Re: Weekly 51 for Christmas
Reply #9 –
In very old times (talking about the very dawn of the internet) there were browsers without a permanent address bar. The address field was implemented as a dialogue box. Opera's secondary address field is a remnant of that. Relic I would say
I personally immediately saw its usefulness. For example, the first computers I used had a fairly small screen, so I often set the browser fullscreen. Opera's fullscreen is such that no toolbars and buttons remain visible. This is where the secondary address bar is handy.
It's handy not just for typing in addresses, but also for extracting urls from links. I have this menu item in Opera:
[Link Popup Menu]
...
Item, "Edit link" = "Copy link, -2, "urlinfo" & Delay, 200 & Go to page & Delay, 200 & Paste"
...
[Link Popup Menu] means the item is in the menu that opens up when right-clicking a link.
Copy link, -2, "urlinfo" means take the url from the link.
Go to page opens up the secondary address field and Paste puts the url in it. You would not want to use your primary address field for this, would you?
Later I discovered exactly the same function (extract url) was implemented in Elinks out of the box. So, clearly this is not some ultrageeky thing necessary only for me. By the way, Elinks is one such browser that has no primary address bar at all, only address field as a popup dialogue.
Let's hope next year Otter will acquire macros so we can serialise actions like in Opera, and proper fullscreen like in Opera.