Do you use Speed Dial in Opera?
Published August 1st, 2007 11:36 AM EDT By Daniel GoldmanIt has been nearly four months since Opera released Speed Dial in the desktop browser.
When I show people the Opera browser, Speed Dial is usually one of the first things to catch their eyes. Most of them tell me it’s a feature they love and will use.
In the beginning, I didn’t know whether I’ll be using Speed Dial. I wasn’t sure whether the webpage thumbnails on the Speed Dial would make my Opera look crowded and cluttered. But, after using it for a bit, I’ve come to see how useful these visual bookmarks are for me. I love Speed Dial.
What about you? Do you use Speed Dial? Do you find it useful? I want to hear your feedback.
Speed Dial in Opera
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I don’t use it, because news come via RSS and I open the sites I usually visit with Go to Nickname.
Speed Dial doesn’t give any additional benefits. The preview feature is not very useful, imho.
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I don’t use it. The idea was nice, but it always made some forums think I visited their park and marked threads read if I did not visit them. That was very annoying.
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Yeah, SpeedDial is the best thing in Opera 9.2
. I miss in speeddial only rename pages.
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I love it…I just wish that I could set it as my homepage or bookmark it somehow.
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I haven’t really gotten into the habit of using it that much yet. And yes, it’s been awhile. I guess I’m so used to using my personal bar that the speed dial option just hasn’t caught on for me yet. I’d say I use speed dial about 30% of the time, personal bar the rest of the time (most of the same links on both).
But that’s the great thing about Opera - there are so many different ways to do the same thing! And if you don’t use some of them they don’t exactly get in the way.
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It’s just great!
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Use it constantly, speeddial pretty much now does what my personal toolbar did previously.
And coupled with a quick mouse gesture I can bring up a new tab real quick for easy access to my top 9 sites.
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I don’t use it. I use the Personal bar, I think it’s more powerful.
Speed Dial is nice, but previews don’t let you see anything, so it isn’t very useful…
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i love it, but i want more! 9 pages is too little.
i also love how i can set it to update the preview, so i can see if the page has been updated or not.
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I thought the same thing as you Daniel. I didn’t understand why Opera was so excited about speed dial. But after several weeks of using it, I fell in love with the feature. I can’t believe I browsed without it before.
It just makes sense to have my favorite sites there. It makes it easy to visually see all the sites. I used to have a favorites toolbar, but that took up too much screen space. Speed dial is a great way to conserve space while not giving up on functionality.
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I do not click the thumbnails, but I do take advantage of the fact that the sites automatically is set as nicknames 1-9.
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I like Speed Dial.
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I think it’s cool, but don’t find myself using it.
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Ryan Wagner, you could set Opera to open with a blank page. Go to Tools > Preferences > General > Startup.
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I use the Speed Dial keyboard shortcuts all the time, but I don’t use the thumbnail page. In fact, I generally hide it because it slows down opening a new tab.
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For a long while I didn’t use, I actually thought it was silly, but I’ve since started using it. I just wish it was dynamic and started picking up on frequently visited sites during a given timeframe.
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I don’t use it and have it completely turned off. I use the personal bar instead.
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Love it too!
Everything I need at a glance (Netvibes, Gmail, various forums…)
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I do use speed dial. Both the graphical interface and the keyboard shortcuts. I use auto-reloadd on some of the keys as well!
However I am conserned over how much memory it uses. I sometimes see high spikes in memory usage when the auto-reload starts. Opera also starts a little slower when you have speed dial activated.
Other than preformance issues; I have only good things to say about speed dial.
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I love Speed Dial. It’s the first thing I see when I start Opera or when I create a new empty Tab.
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I DO use Speed Dial. A lot actually.
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Hey Ryan, I was wondering how to set it as my homepage, but it appears there is no way. I tried about:blank, but that was just a blank tab :(.
I love speeddial. It makes browsing so much EZ’ier. Ex-I want to check TV listings on Yahoo! TV. I can scroll through bookmarks until I find it, but that takes a while. I can start typing in the location bar, but then I have to scroll to the specific URL I want. With speeddial, I just hit new tab then click Y! TV. It’s a lot easier to find a site when it’s always in the same spot, there are only nine to pick from, and it has a thumbnail. The best part is, I set the speeddial link to the URL I want, tv.yahoo.com/listings, so I no longer have to click thru multiple pages to get where I want.
