Opera workspace organisation

It has always been a bug bear of mine that I choose to have to many tabs open on any given session on the net. In fact, I’m so used to using some of the in-built functionality in Opera that I shyed away from using a stand-alone RSS reader for a while.

One of the most useful things about Opera that I’ve discovered recently is that you can in fact run multiple sessions (or Windows) in Opera and navigate them all from the same window.

Perhaps you knew this already, but I’ll just explain a little further if you didn’t. Using sessions as Opera calls them to organise your web browser tabs is something I’ve done for a long time, but I hate having multiple Operas on the task bar, because that is not the ideal way to find your way to and from sessions.

Enter the dragon: Windows panel. Previously I was unaware that when you open multiple sessions of Opera the Windows panel actually shows you every tab open under the appropriate session. So, just by having this panel open when multi tasking makes it really very easy and unburdensome to find what you need.

See this picture to find out what I mean:

I have to admit there isn’t much organisation going on in that screenshot, mainly because I opened a saved session to show you what it looks like. But I’m sure you can see how you might be able to have multiple sessions open and have it all neatly organised.

For example, you could have your favorite websites open in one: We’ll say for example that they are SitePoint.com, Digg.com, Facebook.com perhaps Twitter.com etc etc.. and in another window you have say a bunch of stock photography websites open because you’re looking for a certain picture for a project. You can quickly see how organising your browser tabs in this manner is going to help de-clutter your experience.

The other side to this point is considering the windows panel does a lot for you, do you need a tabs bar at all? I generally have an extremely cluttered browser by default, with the panels open either on Mail, RSS, or even Window/sessions as in this example. Plus I have the view bar open as I store handy Opera functions such as user-style sheet and page zoom. But could I do completely without the tab bar? Not me, but for someone who likes a minimalist approach, it is really just a few clicks away:

To me, removing the tab bar and the menu bar is a pretty extreme approach. But there is something nice about it too I think. And with that a quick tap of F4 (if you are on WindowsOS) will pop open the panels and you have access right there to your tabs and windows. Yeah, even ctrl+tab will cycle through.

Although I’ve mentioned that I clutter my browser with lots of handy quick ways to navigate around, and for me that improves my ability to navigate quickly, using window panel now makes managing my tabs a whole lot easier, and while this doesn’t really apply to just browsing around, it comes in handy just at the point where you are multi-tasking like working on a project and needing lots and lots of tabs open.