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."

In other news...

Microsoft just announced these features will be available in IE 7.1 slated for release in Q3 2008.

Or

You could just hit your CTRL+1 preset :P

Hooray for Opera!

As a classically-trained singer, I heartily endorse this software in the hopes that it will raise cultural awareness of the musical art form.

Well

I prefer RSS feeds thank you.

easter egg?

Cool, yes. But as easer eggs go, kinda lame...where's the fighting monster video or hidden game?

Re:easter egg?

I agree. Its kinda cool and all but doesn't have the charm of real easter eggs. Now the great easter eggs would have been soemthing like:

1. Type 'nerds' and it opens slashdot, digg, and theregister in tabs.
2. Type 'mafia' and it opens RIAA and MPAA sites in tabs.
3. Type 'sux' and it opens microsoft website.
4. Type 'spam' and it opens hotmail.
5. Type 'pr0n' and it turns off the pop-up bocker, opens 20 pr0n sites and an online catalog of kleenex in tabs .
6. Type 'loser' and it opens ascii porn sites.
7. Type 'kawaii' and it opens aninewnewsnetwork and anime sections of isohunt,piratebay and torrentleech in tabs.
7. Type 'needalife' and it opens startrek and trekkipr0n sites.

Re:easter egg?

trekkipr0n sites

WHAT?!? These exist and no-one ever told me?

I've wasted my life!

In firefox...

/. takes me to file:///

Re:In firefox...

Here's a fun trick for you:

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 /. into that field.

Now any time you enter /. 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.

(Accidentally posted this anonymous the first time. Reposting it so hopefully people see it.)

speeddial

Hey all browsers have a "speed dial" function. It's called favorites or bookmarks!

Heh, some easter egg

In Firefox, I've had /. set as my Slashdot keyword for years.

Uh, Firefox has this also...

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.

Re:Uh, Firefox has this also...

Sorry for the double-post, but here's how to do it and some further examples:

http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.ht ml [johnbokma.com]

It's amazing what two seconds in Google turns up.

umm ?

Who doesnt have slashdot as there home page anyway ?

So...

What's the Easter Egg for Digg?

Re:So...

A Wingding shovel.
Have fun figuring that one out.

Wii

I'm posting this from my Wii and indeed typing /. works here as well.

Re:Amaziiiing stuff

"You mean jumping on one leg while holding the Wii controller open slashdot?"

You really want to taunt a Wii user? He's bound to be in better shape than you.

Not an easter egg!

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.)

Re:Not an easter egg!

Damn, time to change the keybindings on my apps to something less obvious.

You use Emacs to run Opera? :)

g and r

hejdig.

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.

/OF

Nothing new

/. is present in ELinks as sd for something like two years already. It's great to see Opera is catching up.

How Slashdot was named ...

  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.

Why not to put /. on speed dial

*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: ..

loving it

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.

Of all articles to show up...

I heard about this on IRC, tried it out and this article was the first one that showed.

Holy Cow

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.

maemo

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)

Safari has this too

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.

Another fun Opera trick....

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!

finally!

I was looking for this over four years ago [opera.com]!

Nice, but old stuff

I've being doing this in Opera for months, perhaps years.

In fact the first time I realized it, I just thought: 'one moment, I don't remember saving that /. bookmark'.

Anyway, good thing you noticed it ^^.

I suggested this to Mozilla in 2004...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25891 8 [mozilla.org]

The background loading thing that Opera also does is of course new.

How about ctrl-l or F8

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.

Re:Still won't use opera.

Well, you could just CTRL+L or change your keyboard shortcuts.

Re:Still won't use opera.

Try pressing F8 (focus to address bar) and F9 to return the focus to the page.

Re:Still won't use opera.

I don't use Mozilla/Firefox because of weird HTML bugs [vgmusic.com] in valid HTML 4.x Strict [w3.org] 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 [w3.org]).

Re:Still won't use opera.

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.

Re:Opera runs without hardware DEP

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?

Re:Opera runs without hardware DEP

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)

Re:Opera runs without hardware DEP

didn't firefox have a security vunerabilty found every day last month?