Rocky Point High School’s varsity bowling team captured second place in the Small School championships and Wildcard Competition this winter, with a total pin count of 3,016 (201 per bowler average). As a result, the team competed in the Suffolk County championships at Bowlero in Sayville.
With an average of 221.2 and ranked ninth overall in Suffolk County and second overall in League IV, tenth-grader Brandon Epp was named to the Suffolk County All-Star team. He will now compete on March 10 in Syracuse. Brandon was also named Second Team All-County and First Team All-League IV.
Tenth-grader Robert Manginello averaged a score of 203.8 and is ranked fifth overall in League IV. He was named to the First Team All-League IV. Ninth-grader Sean Vogel averaged 196.2 points and was ranked 10th overall in League IV and named to Second Team All-League IV.
I met with an Opera developer this evening whom I proudly told about my purchase of a full Opera license two days ago and she asked me: So what do you like most about Opera 8?
The Speed. Opera is fast. I loved my Firefox that I used before, but when I tried out Opera it was a new experience: Is is very responsive and it renders webpages much faster than Firefox. I am on a DSL line, so a major brake is the lag when requesting pages, but once the data comes flowing, Opera builds pages out of it in no time.
The Keyboard Shortcuts. I am being a bit unfair here: In Firefox I could already operate 95% of the functionality I need by keyboard. Now I am at 99%. If I had read Firefox's Documentation as intensively as Opera's, they would probably come up to the same level. Opera has easy-to-use shortcuts to open new pages (that's the Opera-word for what is called "tabs" in Firefox) and to switch betwen them, to navigate inside webpages, to find text etc. Configuring them to personal preferences, which in theory is possible, idid not always work for me however.
The Fullscreen Mode. Again I am being unfair: I suppose Firefox has this as well. Anyway - I only started using this mode in Opera. You hit F11 and the browser goes into full screen mode. This is particularly useful when I am giving a presentation and want to show webpages to the audience. I can navigate and follow links with the keyboard. I gain screen space and the audience can concentrate on the webpage and is not distracted by the browser widgets.
Opera has become my main browser. I love it: It is comfortable, fast and stable. There are fewer plugins or extensions available than for Firefox, but I didn't really miss any of them, maybe except for Slogger. I also miss the functionality that you could drag the URL from the browser into a directory or and a shortcut would be created automatically. For some reason, this drag and drop functionality only works for me when pasting to the desktop, not in ordinary folders. Odd. I also found the possibility to address bookmarks with keyboard shortcuts better in Firefox. It was much easier to create custom searches that could be activated with keyboard shortcuts there. (This was actually my main concern when I thought about switching from Firefox to Opera. These shortcuts to my most important pages and searches make me fast. I still need to find better ways in Opera to navigate to them.)
The menu on top, then a link bar with three bookmarklets ("Post to MT Weblog", "post to del.icio.us", "go to referrer"), then the collection of currently open pages (tabs). Underneath, the navigation buttons on the left and the URL area to the right, which also serves as the progress indicator when a page loads. At the bottom, the status bar. That's all. The theme I use is Odyssey.
Have a look at Opera. (No, they are not paying me! :-)) Even if you decide to stay with your current browser, there are some interesting features to be discovered. But I bet the speed will seduce you... ;-)
What do you like most about Opera? What are your best keyboard shortcuts? Any hacks and trick you would like to share? Any questions?
1. The Speed. Opera is fast. I loved my Firefox that I used before, but when I tried out Opera it was a new experience: Is is very responsive and it renders webpages much faster than Firefox. I am on a DSL line, so a major brake is the lag when requesting pages, but once the data comes flowing, Opera builds pages out of it in no time.
maybe you should have increased the pipeline maxrequests and change other hidden preferences in firefox to speed it up. take a look at this if you ever feel like trying firefox again: http://forum.seo4india.com/lofiversion/index.php/t1125.html
2. The Keyboard Shortcuts. I am being a bit unfair here: In Firefox I could already operate 95% of the functionality I need by keyboard. Now I am at 99%. If I had read Firefox's Documentation as intensively as Opera's, they would probably come up to the same level. Opera has easy-to-use shortcuts to open new pages (that's the Opera-word for what is called "tabs" in Firefox) and to switch betwen them, to navigate inside webpages, to find text etc. Configuring them to personal preferences, which in theory is possible, idid not always work for me however.
if you don't want to touch your mouse never more, you can use hint-a-hint to navigate beetwen links too (http://www.hut.fi/~psillanp/hah_hp)
3. The Fullscreen Mode. Again I am being unfair: I suppose Firefox has this as well. Anyway - I only started using this mode in Opera. You hit F11 and the browser goes into full screen mode. This is particularly useful when I am giving a presentation and want to show webpages to the audience. I can navigate and follow links with the keyboard. I gain screen space and the audience can concentrate on the webpage and is not distracted by the browser widgets.
of course you can do this with firefox. and the key you have to press is F11, just like opera and internet explorer. but in firefox you can configure what you want to be shown and what to hide (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/clav/#almostfullscreen , http://www.krickelkrackel.de/autohide/, and if you want to start in full mode always http://m2n.com/linux/firefox/extensions/fullscreen/)
I switched, because it felt the right thing to do. Maybe Firefox can get as fast as Opera - I don't know. I called this entry "what I like about Opera" and not "Why you should switch from Firefox to Opera" for a good reason: I am not trying to convince anyone to switch. I just wanted to praise the browser I like best. If there are two or even more excellent browsers to choose from - great. Take the one you prefer. As long as your choice is not Microsoft Internet Explorer, everything is fine with me. ;-)
I like the "toggle loading and display of images" function a lot for slow internet connections. There is a Firefox plugin to do the same, but it's not that powerfull.
I don't like Opera very much, because the standard GUI/theme seems too cluttered compared to the pretty clean Firefox GUI. And further it seemed always (too) much work for me to go through all the settings to make Opera suit me (it's the same with KDE: too many settings available and the standard settings are just to overwhelming).
Okay, what is my answer. There are so much equal pleasing me features, that each one should be named here. An good wide and also deep overlook gives the tutorial of tntluoma:
I simply need drag&drop feature!!! I have tons of well categorized bookmarks (list grew up over years), which are stored in a folder as ".url" files.
Main advantage of my system is that they work on every computer unlike all bookmark solutions found in IE, FF or Opera. I can drag a bookmark to that folder with IE or FF, but not from Opera... Too bad, this is the only thing, that keeps me from migrating to this superb browser.
ps: try browsing in dual display mode, with Total Commander on secondary display. It is a revelation. Revelation!