Also, speeddial can remind you of things. Ex- I’m a runner, so I log in my run every day on flotrackr.com. With speeddial, every time I open a new tab I see a thumbnail of my running log. I also set up this one to link straight to the form where I log in my day’s run.
Hey Ryan, I’ve got tech.cybernetnews.com on my speeddial (even though I have it on RSS in Y!MB).
You’re right Megan. Some people try and claim lots of features are a bad thing, and they often can be. In Opera, however, they don’t get in the way, or slow the browser down, so they really can’t hurt.
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So, it’s a good idea and I use it.
Ilya Shpan’kov
Russian Opera Team
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They’re great but kind of scary. I think they stop me from hitting a broader range of sites on a general basis…
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I use them, but something needs to be to be done to have more permanent titles.
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Ryan Wagner: if speeddial opens on new tabs (default), using a kbrd shortcut to Rewind will bring you back to it. But I am sure there is a tweak to reference Speeddial with a opera:~ type URL.
Speeddial is a great feature for most users; for those of us tending to use kbrd shortcuts, it is of lesser value. I assume 90% of users who prefer clicking love the feature; I would, in their shoes.
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i use it a lot, i save a locked special speed dial tab on my session along with my irc tabs
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I hated the idea at first, but now I use it all the time. When I add sites to my bookmarks I keep forgetting about them. With SD they are always right there, so I remember to visit them regularly
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I put on Speed Dial couple of news sites such as bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, reuters.com, gazeta.ru, lenta.ru… Since all of them have big pictures on front page I can distinguish from the first sight if I want to read some news.
Also I have my Opera forum and comment subscriptions pages where from thumbnails I can see if there any new items.
But for most sites I still use nicknames…
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Wouldn’t be without SpeedDial, it’s essential to my browsing now. Using old browsers without it sucks
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Na, don’t use it much. I get my news via RSS and go to sites from there. The shortcut keys are handy, but most of my favorite sites already have RSS feeds.
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I use it for favorite sites that do not have a favicon. I use favicons without text on personal bar.
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I’m using it. I find it a great addition.
It allows me to keep track of sites that don’t have RSS. Or don’t have RSS for parts that I need (for instance, a forum that I visit).
I don’t use the built-in RSS reader, I find it to clumsy compared to Google Reader (same with mail).
The searchbox however I don’t use. I use my search keywords for that.
What would be nice is the ability to zoom to a specific area of the preview.
There is a site with a counter that I would like to follow, but it’s too small to see properly.
Also, sites with Javascript don’t work properly (atleast for the thumbnail).
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i use it massively, however it would be a nice addition if i click on the speed dial page, the thumbnail version would automatically update itself, so the speeddial page would always show a somewhat up-to-date version, instead of the manually updates version i’m forced with right now.
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You can press Refresh to update all, or you can set it to refresh itself every X minutes (rightclick on the thumbnail).
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I don’t use it. I use my own HTML page with frequently used links.
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I don’t really use it as I have all the pages I really visit to always open in tabs anyway and I have set Opera to start up with the previous session.
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I use it, but only for the keyboard shortcuts, i keep the thumbnails hidden.
For those that want to set it as their homepage, while i see why you would want to be able to do that, you can however just open a new tab, or if it’s for startup that you want it just set opera to “start with blank tab”.
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Yes, I use it, in combination with the much-maligned Start bar. So all of the pages I visit most are all within easy reach.
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Thanks for the tips guys on trying to get Speeddial as my homepage, but the trick that Daniel pointed would make me lose the tabs I had open from the previous session. I always like being able to pick up where I left off.
In reality there should be an opera:speeddial command to access that page, but as discussed in the forum this is non existent.
@netster007x: Nice to see you commenting over here as well.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot to mention one of the cool things that I’m using Speeddial for. I have it performing a cron job for me that happens everytime the page gets refreshed. I set that speedidial page to automatically refresh every hour, and then the job is automatically ran when that page is refreshed. That way I don’t have to keep a tab open and have that refresh, and since I only want the job executing when I’m awake this is perfect (I close the browser when I go to bed).
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Me too I don’t use it, I have mostly newsfeeds (displayed on Netvibes or Opera’s built-in) and others are in my bookmarks.
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The speed dial is part of my regular routine now, especially when I fire up Opera in the morning. Along with the shortcuts, which I didn’t know existed till recently, I think I use these two features the most.
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Same as you, Daniel - wasn’t sure, then found out just how useful it is!
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I like this goodie.
Yes, always!
Yeap
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I was’nt sure if i’ll use it in the start but now it’s a real time saver.
