opera speed dial.jpg
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I never thought Opera was going to make this possible, but I’m pleased to say that in the new Opera 9.5 you can actually customize how many Speed Dial entries are shown at any one given time! They are so incredibly useful that I’ve found myself needing more than the nine that comes standard in the browser. I will say that the Opera team could have made it easier for users to customize how many Speed Dial entries are shown at a time, but I’m just grateful that in Opera 9.5 this can now be changed. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Note the path to the Opera Preferences (type about:opera into the address bar to find it). Also, make sure you have at least one site added to Speed Dial already.
  2. Close Opera. This is important to prevent Opera from modifying the configuration file we’re about to edit.
  3. Open speeddial.ini file in any text editor from the Opera Preferences directory that you found Step 1.
  4. Add the following lines (somewhere near the top is fine), and adjust number of rows & columns to meet your needs. I’ve got the speeddial.ini file open in the background in the screenshot above, and you can see that I set the number of rows and columns to 5.
    [Size]
    Rows=5
    Columns=5
  5. Start Opera.

You’ll need to play around with the number of rows and columns until you find something that fits your screen well. In my example I added five rows and five columns, but you’ll notice that some of the rows don’t show up. Opera requires a minimum size for each of the Speed Dial entries, and if they don’t all fit they will simply run off the screen. Once that happens there’s no way to access them since scrollbars aren’t shown.

Options like these would probably be better served in the opera:config advanced options area, but hey, I won’t complain. Speed Dial is Opera’s most useful feature for me, and having more of them makes it even better.

One thing that you should note is that Opera Link will keep your Speed Dials synchronized across multiple computers, but it will only do work for the first nine entries you have. So don’t expect to all 50 of your Speed Dial entries to appear on all of your computers running Opera. Sorry, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. ;)

  1. As you are at customizing Opera, could you share with me how to purge Google entirely from Opera, especially from the search box. Having a Google icon hardcoded in Opera (can’t be removed through configurations) is the only thing preventing me from using it.

    Thanks.

  2. Chris RossiniAll-StarJune 13, 2008 at 1:55 pm

    Very nice tip…thank you!

  3. fred zhang wrote:
    As you are at customizing Opera, could you share with me how to purge Google entirely from Opera, especially from the search box. Having a Google icon hardcoded in Opera (can’t be removed through configurations) is the only thing preventing me from using it.

    You can edit the “search.ini” residing in Opera’s installation directory, it’s the first entry. Take into consideration that every time you update Opera, the file will be recreated so you have to do it again. And the favicon is not hardcoded AFAIK.

    The question is why a favicon is preventing you from using Opera :?

  4. “The question is why a favicon is preventing you from using Opera”

    @Lashiec
    It’s not the favicon prevents me from using Opera. It is the fact that you can delete all other search providers BUT Google from Opera is pissing me off. I don’t personally use Google for various reasons (yes, I can still get any information I need without using Google). I don’t like the feeling that a thing you don’t like is lurking around you, even if it’s not shown as the current search provider in the upper right corner.

    Anyway, thank you for your tip. I think I’m going to download Opera again and give it another look.

  5. fred zhang wrote:
    how to purge Google entirely from Opera, especially from the search box

    -Edit the google search engine(e.g. the name) in the search engines list in preferences>search
    -Open the search.ini in your *profile directory* and change “Deleted=0″ line in google section to “Deleted=1″
    That way, the change will stick even after an update.

    btw, it’s not intentional; it’s actually because of a bug in opera – [my.opera.com]

  6. x wrote:
    btw, it’s not intentional; it’s actually because of a bug in opera – [my.opera.com]

    Hmm… It’s hard to believe it’s a bug given all other default search providers also come from the search.ini in the installation folder.

    Besides, if it’s really a bug, why haven’t they fixed it after more than 1.5 years since 9.1 released??

  7. fred zhang wrote:
    Hmm… It’s hard to believe it’s a bug given all other default search providers also come from the search.ini in the installation folder.

    The bug is that you can’t delete the first search engine(the engine defined in the search.ini in opera installation directory as “Search Engine 1″) not that you can’t delete any default search providers.

  8. Maybe because income from Google searches within Opera is the main source of revenue for the desktop version of Opera :)

    Although they probably had similar arrangements with Ask and Yahoo!

  9. Lashiec wrote:
    Maybe because income from Google searches within Opera is the main source of revenue for the desktop version of Opera :)

    Although they probably had similar arrangements with Ask and Yahoo!

    I’m guessing they’re getting more money from Ask.com now though, and that would be the reason they made it the default search engine for Speed Dial in Opera 9.5.

  10. Adding additional speed dials was avalable since first Opera 9.5 Alfa

  11. nice tip……once this works with Sirius I could forsee Opera becoming my main browser…

  12. I’m quite sure this trick was originally posted at Remco Lanting’s blog here:

    [my.opera.com]

    Please link to original sources.

