Slashdot Mirror
Opera's Slashdot Easter Egg and Speed Dial
Thelomen writes "Opera Browser contains an Easter egg that is not widely known, recently reported over at OperaWatch.com: type /. in the address bar and you are taken directly to slashdot.org. Other recent news from Opera is their new Speed Dial feature, present in the most recent build from Desktop Team. At first glance Speed Dial just looks like 9 bookmarks you can open with CTRL+1 to CTRL+9. However, the pages on the Speed Dial are shown in thumbnail and are automatically pre-fetched in background — a useful thing if you have some heavy pages among your top bookmarks."
Microsoft just announced these features will be available in IE 7.1 slated for release in Q3 2008.
You could just hit your CTRL+1 preset :P
As a classically-trained singer, I heartily endorse this software in the hopes that it will raise cultural awareness of the musical art form.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I prefer RSS feeds thank you.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Cool, yes. But as easer eggs go, kinda lame...where's the fighting monster video or hidden game?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
/. takes me to file:///
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
And if you really want it as alt-D, then just go into Preferences->advanced->shortcuts and edit the keyboard setup.
Just add an entry for "d alt" "Focus address field" in the application or browser window section.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Well, you could just CTRL+L or change your keyboard shortcuts.
Try pressing F8 (focus to address bar) and F9 to return the focus to the page.
Hey all browsers have a "speed dial" function. It's called favorites or bookmarks!
In Firefox, I've had /. set as my Slashdot keyword for years.
Depending on your particular language version of Firefox 2, out of the box it will jump to various sites simply by entering keywords.
For example:
wp slashdot - look up Slashdot on Wikipedia
slang pwned - look up "pwned" on UrbanDictionary
Simply entering "wp" and "slang" also work because of the way the URLs are formed. As far as I know you can configure others. I haven't looked into it extensively.
Yeah, but they're not very practical, since you have to move your left hand away from the 'home' keys and your right is almost certainly on the mouse. Its my number one annoyance on the Mac as well for various browsers.. Alt + L, sure, D may not make sense, but its easier. :p
Who doesnt have slashdot as there home page anyway ?
What's the Easter Egg for Digg?
Feeling a bit scared? Afraid? That's just death lurking around.
I'm posting this from my Wii and indeed typing /. works here as well.
That's not an easter egg. Easter eggs are hidden features which are unrelated to the main task of the program. Usually they give credit to the team in a fun way.
At best, this is an undocumented shortcut. Lots of software has them.
(You can tell it wasn't hidden, because the obvious shortcut for "slashdot" is "/.". If it were hidden, you'd be doing something completely unlikely and suddenly and unexpectedly get to Slashdot, like pressing Ctrl+Alt+/, then Shift+Meta+., then double clicking on the "Help" menu item.)
Look out!
hejdig.
/OF
FYI: writing "g whatyousearchfor" opens google, "r anothersearch" opens groups.google.
It is one of those things that one won't understand how good it is before one tries it.
/. is present in ELinks as sd for something like two years already. It's great to see Opera is catching up.
That's very cool, and very nerdy, of Opera to add the "/." egg. I'm now tempted into downloading Opera and trying it out.
I've often thought that the Slashdot name was an unfortunately mistyped unix dot slash (./). Fortunately, I've recently discovered that it was originally named to confuse people who tried to verbalise the URL (i.e http colon slash slash slash dot dot org). Thus now I am reassured of the proper geek foundations for this site.
It's still a little unfortunate that Rob didn't choose "dotSlash" for this site's name. That would have appealed to the unix crowd, and would have been almost as confusing when reading out the URL (http colon slash slash dot slash dot org). Too late to change now, I suppose.
*ring* ..
Anonymous Coward: Hello?
CmdrTaco: Stop requesting my website and closing the connection ungracefully!
Anonymous Coward: Say what? Who is this?!
CmdrTaco: You know who this is!
Anonymous Coward: I have no idea..
CmdrTaco: Fool! I know you have Slashdot on speed dial, don't be playin'
Anonymous Coward: But I..