One thing i want is some tweak which allows more then 9 sites. I am on widescreen and high resoulution, and can easily fit 5 per row instead of 3.
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I use it and I love it… I wasn’t sure about it at first since it looked a bit cluttered and I already keep a “home page” with all my frequent links. But it’s great for keeping links like facebook, twitter, etc. where I want quick access but don’t want to devote “home page” space or personal bar space to them.
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I use it, but I don’t even know why
I was quite happy with personal bar.
Some of my friends absolutely love speed dial though.
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I’ve used Speed Dial since it was implemented. I don’t look at the thumbnails very often. It’s just used as a quick visual list of shortcuts to my most commonly visited sites. Keyboard shortcuts don’t get much use, either. I’m usually opening a new tab when I visit one of the sites, so clicking on the thumbnail fits better into my usage patterns.
Suggestion-wise, I find myself wishing that my bookmarks (or a selectable subset of them) were displayed beside the Speed Dial thumbnails. Not as an expandable tree, of course. It’d probably have to mimic the single folder view of the bookmarks sidebar. It seems like a good use for the empty space, at least at 1024×768. My browsing habits are very tab-oriented and it feels inefficient to have to use the sidebar or the menu when my bookmarks could just be visible in the new tab I’ll be using.
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I use Speed Dial all the time for sites that don’t have RSS.
I would like the option to have more then 9, maybe display more the larger the window gets or have smaller previews as more panels are added, also a option to auto fill all or just the unused panels based on your most visited sites.
I could fit about 24 at their current size on my screen (1920 x 1200).
Syncing with del.icio.us would also be very useful.
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i dont use it. i prefer my bookmarks nicknames.
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to show speed dial in the current tab you can use some of the custom buttons on this page http://homepage.hispeed.ch/ttt-opera/button/h-bu-various-adv.html
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I use it a lot, just wish there could be more speed dial pages, 9 isn’t a lot and on higher resolutions there’s a lot of wasted space!
Good idea having Yahoo as the search on the speed dial page instead of Google but I wish it was customisable…I don’t really like Yahoo either lol
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I must admit I hated the idea of it at first, and always used to use the start bar, however I use it loads now (although the start bar is still very useful so don’t try and get rid of it again Opera!).
Fantastic move, nice to see that the FF add-on fan boys are getting in on the act as well although its not as slick as the Opera one. Keep up the good work guys!
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I loovveeeeeee this feature! It just great and will continue to use it!
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Of course I use speed dial too.
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I tried to use it, but after one or two weeks I just gave up on it. It’s not really very useful if you know alternative ways of getting to the content you want - I use sessions and a bookmarks button on my toolbar.
My girlfriend uses it, though. But I’m trying to wean her off it by switching her to an RSS client that’ll let her see when all the things she has in it updates.
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I have to say that I love speed dial. I used to keep the few links to sites I visited often on my Personal Bar, but thanks to the speed dial I have turned off the Personal Bar, and haven’t used it since.
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I use it, but I use bookmark nicknames more. I am used to doing things where I enter the site before I create the new tab.
One thing I do do, though, is keep a copy of my personalised world clock (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/personal.html) in the middle of the speed-dial, so that I can see international times without opening a page. But I would like it if I were able to have the thumbnail more zoomed in in this instance.
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Count me in as someone who didn’t think they’d end up using it, but now I do all the time. I don’t like giving up screen space for a personal bar, my old method was just using site nicknames in the bookmarks and typing those into the address bar to go to places I commonly visit. But I decided to set up a full 9 Speed Dial sites just to see how it worked, and have been using it since. The main reason I think it’s great is because it gave a use to previously unused space. Previously you open a new tab, you get a useless white window. What a huge waste of space! Now that itself has become a sort of shortcut space. A great idea on Opera’s part.
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The first comment says it all.
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I didn’t like it until I realized that one could type the number and it would open the corresponding page, (Cntrl^T, 3) gives me a quick keyboard shortcut to Google reader.
One thing that would be nice is to have the option of using the wand on the previews..
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Here’s what I wrote a while back on the forums
I have been using speed dial quite a bit, but wish it had a lot more than 9 spaces. I’d prefer they do away with the preview images because this just slows down the new tab loading. Rectangles with large text, in varying colors, would be great.
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=2155595
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I use it for most websites i visit.
Speed Dial opens when i click New Tab (Doesnt seem to for some people), and can grab whichever page i want at a glance.
