I've been using Opera for about 2 hours.

After installing a few extensions, the next order of business was to see what's going on with the Speed Dial.

Monkeyfish8 wrote:

Go the website using the speed-dial link, click the heart and choose a new picture.

Thank you for sharing the procedure, Monkeyfish8. It wasn't intuitive at all!

Specifically, when you open the speed dial link and click on the heart, you get a half dozen or so pictures you can choose from. After playing with two weather websites, I found one acceptable (usable) picture for each website from the choices I was given. I hope my luck holds out with additional websites, because the choice of pictures that are offered is pretty limited.

With this speed dial, half the time I find myself typing into the Google search field instead of the URL bar. You think the Google field is big enough? Are you sure the placement smack-dab, big-in-the-middle really translates into profits for Google? I mean, it's not like I need their overgrown search field there or else I'll forget they exist.

"If you don't want to use it, you don't have to."

But, if you don't want to use it, it's pretty big, and smack-dab in the middle, which isn't too ergonomic or pleasant for something that you don't even want.

I went into "Manage Search Engines," I added an "Other Search Engine," and I'm still waiting to see where my added choice is going to show up in the GUI. (Sure would have been nice if it had changed that Google field.)

Ugh; this typing field doesn't have a vertical scroll bar, and my mouse-wheel doesn't scroll to the top of what I've written. (Using the arrow-key workaround.) Maybe I'm typing too much.

Thanks for tolerating,
-n-

@jbrandon

Moto G5 Plus, Android.

I tried turning on News.

The first time I browsed it, within 5 minutes, I turned it off. There was too much "cheap clickbate."

I think it reflected poorly on Opera.

I'm reading other comments about News' poor configurability, such as not being able to affect sources. I would like, therefore, to thank you for allowing it to be turned off, at least.

I'm using Opera on a Moto G5+ Android.

We're forced to scroll if we want to expose the toolbar with the Refresh icon.

Instead, I'd like to do a long-touch on the display and pop-up a little context-menu, which would include a refresh icon.

Then, the window would refresh right where I was reading.

I have 30 tabs open, Android phone. 30 open tabs are reminiscent of stuff piled up all over my room.

After I bookmark a webpage, I don't see any indication that the webpage has been bookmarked.

My workaround is to go into the bookmarks to see if I already bookmarked the webpage or not, but the process is awkward. E.g., if I already bookmarked, am I checking the correct location where I put the bookmark?

Best luck.

You wrote:

Thanks for using Opera! If you want more information, or if you want to reach us, head over to our blog or user forum.

For the person that doesn't frequent Support, how are we to know whether we should go to Blog or Forum? There's no guidance.

Also, the last item in the upgrade-notice introduced a new text-size function, but in this case, directions for finding this new setting was not provided. I'm still looking, and optimistic, but still looking.

@jbrandon

Moto G5 Plus, Android.

I tried turning on News.

The first time I browsed it, within 5 minutes, I turned it off. There was too much "cheap clickbate."

I think it reflected poorly on Opera.

I'm reading other comments about News' poor configurability, such as not being able to affect sources. I would like, therefore, to thank you for allowing it to be turned off, at least.

Hello leocg and rif.

leocg wrote:

Windows is set to 100% dpi?

That's a setting I forgot to check. When I found it set to 125%, I thought we had something. So I set it to 100% and restarted the computer, but it didn't change the googlemap problem. I really thought it would work, although the antique laptop has been set to 125% dpi for ever, and the problem only started a couple of weeks ago.

rif wrote:

Try other browsers

I can't believe I missed that one, also. Short story shorter, I opened Firefox, and googlemaps worked. The mouse points and clicks in the same spot using Firefox. So I have a work-around. So the Firefox-Googlemap combination will have to crash the antique laptop occasionally.

Since I'm the only person on Earth having trouble with WinXP / Opera / Googlemaps, I guess I won't raise a stink. Choose your battles wisely.

And since everyone needs a hobby, I'm going to spend an hour seeing if I can compensate for decreasing the dpi to 100% with the other Appearance settings.

Thanks, Bosses.

WinXP, Opera 36. Yeh, that's another problem.

A week or two ago, Opera started having problems with googlemaps. The mouse-cursor appears on the map in one place, but it waves-over and clicks in a different place. i.e., a couple of inches away, at about 309 degrees.

It's hard to wave-over or click anything on the map when the mouse is actually active at a point that's different than where the mouse cursor appears. So I've lost most of the functionality of googlemaps.

I've tried changing Opera zooms to Normal and 100% [in Settings]. I've tried changing my mouse from Big to Normal-Standard [in Windows]. Playing with those settings didn't change anything. There remains the same couple of inches dispacement, in the same direction, between where the mouse-cursor appears and where it actually waves-over and clicks upon.

