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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
It's actually incredibly easy to create your own search keywords in Firefox, too. I've had 'gis' mapped to Google Image Search for years now, for example.
*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
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
A Wingding shovel.
Have fun figuring that one out.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Gis mapper !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I heard about this on IRC, tried it out and this article was the first one that showed.
You mean jumping on one leg while holding the Wii controller open slashdot?
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?
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)