Only thing is, 9 isnt enough, needs to be customizeable to the number of items, I want say, 16 (I’ve got the screen realestate for it), but my sister wants 4(Less pages to fill it with), etc.
I Routinely get asked if theres a way to change the number displayed, mainly by those i’ve converted to opera.
The other thing i’ve found is that the thumbnail can stray from what i’m expecting, ie. it shows the login page for my uni site, not the page i’m wanting to look at, it’d be great to lock it to an image and keep it there…
D
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Great feature. I don’t go to more than those 9 sites on a regular basis anyway. The few bookmarks I had are now pretty much obsolete (I even find me using my beloved shift+F2 + nickname = all my important sites shortcut less and less).
Simple, convenient, and just so obvious.
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I use 1st the personal bar and 2nd the speed dial. But, as the LinuxFormat magazine says about the SpeedDial: it’s bookmarks 2.0!
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Wonderful feature I use it all the time and would love more than 9 options!
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To my own surprise I do use it. For years I’ve created my own startup/portal page; but I’ve realised speed dial complements it really well. When I need the full lot of links, I hit my homepage. When I’m diving off to a commonly visited site, there it is in speed dial.
The only downside is some sites don’t make good images, or they don’t differ enough from others; it’d be nice to override some with a chosen image.
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@Ben Buchanan
Speed Dial thumbnails are stored on Documents and Settings\your user name\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\thumbnails just replace the thumbnail with a png that has the same dimensions and name, is not an ideal solution but it works fine as long as you dont reload the page on the speed dial
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I use it daily, however, like several others I would like some freedom with speed dial. I’d like to be able to add more pages. I wish it were in a web page design in Opera so style sheets could be changed and applied to it. There are several “Speed Dials” on the web (ex. my12 by gcampos), but if Opera had made their web based from the start it would have been much easier to alter later on. Unfortunately when they attempted this they found that they would have to change too much in order for it to work right. I love it though!
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I use speed dial to keep track of my web comics. most of them don’t have RSS feeds, and also you see changes quite well in the thumbnails. Another thing I use speeddial for is to temporarily bookmark things, like stuff I want to buy but want to do more research on and other stuff that needs temporarily bookmarking. (atm I have six webcomics and two products from our local music dealer, so one field is still free)
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I use it, but not as much as I thought I would.
Probably because I read news via RSS, have keyboard shortcuts for many bookmarks and use the Personal Toolbar for the rest.
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I don’t use it.
When Opera starts up it will load a saved session with the six sites I visit regulary or need anyway (bloglines, news). I get a tad confused when I open a new, fresh page and the screen is already’s filled with “stuff”.
When I want to open other, specific sites I use the bookmark panels quicksearch, the nicknames or I simply type the search keywords. I have nearly every site I use assigned with an easy bookmark like “trailer” for searching on the apple movie trailer website, “movie” for imdb search, “map” for google maps, “weather” for some weather websites and so on.
If I search for anything I just open a new tab and type quite “naturaly” in the adress bar “weather london”, “map london”, “imdb transformers”, “trailer transformers” - and opera just understands what I want to do.
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I Love it. It’s easier and faster to visit my favourite 9 sites. Going to Bookmarks is sometimes such a pain.
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Combined with mouse gestures, it really speeds up my browsing!
But it would be nice to have some more previews. I would love to have 12 or 15.
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I use it for a few sites I visit very frequently, such as my bank’s web site. I also have the opera:config page on there. However, my favourite way to use speed dial is for some of Google’s bookmarklets - hitting Ctrl-1 lets me bookmark a page in Google, Ctrl-3 goes to my next unread item in Google Reader, etc. Overall, I have found it to be a very useful feature.
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Yes! Always. I can`t live without Speed Dial….
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I use personal bar on top side of browser and 6 lowest pages from speed dial at one time
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I use Speed Dial constantly. Having those large screenshots of the websites displayed is a lot easier to distinguish from across the room (using a wireless mouse) than reading small bookmark labels. Turns out I generally go to less 9 sites regularly anyway. Between the Speed Dial and Google search box I’m getting to stuff I want to see faster than ever.
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Was sceptical at first, but use it all the time now. The thumbnails I only use for identifying the sites and I don’t use the keyboard shortcuts. There’s a definite performance hit but it’s not bad. 9 slots suits me fine though something I’d like to see is the ability to change titles (as others have mentioned)
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Greetings from Portugal. Speed Dial rocks! I made many conversions to Opera simply because people loved SD.
