New Speed Dial functionality in the Opera browser for bookmarks
16 CommentsPublished February 28th, 2007 7:42 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
The Opera desktop team today introduced a new way to quickly access your bookmarked sites, using a new functionality called “Speed Dial”.
Similar to Speed Dial on Opera Mini, where you can quickly access your top 9 bookmarked sites by simply pressing “*” with the bookmark number on the phone keypad (i.e. *1), the desktop browser allows you to use CTRL+1 to CTRL+9 for the top 9 sites. In addition, these bookmarked sites will also be shown in a thumbnail preview on blank tabs. Clicking on the thumbnail preview brings you to the site. In addition, a search field will also show above the Speed Dial pad.
I suggest you read more details on this new functionality on the desktop team blog.
Although showing Speed Dial thumbnails on blank tabs is very different than what most users are probably used to now, it does offer quick access to the most often used tasks.
Browsing websites could fall into three categories.
- You visit your usual 5-6 sites (i.e. you check your email, read the news, some social networks, etc.).
- You don’t know the URL of the site, so you search for it on Yahoo, Google, etc.
- You know the URL of the site, however it’s not one of the top 5-6 sites you usually visit.
Speed Dial takes care of the first two categories. If you’re most likely to visit one of your top 5-6 sites or search for something online, then why not bring it one click closer by showing them on new empty tabs.
Speed Dial can be easily turned off.
This functionality is perhaps geared mostly toward the non-power user crowd; I wonder how popular this will be with the tech savvy. I’ve been playing around with Speed Dial for the past few weeks, though I haven’t used it long enough to form an opinion on it.
A test version of the browser including this new functionality was released today. Go get it from the desktop team blog.
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using
After using it for a couple of hours I already like it. I turned off the “window with no tabs” option and I just load the Speed Dial when I have no tabs open. Its rerally easy to use and I might just remove my personal bar now, give me more screen room
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Being a completely new feature, it took me a few minutes to get the hang of it. But after using it a few times I think I will sign off on it. Thumbs up, Desktop Team!
There seems to be a battle brewing about the decision to drop the start bar, though.
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=179565
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I would have to agree that this is more geared to non-power users. I already have pretty much all of the sites I look at opened up in Opera. I do have another copy of Opera installed where I keep only one or two sites opened at a time, so this would make things easier there.
About the search field, though, aren’t three different ways to search the web a bit much at one time? With speed dial, you’d have the address bar, the search field up in the toolbar, and then the one in Speed Dial. Just seems like overkill to me.
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Opera could make things easy for category 3a: You know the url, it’s in the bookmarks, but not in the top 5-6.
Often, it’s faster for me to just type the url than browsing my bookmarks. But I whished that Opera would offer auto-completition for bookmarked urls, not just for recently visited ones. So you could bookmark sites, and still access them quickly with the address bar.
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@Frederik: Opera added autocompletion from bookmarks in Opera 9. But it is broken for now, as Opera only uses the top-level bookmarks. This will be fixed in Kestrel.
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Useless for me (turbo-nicknames is faster than seep dial) but I guess new users could use it.
Regarding category 3a, well, the solution is easy enough: address completion (bookmarks and history) a la command-line completion (zsh, bash, ksh, etc); that’s a feature that all users (advanced or not) could benefit from.
P.S Removing the start bar is one of the dumbest moves done by Opera. Heck, disable it by default but don’t remove the feature from the core.
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Speed dial is very nice. Maybe possibility to have several “tabs” of speed dial could be even better.
Opera 10.00
using
I love this new feature, too. I agree with Ryan that so many ways to search is overkill. Furthermore, I like to have auto-completion for bookmarked URLs too, like Frederik.
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Start Bar => bye?
SpeedDial => just awesome, as Ladislav Bodnar (distrowatch) said: “Want to know wich exciting features your preferred browser will have in a year or two? Just take a look at today’s Opera to find out”
using
It worked very differently to what I thought. I was going to bash it and say it was unnecessary because you can already press Ctrl+L then press write the nick name of the bookmark you want to visit then enter, and you are there. But it just feels more right to have some of them as speed dial. And most of the things that bothers me about the speed dial as it is now, is already on the “known issues” list. Sweet.
Now if we could only sync this and the rest of my bookmarks with the rest of my Opera browsers around it would be hard to not permanently make the final switch.
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I hope they’ll bring the start bar back otherwise it will be bye opera, back to Firefox because it was because of the start bar I started using Oper …
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@Ryan: yes, there are multiple ways to search using Opera, though most non-tech savvy users don’t know how to use the integrated search. My hope is that Opera will add a search button near the search field on the speed dial page, to make it easier for these users to use. Otherwise, you’re correct, Opera is just duplicating what it already has.
@Frederik: You could use Opera’s “nickname” functionality. In the menu bar, go to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks > right-click on one of the bookmarks > Click on Properties > enter a nick in the nickname field. Next time, you simply use the the nickname instead of the actually URL. Try it out.
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I’ll admit to being a bit underwhelmed at first, but then I haven’t gotten around to trying it out. It basically amounts to creating a local portal site from your bookmarks/history…
…which reminds me of a feature Galeon used to have back when I was using it regularly. (They did a massive rewrite for version 2, and dropped a lot of features from the first version.) You could start with a home page, a blank page, or a “portal” page generated from your bookmarks. Unfortunately, it would use all your bookmarks, so after a while it wasn’t particularly lightweight.
Keeping it to the top 9 sites sounds limiting, but it’ll probably be more useful that way. And adding a visual identifier (the thumbnails) always helps.
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Another problem with the current implementation is that the thumbnails are really too small to decifer any information from a webpage. I think that it would be cool if the thumnail expanded a bit to show a page in more detail, sort of like what the keyboard buttons do on the Wii. Then I’m sure Speed Dial would be really useful.
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Kelson:
…it would use all your bookmarks, so after a while it wasn’t particularly lightweight…
I wouldn’t mind if it did that. The thumbs would have to go though, and adding tags to the bookmarks would make the whole thing a bit more manageable. Maybe make the text blue, and call it del.icio.us would be a bit too much, but at least very usable.
Bookmarks have been bookmarks for too long. Flock had a vision and experimented (still does) with our definition of a bookmark. I would love to see Opera follow up (any browser really), or even dare to take their own turn and do something crazy with OM and the 300Mb that every Opera community user have waiting for them. I see so many opportunities, so many possibilities, and so little time…I really wish I could write an extension for Opera right now.
- ØØ -
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This speed dial is awesome. I use firefox most of the time and I open a new tab and hit a button on my bookmark toolbar and go to the site. This basically allows me to get rid of that toolbar, or have the toolbar have bookmarks to other less visited sites.
Either way I have access to more bookmarks in less space. A big screen of nothing isn’t very effiecient. So as long as it loads fast, I love it.