I figure it has been some days since I last wrote anything about my favourite browser Opera. Today I have 5 useful tips. These are simple ones and do not require you to edit any file or deep rooted configurations, just simple preferences.

1. Portable installation – Portable software has gained a lot of popularity these days. Everyone’s using portable versions of Chrome, Firefox etc. Unofficial Opera USB has been available for quite some time. But did you know that portable installation is now officially supported in the Opera installer? To install opera portable, on the opera installer, click on the options button. On the next screen, from the Install for dropdown, select Stand-alone installation (USB).
   
   
2. Identify as IE or FF – Sometimes some websites don’t open in Opera just because the developers don’t want them to open in Opera. So if the website is unable to identify the browser as Opera, it would work fine. There’s a simple solution for this provided by Opera. When a site doesn’t open properly, right click on the web page and select Edit site preferences. Go to the Network Tab. From the Browser Identification dropdown, select the options Identify as Firefox or Identify as Internet Explorer
   

3. Panel Toggle – The Opera sidebar is very useful. The many features of Opera like Notes, Unite, Mail/RSS are accessible from the sidebar. However, by default there is only a toolbar button to open or close the sidebar. To enable panel toggle at the edge, click on the Opera button and Select Appearance (or press Shift + F12). Go to the panels tab, at the bottom, select the option Show panel Toggle at edge of window. Now you can simply click at the left edge of the screen to open/close the sidebar.
   
   
4. Start Bar – The Start bar is a very useful feature of Opera. But by default it remains disabled. The Start Bar is a toolbar that appears when the user clicks in the address bar. By default there are bookmarks, top 10 etc. in the Start Bar. However, you can customize it yourself and add options which you use but not that frequently. For example, I add enable/disable sound, browser identification, page zoom etc. on the Start Bar.
   
   
   To enable the start bar, go to Appearance. Go to the Toolbars tab and select Start Bar. Press ok and come out.
   
   
5. Skin Color – Opera allows users to customize the skin colour. By default there are 9 choices. However, you are not limited by those choices, you can choose any color you want to. For this, type Opera:Config in the address bar. Expland the Colors node. Scroll a bit to find the option named Skin (Click here if you are using Opera). Click on dropdown on the right of it, Click on the Other… button. Select any color you want for the skin.
   

Hope these tips will be helpful to the users of Opera Browser.