CmdrTaco: I star 69'd you! Don't you be disrespecting my server no more *click*
Anonymous Coward:
I use both firefox & opera on my USB stick, but I find Opera more useful. It packs a lot (email with IMAP, IRC+RSS+torrent client, widgets in a small package), and with the latest version, you can block ads and add your own searches, which you could not easily do before (though you could with Firefox). You can also have the browser read pages to you aloud which I haven't figured out how to do with Firefox.
Mod me as a troll, if you wish, but my Opera experience vs. Firefox is similar to Mac vs. Ubuntu. This is not to say that it's necessarily better, but sometimes you just don't feel like configuring everything, and for those times, it's great to have someone who does it right for you, and to top it all, gives it away for free.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
my little sister told me, that easter eggs are colorful eggs well painted by some mad rabbit.
Will that version include the famous monkey dance? [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Well done to your, little sister.
Look out!
Why would you need to focus the address bar to type unless your right hand was on the keyboard?
Opera has a built-in feed reader as well.
I don't use Mozilla/Firefox because of weird HTML bugs in valid HTML 4.x Strict pages.
There's something wrong when Firefox renders something incorrectly that IE gets right. Particularly for a 9 year old standard (published 18 December 1997).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
So where did you get the free Mac..?
Or did I miss the end of that analogy?
Linux: .\" >> /etc/hosts "
$ sudo bash -c "echo \"66.35.250.150
Windows:
Start->Run-> wordpad %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
and then add the line.
Additionally, it seems that if you type 'firefox xxxxx' in the address bar, if there is anything indexed at the Mozilla site matching that, it will open that page rather than revert to the default search engine. Try 'firefox help' 'firefox keyboard' 'firefox backup' etc.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Please make this shortcut to slashdot much, much more obscure. You are insulting our geekiness, and not providing us with any kind of challenge. Thank you.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Just tried this with Firefox and it redirected me to a site with huge pr0n collection.
I don't use Opera much, but I still have it installed alongside Firefox. The reason is that Firefox tends to render pages a little differently to IE (making them seem more...compressed vertically). I find that Opera does a better job of imitating the IE renderer.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Type http://www.slashdot.org/ in the URL bar and hit Enter. You are automatically taken to slashdot.org.
IT'S MAGIC I TELL YOU
I never knew the and tags existed. Let me guess: They arent used at all? :P
I heard about this on IRC, tried it out and this article was the first one that showed.
And Opera has had keywords (it calls them nicknames) since version 3, released in 1998.
:-)
I don't recall if they worked for bookmark folders at that stage, though, But I was using nicknames for folders to open all my news sites back in 2001/2002, I think - before RSS was really common it was necessary to open a whole folder of bookmarks to do my daily reading. Just typing "news" and getting El Reg, Ars Technica, Slashdot and others was very handy...
Finding a feature in a browser that Opera didn't have first or didn't have an antecedent of is very, very difficult.
Mine is set to "C:"
Yea, that's a reason I suppose. When I first switched to Mozilla several years back it was a lot more difficult. I got tired of cleaning spyware out of my machine that was downloaded secretly via IE bugs.. Once I switched the members of my immediate family over to Firefox those problems stopped dead. I didn't switch because I wanted to use open source. Anyways, many pages refused to load with "IE ONLY." Lots of pages loaded very poorly, with wrong positioning and incorrect fonts. Usually it was usable, but sometimes I'd have to load up IE.
Even as recent as three years ago, a good number of web pages had problems if you weren't using IE. Now, the number is very small and shrinking every day. These days it's mostly internal corporate apps that are broken. I bitch at our developers for doing IE only bullshit but they don't care..
I really can't remember the last time I HAD to load IE because a page rendered incorrectly. I'm sure they're still out there, but I never visit any. I do use IEtab on FireFox for when I open up Outlook Web Access.
So, since web site development standards are moving more and more toward full CSS usage and other goodies, and moving quickly away from ActiveX, it's such a small problem that I still don't think I'd bother with Opera and keeping another piece of software updated.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
You certainly have the right to use something without odd HTML bugs that have never once affected my web browsing experience, but it seems too a little too elitist to me.
I'm sure they'll fix it eventually, but they do have a lot of work to do, and this particular problem must only affect a small number of pages, or doesn't really affect the usability of any web sites.
