace and switching to the Opera window containing the previous evening's huge treasure trove of nifty bash scripts and perl modules. That dark corner room with the computer desk was getting old faster than I was.

As it turns out, however, the speed of this low-budget (with a two-year contract ) wireless access is unreliable, and sometimes even slower than dial-up. So a lot of my old Opera settings are still useful--or would be, if I still knew how to fine-tune them.

At some point, one of those Opera upgrades made "Never" seem to mean "Always" when I told it never to check servers for new versions of documents or images. Now I see under opera:config in v. 12.14 that the 'Documents Expiry' (?) setting under 'Disk Cache' was set at 300 seconds. When I hit the '?' button for that option (resigned to keeping JavaScript enabled for the moment), the speech bubble just states the obvious: "Cache expiry time in seconds for documents"; so I don't know how big that setting's contribution is to Opera's recently acquired habit of reloading pages that I don't want reloaded when I return to them, and I don't know where to find the answer to either that question or the question of how to make Opera do what I used to be able to make it do without loading that opera:config page.

That's just an example of the kind of information I'm trying to find. While an answer to that specific "how" question for this specific Opera version might be very helpful, these circumstances would make it a little like giving a man the proverbial fish instead of teaching him how to fish. What I really hope to find are links to well-organized pages I can read on my own to get both the big picture of the Opera disk cache settings' evolution, and the details of how each setting fits into that picture. Might anyone here know where to point me?