Dungeon Overlord on Facebook has been in beta for a bit over 9 months now. Much has improved, but some things still suck. Most notably, it leaks memory. Also, often for no apparent reason it just crawls or halts, and of course the containing browser window effectively bogs down or freezes up as well. This might or might not be tied to something marginal in Facebook, or on the app server side.

It's really bad in Chrome, but Chrome is nice about running the Flash app in its own process so (using Process Explorer or whatever) I can kill the DO process or give it more or less CPU priority. It's marginally better in Firefox, again I can selectively kill the Flash plugin-container process. I haven't dicked with it in IE because, if anything, IE's architecture gives much less control than its competitors. And today I dusted off Opera.

So far, it runs more smoothly in Opera than in any other browser, which doesn't quite make sense because hey, they're all just containers for Flash virtual-machine plugins, aren't they? But there it is.

However, Opera has this stupid "speed dial" page it loads instead of your designated home page when you open a new tab. Hey fuckos, that's real cute, shoehorning the telephone paradigm onto the browser... how about instead though? When I open a new tab (or window, in my case, because the Windows taskbar is my "tab" bar tyvm), you just open my home page. And if there's a short-list of sites I might want to select from, every time I open a new window, I'll just bookmark them.

Easier said than done, because Opera users are a small minority, hence poor config tip circulation compared to more popular browsers. And over the many years, Opera have repeatedly changed access to finicky preferences, so step-by-step instructions for, say, Opera 9 are no longer applicable.

Normally any Windows user looks in the menu system for something called "Options" or "Preferences", but following a trend in popular computing, Opera doesn't HAVE a menu bar. Like Firefox, "about:config" in Opera opens an extensive page of configurable preferences. What we're really looking for here though, is a "Preferences" dialog invoked by Alt+P.

On the Advanced tab in the Prefs dialog, near the bottom of the left-hand category list, is "Shortcuts". We're interested in the "Keyboard setup" section at the bottom. For safety's sake, Opera automatically protects its standard keyboard config, and will save any changes to a setup called "Opera standard (modified)".

So, clicking the "Edit" button to the right, we're in the Edit Keyboard Setup dialog. In the Search box, we type (in syntax backward Opera's) "n ctrl", which shows an associated command something like "New browser window". Double-clicking on that value, we change it to "New browser window & Go to homepage", and save. Voilà, Opera 11 now behaves consistently with other browsers on Ctrl+N.