I know I've never used those tags on any sites I've put together. Regardless I'm not a paid web developer, but I do favors.
Anyways, it's not enough to get me to switch to a closed source program when the open source one works so well.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Do you guys still trust a browser that runs without hardware DEP? (buffer overrun protection)
.aspack (an executable packer used by Opera, IrfanView and XNView), .pcle (currently unknown) and .sforce (the VERY UNPOPULAR game/programs copy protection).
e =hardware_dep_has_a_backdoor&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2cwcom
A fully patched Windows XP SP2 box that runs the latest version of Opera will turn off DEP (Data Execution Prevention) for the Opera process. Leaving the door open to buffer overrun attacks. Not good at all.
The problem comes from the fact that the DEP OPTOUT mode should be called OPTOUT + BACKDOORS. There are currently 3 backdoors section strings that when found in the executable header disable the DEP for the process. These strings are
More about this on my blog. http://blog.fabriceroux.com/index.php?blog=1&titl
Home of Faramir Paint Shop Pro scripts
You mean jumping on one leg while holding the Wii controller open slashdot?
The difference between slashdot (/.) and dotslash (./) is that the latter is in theory a legal address. Unless early monday sunshine has rotted my brain all internet addresses start with a . (.slashdot.org) to indicate the root of the address, just that it is usually left off.
The / indicates the end of the domain name and the start of, eh what is the rest called again, DAMN YOU SUN!
So ./ would be the website running on the root servers.
Or maybe I am just spouting nonsense.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It works !! I've beem wasting my keyboard presses for months =) As for it being an easter egg, it is: bookmark nicknames cannot contain a dot or a slash. Also, note that Opera does have bookmark nicknames, in case you didn't know, so that you can type "sd" for slashdot as well. And "g stuff" to google stuff. Etc.
So emacs is full of easter eggs...
[Ducks]
That's strange, because I've been using Firefox since back when it was called Phoenix, and the only issue I ran into was filing my taxes online through H&R Block.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
doesnt work with the opera on my nokia770 :( must only work in newer operas (770 uses Opera Version "8.02 Internal" Build "1.1.50)
Have no fear, it's Bug #915. (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915 - you'll have to copy-paste since Bugzilla blocks Slashdot referers.)
... oh.
... oh.
It's been open since September 1998, almost as long as the spec has been published. It's marked as blocking the release of Mozilla 1.3, so once that gets released,
Well, now it's marked blocking Mozilla 1.9, so once that gets released,
Well... at least it's in there. And has been for almost 10 years.
It's one of the oldest bugs in Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915
(It's marked helpwanted, so it looks like it'll remain for even longer)
More on IE support for columns:
http://ln.hixie.ch/?count=1&start=1070385285
While I press Alt-D, I move my mouse hand to the keyboard, unless I'm already there (I try to navigate using the keyboard instead of the mouse).
Command-1 through Command-9 activate the first 9 links in your bookmark bar. This works even when the bookmark bar is hidden. If you like speed and real estate (and have a good memory) it's a great way to go. I've set the first 4 links to be the same on every Mac I use and it's really handy--my most-visited sites are a keystroke away and it's the same wherever I am.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Try hitting Ctrl-Alt-V. It will open up a tab that runs whatever page you are on through the W3C Markup Validation service. It's quite handy for checking your own pages for errors, or to find out just how badly someone else screwed up. :-D
Running the Slashdot front page through it gives me the following:
Result: Failed validation, 5 errors
File: default.htm
Encoding: iso-8859-1
Doctype: HTML 4.01 Strict
This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Strict!
Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.
Error Line 291 column 126: delimiter "'" invalid: only S separators and TAGC allowed here. ...ads/sidenav_sky.js?'+dfp_ord+'">');
Error Line 291 column 126: end tag for element "SCR" which is not open. ...ads/sidenav_sky.js?'+dfp_ord+'">');
The Validator found an end tag for the above element, but that element is not currently open. This is often caused by a leftover end tag from an element that was removed during editing, or by an implicitly closed element (if you have an error related to an element being used where it is not allowed, this is almost certainly the case). In the latter case this error will disappear as soon as you fix the original problem.
If this error occured in a script section of your document, you should probably read this FAQ entry.