  13. Me wrote:
    I’m quite sure this trick was originally posted at Remco Lanting’s blog here.. Please link to original sources.

    The original source is linked in the operawatch post (via [RemcoLanting]). Ryan linked to the operawatch post probably because he found it first on operawatch. Nothing wrong with that..

  14. I am an Opera user for many years now and love the speed dial – but, I need more than one page.
    So I looked around and found this

    [only2clicks.com]

    For me the best found of the year – awesome in all respects – maybe Opera can do something similar ;-)

  15. recently shifted to opera, after being firm safari user. love it. one thing irritates me though, which might make me shift back to safari. opening a new tab, there seems to be no option to open the tab behind the current one, without using three fingers instead of two (aka safari, where you can specify where the tab opens, using the same cmd+click option). i use a laptop, and it’s increasingly irritating to line up three fingers, or take my other hand off that coffee/beer/whiskey/etc or is there a way around it?

  16. Anonymous wrote:
    opening a new tab, there seems to be no option to open the tab behind the current one, without using three fingers instead of two

    Middle click/Right click>Open in background..

  17. On the other hand, I want less, so I set it at 2×3 … easier to see if the site has updated.

  18. chaitanya krishnanJune 16, 2008 at 2:28 am

    Awesome find!! had been looking for a way to increase the number on speed dial eversince i got a widescreen monitor last year!! Thanks!

  19. You should give credit to Remco Lamting for posting this first.

  20. x wrote:
    Me wrote:
    I’m quite sure this trick was originally posted at Remco Lanting’s blog here.. Please link to original sources.

    The original source is linked in the operawatch post (via [RemcoLanting]). Ryan linked to the operawatch post probably because he found it first on operawatch. Nothing wrong with that..

    Exactly. We link to the sites we find the information at. If we only linked to the original source then other sites may get mad when they know we got the information from them. And trying to link to all of the sources could result in a huge chain of sites. In the end do we ever know who the original source is? In this case it would probably be the developer who added the feature, but I don’t know who that is either.

    So generally we just link to the site where we got the information from. If the original site wanted to get linked to in our article then someone should have sent it in as a tip.

    Anonymous wrote:
    On the other hand, I want less, so I set it at 2×3 … easier to see if the site has updated.

    That’s interesting… never thought about wanting less. I could definitely see how that would be beneficial though.

  21. TNX TNX TNY i really need this options only 9 pages i cent have in Speed dial :D :D

  22. love it! thanks for the tip.

  23. This article isn’t entirely correct in stating that you can’t dial the other entries, just add a new key mapping to the keyboard shortcuts for the new items.
    For example:

    “1 ctrl alt” is mapped to “speed dial, 10″

    Personally, I don’t use the keyboard shortcuts, but they’re there if I want them.
    So, once again, Opera’s built-in features are more useful than Firefox’s and you don’t have to install plug-ins, keeping your memory bandwidth down.

  24. Thanks guys. Very, very useful.

    I actually only just switched to Opera last night, but I already really like it. This just makes it better.

  25. Brilliant tip, regardless of where it came from, I found it here.

  26. obviously google adsense goes and puts a GoogleChrome advert in the middle of this wonderful opera hack article.
    :P

  27. Is there any way to make this work with 9.64??

  28. It works with 9.64 it was just a little difficult to find the file I needed to edit.. Been wanting this for a long time.. Thanks

  29. finally I found it, it is all I missed in my Opera (well, perhaps I am still waiting for the HTML E-Mailing ;-) , looking forward to the 10.0 !!!)

  30. thanq very much

  31. x wrote:
    Anonymous wrote:
    opening a new tab, there seems to be no option to open the tab behind the current one, without using three fingers instead of two

    Middle click/Right click>Open in background..

    It doesn’t look like you can right click on in background tab for speed dial. This is the only think so far that Firefox has over Opera when it comes to speeddial

  32. hi thank you for this post
    to make spead dail shortcut just edit c:\progra~1\opera\defaults\standard_keyboard.ini

    and add some thing like that
    1 alt = Go to speed dial, 10
    :) best wishes

  33. Thank you very much :)

  34. NOPE NOPE NOPE – DOES NOT WORK. DOES NOT WORK IN version 9.6. That really sucks too. Tried adding to the top, to the middle to the End. NOTHING!! THIS DOES NOT WORK ALL THE TIME AND SOME OF THE TIME IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH !!
    IF IT DID NOT WORK FOR YOU (reader) EITHER, TAKE HEART. NOT BECAUSE THERE IS A SOLUTION, BUT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT ALONE !! THE INSTRUCTIONS ARE INSUFFICIENT !!!!!! THIS LOUSY LITTLE FILE IS A FEW LINES LONG. WHY NOT SHOW US THE WHOLE THING TOP TO BOTTOM? I think it is because they want an excuse when the tweak does not work…. thumbs down on this tweak.