Posts made by nei1

Occasionally, there should be non-complaining fan-mail on the forums.

The other's VPNs charge too much. But for $24 per year, I'm happy to have Opera VPN, even if I only activate it occasionally. Besides, I appreciate the opportunity to pay Opera for a service -- any service, since I've been comfortable using the browser for years.

My Swiss bank account will be auto-charged in a few days when my 2nd year of Opera VPN begins, and I'm delighted.

Even the non-Pro version is a gift.

My VPN Pro is on an antique Chromebook, a new Android tablet, and a Windows laptop. I'm about to replace the Chromebook (with a newfangled Asus CM30), and I hope moving the VPN from the old laptop to the new laptop will be a fairly easy procedure. Thanks.

Opera on Pixel 8.

There's no update link. I suggest that to improve the warm and fuzzy feeling, the field that displays the Opera version should mention "You don't have to do anything; Opera automatically updates. Don't worry about it. Nothing can go wrong."

Assuming that's what's going on.

Some of us are used to a virtual button to check for the update status. Opera displays the current version number, but that doesn't tell me if my Opera is updated. Without including a statement as suggested, the user has no way of knowing if the displayed version number is the latest update, or what.

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On a tangent, Aria is wonderful.

@konstan-m
Agreed. 130 dB dynamic range is wonderful, but it's not appropriate in noisy environments like the car. Or in case of hearing problems, when it might help for the volume level to be more steady.

Audio volume level compression would raise all the soft sounds so they're almost as loud as the loud sounds. Good for Clasical music in the car. Pop music is already compressed out of the factory, to make it easy to listen to anywhere.

McIntosh had equipment in the 70s that included audio level compression, and it cost thousands of dollars. And they broke the audio spectrum into 3 bands, so as the bass, mids, and tebles got louder and softer, they would all be held steady, independently. If the volume of the entire frequency range is compressed as a single band, a bass beat might cause the mids and trebles to pump.

Should be easy to add a little DSP, multi band, digital signal processing in the Equalizer app to do the same thing, easily. Make those octacores work for a living.

Now that you mention it, I have found Opera-For-Android-Tablets' native ad-blocker to be disappointingly lackluster. But, no add-ons allowed, so improvements in the Opera experience are complicated if not impossible.

@Rasan wrote:

ad-blocking DNS

That's a good idea. If I can't make it work, then I'll have to switch my tablet's browser to Firefox, my other favorite alternative browser. They allow add-ons for Android, and have a million of them. If I miss Synch-ing, then I'll have to move a few of my devices to Firefox, not only this tablet.

Still, frustrated by Opera not allowing extensions on tablets. Most recent annoyance: I did a "private" Internet search, where Opera doesn't allow websites to access my stored cookies. For the private-search returns, half the webpage was filled with requests for cookie permissions and options, which is tedious, unnecessary, and annoying. If Opera for Android would accept add-ons, I would have installed a No-Thank-You-For-Cookie-Permission-Requests add-on. Instead, my only option is to be dissatisfied with Opera.

Ok, easiest is to go to Settings, then search within Settings for "DNS." The next question is how much will a subscription cost for an ad-blocking DNS service, since Opera For Androids' doesn't work so good. Minor point -- I'll be surprised if an add-blocking DNS can block cookie-permission requests...

@domovnik wrote:

Add a Compressor/Limiter

Amen. There are environments where 100 dB dynamic range is undesirable. E.g., in the car where you can't hear the soft passages; or at night where loud passages may wake up the baby...

Also, apparently, when your hearing isn't so good anymore -- for instance, post Led Zeppelin -- reduced dynamic range can be helpful, since the Pain Threshold becomes an issue.

On a tangent, a lesson I'd like to pass on to y'all: Just because your ears don't hurt doesn't mean the volume isn't up too loud.

@gxkelvin017 Just because your ears don't hurt doesn't mean the music's not too loud.

@koczek37 135 MB, at the moment. Android 8.1.

@ziya89

When I start Opera, it opens a couple of dozen processes (all named "Opera"). Plus an Opera Update process. Depending on how much maintenance and updating Opera requires, a lot of CPU threads might be worked pretty hard for a few minutes.

Recommend go to the website of the manufacturer that made your CPU. Find out what the maximum allowable Temperature is. Temperature rising might not be a problem if it's not going above the max allowed temperature.

