Posts made by parrotslave

On the main Facebook feed, an occasional post will show only the automatic description of the image (the automatic alt text), not the image itself. However, opening the image in a new tab gives the complete image, so it couldn't be a cache problem. (Besides, CCleaner automatically cleans Opera every time I close it, and this issue doesn't just occur with an "old" instance of Opera.) The issue is not occurring in Firefox, or in other Chrome-based browsers such as Vivaldi (at least at the moment.)

Thanks to this forum discussion, I realized that, in my case, it was the VPN that was the main culprit. The VPN was introduced in Opera 40, on 9/20/16, but I didn't use it until either v41 or v42. I used it, just to see how well it would work, and I forgot and left it on all the time. I started getting regular crashes due to memory issues several weeks ago, crashes which became more and more frequent, until I finally got one last week that coincided with a Windows low memory message, which blamed it on Opera. I haven't seen such a message from Windows in ages, and certainly not on this laptop, which has 16gb of RAM. That meant that I had to take the issue seriously: it was more than an inconvenience. I did some looking and was shocked to see that pagefile.sys was >22 gb, leaving less than 2 gb free on my C: drive. Pagefile.sys is normally at 1 gb all the time. I have hiberfil.sys disabled, so I don't have to worry about that. Uninstalling and reinstalling Opera did not solve the problem. There had been no major software changes on my system. Although the VPN was the only thing I was doing differently, I considered that there might have been some other change in Opera to cause the problem, so I asked my friend Google about it. That eventually led me here. Stopping the VPN stopped the problem.

The search bar is still as wonderful as it was when this thread was started. You cannot type anything into the search bar that starts with y, d, z, b, or w, or it will start searching Yahoo, Duckduckgo, Amazon, Bing, or Wikipedia. Fortunately, since Google is my default, I can type anything that starts with "g" without any untoward behavior. I thought my browser had been hijacked the first time it happened, because I was trying to get to a website that started with "z" and it kept searching Amazon. I love Amazon, and go there all the time, but it's not the only website in creation.

An easy fix for that would be to change the shortcut to require a capital letter in order to change search engines. It is probably rare for most people to want to use another search engine, and it wouldn't be that much trouble to use the shift key and a letter in order to switch to a different one on those rare occasions. In fact, that would be more in accordance with the way things have been in the Windows Universe for a long time. Or, they could set up a shortcut key so that, when you discover that it has reverted to the wrong search engine, you could press the shortcut and have Opera do the same search in whatever your default search engine is.

It is much more time-consuming to type something into the search bar, then figure out what the problem is, then have to redo your search. That problem does not occur if the actual search starts with a capitalized letter, but how often do you or I do that, other than with a copy and paste? It is extraordinarily inconvenient to have the search engine change like that.