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I used it from the first moment and I loved it.. I wish there was a way to increase the sites number even if that reduces the size of the thumbs
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I used to use it, but I don’t use it any more. I rely on RSS to visit sites when something new appears. It saves my time.
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Do I use it? Naaaah.
I use F2+”nick name” and open previous session. Would have liked if could open the address book in a similar way and click a contac image to call this person using VoIP.
That would be quick dial!
cheers
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I don’t use it.
I find the start bar is more convenient.
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I don’t use SpeedDial anymore…
…the FF extension is too slow when opening new tabs.
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I didn’t use it at first, and was a bit conservative in regards to my appreciation for it. I didn’t want to switch away from my conventional bookmark scheme.
After a while though, I learned to like, nah, I grew to like it! I use it all the time now, and I would suffer a inconvenience if it wasn’t there.
I’d like an option for even more speedtab bookmarks in the future (As opposed to the 9 currently), maybe an ability to choose how many we want. That would be awesome!
Keep up the good work Opera dev team!
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EC, use Opera
The Real Thing[tm]!
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Sure, I use speed dial, all the 9 places have a frecuently visited page.
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Yes, it’s much faster than bookmark lists.
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speed dial is great! also someone on mozilla.com made a speed dial extension for firefox, but i don’t have it.
(oh, i have opera but i’m using firefox right now.)
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I use it a lot, but not the keyboard shortcuts though.
One of the things I found annoying is that it doesn’t respect the trailing slash (/) at the end of the URLs … a.k.a “be nice with the web server”. The problem appears when you edit the URLs and add the trailing slash.
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A lot of people would like to customize number of displayed pages. I hope that Opera developers are reading these posts! I don’t want to use auto reload but when I visit a page from speed dial the image should refresh since the page has already been loaded. Why not?
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I definitely agree with you MadHatter…hopefully they’ll do that.
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I never used and disabled speed dial because I created my own HTML ‘Start’ page that loads every time I open a new tab. It has my 30 or 40 frequently used links.
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I don’t use speed dial. It is just added to the bevy of “features” in Opera that I consider bloat. In my opinion, the worst part about speed dial is that the firefox extension that copied it is better because its more customizable than Opera’s implementation.
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I love this option. It’s easy to click on your favorite websites. However I never use the Ctlr shortcut option.
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Thanks for the My12 link! I’m lovin’it! Nice suggestions on your website. We’ll probably have to wait for Opera 3, or maybe 4!
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How can i add mor then 9 site ? 9 site list is not enough ! Want more and i truly love this feature
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Only thing is, 9 isnt enough, needs to be customizeable to the number of items, I want say, 16 (I’ve got the screen realestate for it), but my sister wants 4(Less pages to fill it with), etc.
I Routinely get asked if theres a way to change the number displayed, mainly by those i’ve converted to opera.
Show me how to change a number page in Speed Dial.
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I use it all the time. I used to keep a bunch of tabs open all the time and always got annoyed if something happened so I lost them. Now probably 40% of the browsing I do start with one of my 9 speeddials!
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I miss the option to fully disable it, because i dont use speed dial…
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I use it, but I would prefer it if the short cut numbers matched the numeric keypad on my PC (and not the numbers on a phone!)
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I only use it to make Opera’s market share bigger, i added popular sites and i keep Opera autoreload them every 10 mins… it’s my way to help Opera gain the place it deserves ^_^
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Any updates to Speed Dial in Kestrel (v9.5)? Is there any way to save multiple Speed Dial sessions without changing the SD default page?
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when i use opera, i don’t use the speed dial function.
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How do you get it back if you have hit the hide buttom????
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HD78, you’ll notice a button on the bottom right corner of your Opera browser ‘Show speed dial’. Click it.
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Daniel Goldman, Mine does not have that.
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i found it
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I didn’t think much of it when I first saw it. But I have Opera set so that I get a blank page on each CTRL+T (new tab/page). So everytime I hit CTRL+T, I saw the speed dial, and from there it just turned into my mini-portal for jumping to sites I read often. Now I find myself very annoyed that there are only 9 pages allowed. Seriously, why can’t it be configured to a bigger grid with more pages??
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I might have used this if it had been available years ago, but I already have all of my frequently visited sites either in newsfeeds or using nicknames, which I access through F2 (shift+F2 by default). As it is, I don’t use it.
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Not using it. Too much time waste. To open any site with speed dial you need two clicks: New tab and then webpage button. With personal bar your just one click away with no need to move around with the mouse. Shiny gimmick, nothing else.