Just thinking on my One Major Software App…
I’ve used more than a few web browsers since my first explorations using Cello and other early Mosaic-based browsers. I still have five I use, depending on which “side” of a dual boot or which computer I’m using. Internet Exploder (version 8 only right now), Firefox 3.x–whatever it is with the latest bug stomp–Sea Monkey (which is now in version 2!), Konqueror and Opera 9.64 and Opera 10 Beta (in various flavors, including some “anonymized” proxy-based setups). But I’ve been using Opera Browser as my primary browser for 14 years now. I forget when Opera first brought tabbed browsing out, but it was more than a few years before Firefox, which has popularlized tabbed browsing to a degree Opera’s smaller eye share had not, brought it out and something around a decade before M$ decided to move Internet Exploder into the 21st century.
Still, until I moved to this 23″ widescreen LCD monitor (Acer 223W), I rarely had more than 30 or maybe 40 tabs open at once. I just counted off my current tabs. 89. The first 10 are locked so they can’t be closed down absent some direct intervention (two mouse clicks to unlock ’em and a mouse gesture to close), but the others are things I want to keep open for various reasons. Two are books I’m reading (one or the other when I’m on this computer, depending on whether I feel like reading a book at any particular time during a compy session and which one I want to bring up), several are products I want to keep links to somewhere out “in the open” as it were and others are related news or stories or pages with links to music, etc.
Handy lil things like moving the tabs around to group them by subject or relatedness make things easier to deal with when so many tabs are open.
And then there are the 50 or so links I’ve placed on a toolbar, cos I want ’em handier than a bookmark.
I had my tabs collection pared down to just about 30 just yesterday…
Of course, bookmarks are easier to manage in Opera than any other browser I’ve tried, and all my bookmarks are in 45 folders, most with more than a few subfolders, for classification into categories that speak to me. Adding new folders or subfolders is easy-peasy compared to other browsers, and that’s a Good Thing since I like things in their places.
And then there is the easy-peasy facility for managing, creating and modifying keyboard shortcuts. CRTL+F12>Advanced>Shortcuts>Edit brings up a wealth of built-in keyboard shortcuts, and changing Opera’s behavior is trivially simple from there.
And what can I say about simply typing opera:config in an address bar? Almost everything else that can be modified by a user is available there. Almost. I do have to import my saved passwords and a couple of handy config files when adding a new, separate, Opera build to a computer, but there again, it’s simply either copy-paste the config file into a new folder for the new instance of Opera (so I can run two different versions of Opera on the same computer but also still have all the same configuration) or point the new Opera to the old config files using… opera:config.
Nice that some other browsers are letting folks add on things like mouse gestures, although I think Opera’s implementation is better, cleaner and less prone to breakage since it’s a built-in part of the software itself. And has been for the past four major version numbers. Ditto with the nice lil extension that now allows Firefox users (sorry Internet Exploder users, no joy with this for you) to emulate Opera’s Speed Dial feature.
But still, having 89–Oops! now 90; added one to check something a minute ago–tabs open is the single most typical indicator of my dependence on Opera. Hmmm, there’re some things in this session I don’t want to lose. Time to implement another Opera first now emulated by FF: save this session. Sure, Opera saves all my sessions automagically whenever I exit (or an OS crashes or my UPS powers down during a power outage or whatever) but saving a session with some comments to goad my memory is a Good Thing too.
Well, that’s enough rambling for now. I think I’ve used up my word allowance for the da_
It is truly disgusting to read about someone as organized as you. I feel good when I can find the last Word document I was working on.
That’s an easy one, TF: first, look in Recent Documents. If you’ve disabled that, open word, click FILE and look at the bottom of the expanded menu for recent Word docs.
Glad I could help.
🙂
(BTW, I need to file things in places where I know I can find them, cos otherwise, I’d never find anything! Worst thing in the world is to see something that’s out of place, think, “I’m going to put that where it won’t get lost” and then… hide it from myself because I didn’t have a proper place for it and then put it in that place.)