Laptops and desktops are designed to provide sufficient cooling even if all the cores are working a sustained 100%. If your CPU is going over the max allowed temperature, then the heat-sink compound on the CPU might need refreshing. Or if it's a laptop, its air-ducts might need cleaning out.

Hopefully, your laptop has a hatch over the air duct and CPU that you can open, and remove any dust bunnies. It doesn't have to be a perfectly clean job, just a periodic one. Can of compressed air is optional. Worse case is if the laptop has no hatch, but instead needs to be disassembled to access the air duct and CPU. In that case, maybe youtube has a video showing how to [partially] disassemble Your particular laptop so you can access the air duct and CPU. And then you gotta decide if it's something you can do or if the laptop will need professional help.

My laptop is old, they hadn't invented hatches yet, so it requires partial disassembling to clean out the duct, which I've never had done. Instead, I turn off the laptop, fold it up, and puff hard a few times into the exhaust vent. That usually results in a big puff of dust jettisoning out of the air intake. To be concise, I'm blowing into the duct with a puff of air that's going opposite of the air's normal direction, which pushes accumulated dust away from the fan and hopefully out the air intake vent. I puff so hard I can hear the fan spinning for a moment. Sometimes I see a puff of dust come out of the air intake, sometimes I don't, but regardless, the CPU's operating temperature drops from the high 60s to the mid 50s, anyway. At high loads, the highest temperature gets into the low 70s before puffing, but stays in the 60s after puffing. The specified high-temperature is 100 degrees C, but it's an old laptop, so I'm not going to wait for the temperature to get close to maximum before refreshing the air duct. When I start seeing 70s, it's high time to blow out the laptop. Besides stressing the CPU, high temperatures would also stress the fan because it has to run faster.

There's probably still some cat hair in there that won't come out just from blowing. But the improvement is probably 99% of what it would be if the laptop were taken apart.

I blow out the laptop in the shower, or outdoors (upwind), because you don't need to let go a puff of accumulated dust in your living area. Recommend: Before you PUFF into the air exhaust vent, point the air intake vent away from you; lol.

For desktops, I take the computer outside and blow out all the dust I can find, especially around the CPU, using a can of compressed air. It doesn't have to be a perfectly clean job, but only periodic. Be gentle so the jet of air doesn't dislodge delicate components.

It's good that you keep an eye on your CPU temperature. I use CoreTemp to keep the temperature displayed continuously in the Windows' toolbar. You can display the temperature of every core (which can take a lot of real estate, with CPUs having so many cores these days). I find it sufficient to set CoreTemp to display the temperature of only the one core with the highest temperature.

Just installed the equalizer. Thanks mucho. There was an instruction to close and reopen the tab that I want the equalizer to be active on. I did that, but the EQ was still inactive, and I got scared. I had to restart Opera, and then the EQ was active. Full disclosure: Windows 7. Perhaps the instruction needs to be updated. Having an equalizer is so fantastic, restarting the browser was no problem.

When I wave the mouse over an EQ slider, the mouse cursor changes to a big sloppy hand. A smaller, more precise mouse cursor would be more appropriate for the small slider controls. Maybe the extension could provide its own mouse cursor, perhaps a nice pointy arrow.

After playing with the EQ for a few seconds, I wanted to return the settings to Flat, but it wasn't a choice anywhere, and I got scared. It took me a while to find out that it's called Default. So, no problem.

I thought it would be helpful if there were a numerical readout for each slider, in dB's. It wouldn't have to be accurate, just something to make the sliders a little more quantifiable. Then I realized there are tick-marks every 5 dB's. That works 100% for me, don't need numerical readout anymore, so no problem.

In summary, I give the audio equalizer 5-stars-out-of-5.

Now I need better speakers, newer ears, and more World citizens demanding more progressive rock. And remember that just because your ears don't hurt doesn't mean the music's not too loud.

@bloort: That's a general description composed by someone's Marketing department. The add-on's creator should recognize the general description is kinda freaky and therefore provide an additional description that's more specific to this add-on. Perhaps something like "The add-on needs permission to poke into your tabs. However, during that process, no information is sent over the internet to to the add-on's creator or anyone."

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."

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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-