I had a similar problem with Firefox a few years ago. But normalizing the Firefox Page and/or Text zooms fixed the problem. Sorry the same trick didn't work with Opera.

I would switch back to Firefox to use googlemaps, but that's a combination that's too hard on this computer -- googlemaps causes crashes if I try to go there with Firefox. In fact, the googlemaps-Firefox-crashing is exactly why I downloaded Opera.

Any suggestions what to try next for Opera-googlemaps? Thanks.

By the way, I hope Leocg is right, and you'll get back your bookmarks by reinstalling Opera 39.

Too late after the horses have all escaped (I mean after all your bookmarks have escaped), but there's an Opera add-on (I mean extension) named "Bookmarks Import & Export." It allows you to save a file with the list of all your bookmarks.

Save your bookmarks-file somewhere on your computer. Save the file on a thumbdrive and wear it around your neck. Email the file to yourself so it's saved in the cloud.

The file is an .html. It's too easy. Use the Export button to save the bookmarks; Use the Import button to restore the bookmarks, if they get lost due to too much imbibing.

Recommend switching from damaging alcohol to healing Cannabis. Just Legalize It. If the NHTSA and AMA have no problem with it, then any other concerns are just a result of 100 years of lying propaganda from the military-industrial complex.

Signed,
Dry, Withering Cannabinoid Receptors in Lawng Island

I guess that's why I can't get Flash content for the past couple of days.

When you've taken on serving millions of people, you've taken on a big responsibility. When you stop providing that service, you're leaving millions of people in the lurch, which is irresponsible.

When you unilaterally decide to stop providing a service to millions of people, you don't have the right to pronounce that "they'll just have to upgrade" or "they can program their own browser."

No one is richer than Google. Regardless, avast! is still updating the antivirus on my XP computer. Firefox is still updating and displaying Flash content. But continuing support for XP was a financial problem for Google?

Mostly, I find fault with Google. I find less fault with Opera, but it would appear that all the complaints when Opera adopted the Chrome engine are shown to have been more valid than they were given credit for.

Amigos.

Still XP. Thanks for tolerating.

I cleaned up my mess.

Old business:

Last week, I started making trouble by changing the account name in Control Panel > User Names. It was annoying to see the account's top folder in Documents and Settings didn't change.

I had to go into Safe Mode to force Windows to allow me to change the top folder name. (I shouldn't have done that.)

When I was done forcing my will, the top folder for the account with all the old data had a new name.

But somehow, Windows created an additional top-folder in Documents and Settings with the old, original account name. It was empty, except for some new-account default files, mostly for Windows Media Player and Bill Gates advertisements.

I thought that Opera was crazy, getting its user data from the empty account, just because it had the original account name. It was keeping me from accessing my million bookmarks.

New Business:

But then I did a right-click on the Windows button, selected Explore, and found that Windows was also going into the empty account folders by default. Instead of looking at the desired folders with all the good, old data, Windows was looking at the empty folders, apparently because their top-folder had the old account name. Windows was refusing to change its default of going to that old account name, even if it had to create a new account-folder with that name. Sorry about the red herring I gave leocg, when I said Windows was back to normal.

And I guess that's why Opera was looking at the empty folders, too.

This is how I cleaned it up. I went back into Safe Mode. I deleted the mostly-empty account. And the 30 GB top-folder with all my data that I had earlier renamed, I renamed it back to the old name -- the one that Windows keeps looking for by default. That pretty much put everything back the way it was originally.

That worked. Windows and Opera are looking at the correct folders for the good, old data. I have my bookmarks, etc., back. I also have my old desktop back.

I need an aspirin and a defrag.

Meanwhile, in Control Panel > User Accounts, the account name is still "changed." So, that's all that changing the account name there is good for -- what's displayed in that User Accounts window, and maybe for logging in and out, which I never do. But it doesn't change the name of the top folder for the account in Windows Explorer > Documents and Settings.

Regarding g00g00's link for re-directing where Opera looks for "user-data," it didn't work for me. They give examples of paths for Chrome and Chromium, but apparently Opera uses different folder names so I wasn't able to apply their instructions, either directly or by inference comparing to the folders I was seeing in This Old Computer. For instance, the path includes a sub-folder named "User Data" which I couldn't find in any Opera folder or subfolder. But the author of the article uses shorthand for folder names, which eliminates preciseness, so maybe the folder "User Data" is actually named something else. If so, don't ask me what. I couldn't find anything close.

I started googling for "Opera User Data" for paths special for Opera, but that's when it dawned on me how to undo my mess.

If the instructions had worked, I might not have struggled to put the computer back the way it was originally. I think this is best.

I don't use the Account functions very often. If I feel the need to change something next time, I'll google for instructions instead of making up my own.

Your suggestions got me working in the right direction, so thank you both.

-neil-