Error Line 292 column 121: delimiter "'" invalid: only S separators and TAGC allowed here. ...ication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> ');
Error Line 292 column 121: end tag for element "SCR" which is not open. ...ication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> ');
Error Line 2091 column 443: end tag for element "STYLE" which is not open. ...n-right: 110px \!important; \}')}
For shame, Slashdot, for shame!
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
There's something wrong when Firefox renders something incorrectly that IE gets right. Particularly for a 9 year old standard
That's not so annoying as Firefox being the only browser (among IE/opera/safari/konqueror) to get the border-collapse model for tables wrong. Half of the collapsed border (yes.. the half of it), will flow outside the container, while the other half displays inside the container.
Nop, that's not the correct box model at all, *for collapsed border* on tables.
I was looking for this over four years ago!
Marge! I've just doubled my productivity! - Homer
Yes, it's illegal to do that in CSS. However, the definition for the COL element lists %cellhalign; in its attribute list. The description of the COL element is "The COL element allows authors to group together attribute specifications for table columns. The COL does not group columns together structurally -- that is the role of the COLGROUP element. COL elements are empty and serve only as a support for attributes. They may appear inside or outside an explicit column group (i.e., COLGROUP element)."
In other words, while it's illegal to do text alignment using COL and CSS, it's perfectly legal in HTML 4 to do <col align="center">.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Don't get me wrong, I still have Firefox around, I just choose not to use it as my main browsing experience.
The other reason is that they won't implement things just because other browsers do it that way. Did you know that Firefox is the only major browser that does <map> tags differently under text/html than text/xhtml+xml for the same page?
And that the Mozilla devs won't even consider changing this behavior?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
About time Opera got some well-deserved recognition. It outbeats all other browsers both in performance and funcitonality. Go Opera! :D :)
You can actually set up bookmarks to those sites (or groups of tabs--open the whole set, then bookmark that "set of tabs") and add the keywords you described (go to that bookmark's properties, type in the keyword). The sad thing is that I'm tempted to set up some of those now...
:-)
This being slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if someone made an extension / offered a Mozilla patch to do something like that just because they were bored...
Yea, same thing happened to me in 2001, but then Mozilla didn't even exist as an RC. I got tired of waiting and gave Opera 5.12 a try, and never looked back. Never really had a reason to use anything else very often.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
"You really want to taunt a Wii user? He's bound to be in better shape than you."
....
I don't know with those RSI problems lately and flying remote controls..
I just don't know
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Ohh my, all the way back then? Wow.
If you'd read my post, you'd see I was referring to Mozilla, before Firefox. Lots of pages back then, around the time Mozilla became available, were terrible if you didn't use IE. A lot of it was because of ActiveX, but a lot was rendering quirks of IE.
Like I said, I don't have to use IE very much. I use it for things like OWA, but I don't have to. Corporate apps tend to be IE only, unfortunately.
Don't be so defensive. Sheesh, it's just a browser.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I used Mozilla prior to Phoenix, even Netscape 6 on Windows, back before I switched to Linux. Rendering bugs never seemed to get in my way.
Don't be so sarcastic...it's just a comment.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
How would you like the legislature (created by the King's bench) to hard-code the Statutory venue to point all references of "Cool" to the Office of CowboyNeal?
/etc if acceptably implemented.
You can't reason with the binary over the meaning and interpretation "/." and how it bipasses all mater of re-appraisal at the URL field. A bigger quest would be to determine if the easter-egg can be supplanted by a systemic replacement in its shortcut/favorite tab. I don't have access to my console, and haven't upgraded Opera beyond version 7 on it. Can anyone test that?
A trait of a polymorphic virus is it can modify the binary/law of itself, while Opera has only hardcoded "/." at compilation. Has anyone experimented in polymorphic applications that keep their configuration within the binary? That's a neat survey, and could do-away with
without prejudice
I've being doing this in Opera for months, perhaps years.
/. bookmark'.
In fact the first time I realized it, I just thought: 'one moment, I don't remember saving that
Anyway, good thing you noticed it ^^.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
i just typed /. in firefox and spysweeper said it blocked access to /. oh hoy hoy!!.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25891 8
The background loading thing that Opera also does is of course new.
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.