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
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.
Here's a fun trick for you:
/. into that field.
/. as a the URL in your address bar, you'll be taken straight to Slashdot. If you think that's cool, do some looking into the keyword search bookmarks Firefox allows you to create.
Bookmark Slashdot in Firefox. Now right-click the bookmark and select 'Properties'.
In the window that comes up, there's a field marked 'Keyword'. Enter
Now any time you enter
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.
Here's a fun trick for you:
/. into that field.
/. as a the URL in your address bar, you'll be taken straight to Slashdot. If you think that's cool, do some looking into the keyword search bookmarks Firefox allows you to create.
Bookmark Slashdot in Firefox. Now right-click the bookmark and select 'Properties'.
In the window that comes up, there's a field marked 'Keyword'. Enter
Now any time you enter
(Accidentally posted this anonymous the first time. Reposting it so hopefully people see it.)
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?
Exciting. Well, not really. Both Opera and Firefox have had this ability to make bookmark keywords for a long time. Woopty-freakin-do. Ranks up with the original post in terms of unnecessary information.
Speaking of the OP, as easter eggs go, yeah it is lame. Hardly worth a post. It's all just fanboyism of one type or another.
(burning some karma.)Shick's Law: There is no problem a good miracle can't solve.
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.
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.
So, what cool keyword searches do people like to have?
When I set up Opera, in addition to the builtin 'g' for google, I add
'gi' for Google Images,
'w' for Wikipedia,
'wkt' for Wiktionary,
'imdb' for the International Movie Database,
'animenn' for Anime News Network and
'bm' for a Norwegian Bokmål dictionary.
It's become almost indispensable. Does IE7 have this yet?
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
I never knew the and tags existed. Let me guess: They arent used at all? :P
Submit a patch. This is a critical bug which must be fixed.
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.
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. -
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.
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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)
That's exactly what happened to me with Opera.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
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.
Well, I trusted it for some seven years plus before DEP came along, so I guess the answer is yes.
It'd be nice if Opera supported DEP. I suspect it doesn't because they're very proud of its small size, even if it is enhanced by a packer. No other internet suite fits a browser, RSS reader, POP3/IMAP4 mail client, IRC client and NNTP client in such a small package. The packer makes it look even more impressive, of course, but even when unpacked it's still danged small for all that it does.
Opera has had surprisingly few really bad security issues over its lifetime - far fewer than most alternatives. The track history of the software and the attitude of its vendor do far more to assure me of its security than whether or not it uses hardware DEP support.
Because there's a difference between just being protected by hardware and being protected by good design. Other browsers may well support DEP, but we can probably all think of a certain browser that has an awful design which is almost impossible to truly secure because it places - deep in its design - functionality and integration with the OS above security.
DEP is nice, but not all attacks are buffer overruns. Some of them are just getting a browser to do something the designers thought was cool at the time, but didn't realise the security implications of.
Having read you article, I have a question - have you actually contacted Opera themselves about this and expressed your concerns to them? You don't say that you have, so I'm currently forced to conclude you're just griping for the sake of griping or worse, have no intention of doing more than self-publicising about this.
Speak to Opera. If you haven't before now, then start by apologising for posting this without first asking them what's up with this. Be polite, and tell them you'd like an official reply to follow up this entry with.
And in future, would you consider following responsible disclosure guidelines... If this is as serious as you seem to think it is, then it's bloody reckless of you not to, no?
Searches:
'g' google search (which sort of makes the search engine box in the upper right corner redundant)
'gcc' Google search for CC-licensed material.
'loc' Search local.google.com
'news' google news search
'quot' stock quotes (as in 'quot msft' or 'quot goog')
'amazon' Amazon search
'wiki' Search wikipedia (through Google)
'wikil' Search wikipedia, but using "I'm feeling lucky" (usually works)
'pydoc' Takes me to Python documentation for the required module (such as "pydoc os" or "pydoc random")
'flickr' Should be obvious
'yt' Youtube search
'bom' Search the Book of Mormon (yeah, there was a time when I did such things)
'spell' Search m-w.com (I use it as a sort of spell checker, for when I'm not sure I remember how to spell "occasion" or whatnot)
Shortcuts:
'bb' takes me to boingboing.net
'/.' takes me to slashdot
'pwot' pointlesswasteoftime.com
'ok' okcupid.com (I'm not lame! I'm not!)
'wwdn' Wil Wheaton's blog
'blog' Takes me to my bloggin' place.
'mail' Takes me to yahoo mail
I might set up a couple for Google Calendar eventually.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
It is a funny thing to bring up for this specific browser title, Opera.
Opera has been packing executable for years and I can't remember a single buffer overrun bug in the wild.
You can say ANYTHING about Opera but you can't say it is insecure, period.
(posted via licensed Omniweb on OS X)
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).
didn't firefox have a security vunerabilty found every day last month?
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.
- Dozens for a couple small sites I use.
- Queries for common DB queries using PhpMyAdmin on box. (for example, 'ecdbqid' for looking up eC user by id; localdb just for PhpMyAdmin on localhost.)
- demd5 for a reverse md5 lookup (+ demd5a through demd5c in case it's not found in the first database).
- de for http://www.dict.cc/?s=%25s
- e2 for Everything2
- ol for Onelook
- anagram for http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anag
r am=%25s
- dns for http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ptr.ch?ip=%25s
- Shortcuts for numerous Google searches, of course.
- rot13 for http://rot13.com/index.php?text=%25s
- ensv for http://www.tranexp.com:2000/InterTran?type=text&f
r om=eng&to=swe&text=%25s (At some point, I intend to define keywords for all the combos, but I think I have to edit bookmarks.html directly to do that en masse.)
And some others.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
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.
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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.
Don't you find it's kind of funny that the best configuration you can come up with Opera ships with by default, bet there's lots of stuff like that... Oh well it's closed source guess it isn't an option.
How is that the best I 'can come up with?' I'm mainly pointing out that it's available in both browsers.
Ah, bookmark nicknames. Another feature Firefox "borrowed" from Opera :)
Clever signature text goes here.
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.