After installation Opera's default settings show the progress bar which displays information about how the current page is loading in its simplest form - as a small rectangular bar that only appears when a loading process is active. This bar however is not revealing enough information for advanced users who are interested in what exactly is going on when a website refuses to load.
Let's take a look at how we can easily change default lightweight appearance of Opera's progress bar to a “heavy-armed†one which provides us with more information at the same time. Either right-click anywhere around the active tab in your browser (on any panel) and choose Customize from the menu or select Appearance from the Tools menu or again use a keyboard shortcut for it by pressing Shift+F12 (neat how many ways there are in Opera to achieve a simple task, ain't it
). After selecting the Toolbars tab in “Appearance†window, focus your sight on a drop-down list near …you guessed it… the Progress Bar label.
Here you can choose one of 2 options (excluding the default and Off ones), depending on your personal preferences. Selecting “Show inside address bar†option will make the progress bar appear inside of the address bar which seems a bit impractical to me because it blocks the address bar preventing you from accessing it directly. Though, someone might like it being displayed this way. I personally prefer the other “Pop-up at bottom†option which makes the progress bar appear at the bottom of your browser, just above the status bar (if enabled).
Either way, you come to a state where your progress bar reveals lots of information at once. You get a graphical and percentile view of document/code loading state as well as loaded/total number of pictures in the site along with the info of how much KBs were downloaded so far in total, the current speed of downloading (KB/s), time consumed by loading the page.
Last but not least, you obtain overall information about what the core is doing at the moment (requesting connections, sending/receiving data, looking up hostnames) so that you can easily determine what causes the problem when a website stops loading or doesn't start to load at all.
O p e r a FTW
Let's take a look at how we can easily change default lightweight appearance of Opera's progress bar to a “heavy-armed†one which provides us with more information at the same time. Either right-click anywhere around the active tab in your browser (on any panel) and choose Customize from the menu or select Appearance from the Tools menu or again use a keyboard shortcut for it by pressing Shift+F12 (neat how many ways there are in Opera to achieve a simple task, ain't it
Here you can choose one of 2 options (excluding the default and Off ones), depending on your personal preferences. Selecting “Show inside address bar†option will make the progress bar appear inside of the address bar which seems a bit impractical to me because it blocks the address bar preventing you from accessing it directly. Though, someone might like it being displayed this way. I personally prefer the other “Pop-up at bottom†option which makes the progress bar appear at the bottom of your browser, just above the status bar (if enabled).
Either way, you come to a state where your progress bar reveals lots of information at once. You get a graphical and percentile view of document/code loading state as well as loaded/total number of pictures in the site along with the info of how much KBs were downloaded so far in total, the current speed of downloading (KB/s), time consumed by loading the page.
Last but not least, you obtain overall information about what the core is doing at the moment (requesting connections, sending/receiving data, looking up hostnames) so that you can easily determine what causes the problem when a website stops loading or doesn't start to load at all.
O p e r a FTW
