Connections
While most of the other menus deal with beginners to intermediate levels of settings, this menu deals
with a lot of the things that take place under the hood, so to speak, of Opera. You will find that most
of the options and settings in this menu are hidden from the eye of the user in other Internet browsers,
but are openly available for user interaction in Opera.
Browser identification
Identifying the Internet browser that's attempting to access the Web page is very common on the
Internet. Web masters want their pages to appear new and fresh, and to utilize the newest and most
sophisticated technology, but unfortunately, for very many Web masters, this means catering to the known
Internet browsers, and as such, most Web pages are written for either Internet Explorer or Netscape
Navigator, and all other browsers are denied access to the Web page in most cases.
Opera have been on par with these Internet browsers for quite some time, in certain cases surpassing
them, and is now in the process of pulling away with the lead, as far as the support for standardized
technologies and protocols are concerned. But given the extensive installed user base of Microsoft's
and Netscape's browsers, a lot of Web masters will not even bother to assess other browsers for their
Web sites, in many cases, leaving Opera users no chance to use their sites and services.
Therefore, we have created a workaround for this problem in Opera: User selectable ID's for Opera!
It is now possible to select from the drop down list here what you want Opera to identify itself as
when asked which browser it is.
The list goes:
- Identify as Opera
- Identify as Mozilla 5.0
- Identify as Mozilla 4.73
- Identify as Mozilla 3.0
- Identify as MSIE 5.0
There are two things to note here; First of all, the name "Mozilla" is Netscape's internal application
name, which is in many cases the best setting, as most Web sites look for Netscape, or its compatibles.
Identifying as Opera will give up the Opera name purely, while the others will display Netscape or Internet
Exporer, compatible with Opera.
The second thing to note is the "Identify as MSIE 5.0" setting. If enabled, Opera will attempt to execute
scripts that are of JScript kind. Also, the browser will respond to document.all and
document.id calls if this is what Opera identifies as.
Proxy servers
A "Proxy Server" collects information from the Internet and stores it locally until
you view it. In order to work correctly, and indeed, in many cases to allow Internet
access at all, proxy servers must be configured. This goes for every program that utilizes
these servers.
In Opera, this is done in the "Proxy Servers..." menu, accessible through the "Connections".
Here, you may enter the name of the proxy server and the proxy port number it uses. There are
a number of protocols which may use the proxy server, and also a check box to the left of each
of these protocols, which, when checked, enables these protocols.
The biggest box is used for entering your proxy server name. Please enter it like
this example:
| http://www.operaproxy.com |
| or | 111.950.2.721 |
To the right of this is the box for the port number. This number is crucial, unless
your proxy server uses the "default" proxy number (8080). Please write it in like this
example:
8080
Each protocol may use its own proxy server and/or port number, or be disabled/enabled
without interfering with the other protocols.
This is information your Internet Service Provider or
System Administrator should have provided you with. If you do not have it at hand, or if
you do not know whether you use a proxy server at all, please contact them for information.
These are the different protocols and their uses:
| HTTP: | for HTTP servers (ordinary web documents) |
|---|
| HTTPS: | for secure documents (use only if you are behind a firewall) |
|---|
| FTP: | for FTP files |
|---|
| Gopher: | Always needed if you want to access gopher servers |
|---|
| WAIS: | Always needed if you want to access WAIS servers |
|---|
The "Do not use proxy on:" field can be used to specify which HTTP servers should be
accessed directly because they are so close that the proxy would be a bottle neck even
if it had the document stored locally.
Note! Some Internet Service Providers and System
Administrators are using autoconfigured proxy server files ("proxy.pac"'s), something
Opera does not support, so you'll have to enter this information manually. We are working
on this feature for implementation in a future version of Opera.
If you believe this to be the case on your system, please contact your ISP or System
Administrator and ask them what the proxy server host name and port number used are. If you
know that your system is in fact using an autoconfigured proxy server, you can check the
".pac" file and find proxy server and port number in this file.
FTP
Logging onto FTP servers anonymously, such as publicly available download sites, you will for the
most part be placed in the root directory of the server. Opera behaves similarly on this note as most
FTP-clients and Internet browsers, but if you are logging onto a personal or work defined FTP server
with a username and password, you will find that Opera behaves differently from other browser by placing
you in your user directory.
If you wish Opera to behave like other browsers in this respect, you need to enable this feature by
adding a checkmark in the box in this part of the "Connections" preferences.
Server name
Pressing the "Server name completion..." button will take you to a sub-menu that will let you decide
how Opera handles incomplete URLs.
Look for local network machine
Accessing a machine on the local network is highly
possible in Opera, but addresses for these machines lack top domains, and look very much like
incomplete URLs, which will make Opera add the prefix and suffix of the below boxes to it. Enabling
this option will make Opera look for local network machines before attempting to complete incomplete
URLs - the reason this is not enabled by default is because it takes some time looking through an
entire network.
Try name completion using
Here, you set the prefixes and suffixes that Opera will try when an in complete URL is entered
into the URL field of the Progress bar or the Direct URL addressing box. You can add several prefixes
and suffixes, which Opera will look through them, matching them up one by one until it finds a match.
Add several prefixes and suffixes separated by commas (",").
If there's one thing that Opera's known for, it's its performance! Just like with all the other
features in the browser, the performance can also be tuned and its settings changed by the users
of the browsers.
Synchronous DNS
DNS stands for Domain Name System. It's the mechanism that turns your IP
name into an IP number. Like opera.nta.no corresponds to 193.156.19.29. By default,
Opera will fetch information from the Internet asynchronously, because the browser can have several
active windows open and receiving information at the same time, giving increased performance, unlike
other browsers that do not have a Multiple Document Interface (MDI), but a Single Document
Interface (SDI).
Since not all servers or even Internet Service Providers, support asynchronous DNS, it is possible
to set Opera to "Synchronous DNS", which is a way of doing a lookup for a machine name that will block
all threads of execution in an application until a request for the reply
has been received.
Set this option by checking the "Synchronous DNS" box in this part of the "Connections" preferences
menu, but note that unless the server you connect through requires synchronous DNS, you may experience
noticeable slowdown in Opera if you use several windows for receiving information at the same time.
Max number of connections to a server
This will allow you to decide what the maximum number
of connections to one particular server should be. It is recommended that you do not set this too high,
as this may slow the program down a bit, but an average of in between 8 and 12 is not uncommon.
Max number of connections
Here, you set the overall maximum number of connections you want
Opera to be able to perform at any one time. If you open more connections than the number listed here,
Opera will ignore them until it has received the information in the number of windows it's currently
downloading information into.
Size of network buffer (kB)
The network buffer is the part of the cache that receives
information from the network. Its size can be increased to allow for better performance in most cases,
but if you experience Opera becoming unresponsive, you could try decreasing it.
Tip! This is only one of the places you can tune the performance in Opera!
Please see the accessibility page for more hints and tips on how to get the
most out of your Opera!
Server error response handling
Every so often, the server you are connecting to will report errors back to the program. Here,
you set how Opera is to act when it receives such error responses from the server.
Always show server response
If enabled, this will always show the error message
Opera receives from the server in the active window.
Always show dialog box
This option will always display the Opera dialog box for the
type of error the server is reporting.
Show response from server when appropriate
The default setting, this will show Opera's
own error dialogs whenever the error does not appear to be meant directly for the user's eye.