TitBit: Opera’s Neat ‘Spacebar’ Trick

I tend to use three Web browsers. It is more or less random as to which Web browser I will use at any given time however I would say that mostly I use Firefox and that the browser I use the least out of the three is Internet Explorer. The one in the middle is Opera.

Opera is clean and fast and it has a trick that it does that, as far as I know, neither Internet Explorer nor Firefox can do. If they can do this then I have not come across the key combination that makes it happen.

The trick is that with Opera you can use the keyboard spacebar to go to the next page in those cases where you are working through a multi-page Web site.

As an example, say you do a Google search that returns hundreds of pages of results; as most Google searches do. With Internet Explorer or Firefox you will need to use the mouse or PageDown or DownArrow to go work down the page, and then at the end of the current page you need to either click on ‘Next’ or click on the next page number in the sequence in order to go to the next ‘page’.

With Opera you can use the spacebar to scroll down through the list of search results, and then, when you hit the bottom, you just use the spacebar one more time and Opera will auto-magically bring up the next page of search results.

Using the spacebar to advance to the next page works with more than Google search lists. It works with many (but not all) multi-page Web site listings.

This is not a simple thing for Opera to do. It actually has to have a look at the Web page coding and try and work out the method that the site is using to advance pages. If it can’t work this out then it won’t try and advance pages (so hitting spacebar at the end of the page does nothing).

For example while it works with the WinSuperSite (_www.winsupersite.com) it does not work with my Abalook site (obviously whatever method SquareSpace use to advance pages is something Opera cannot work out).