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Using less browser toolbars

One thing that I don’t like is having a big chunk of my screen area wasted with browser’s toolbars. Generally, i try to remove all of them, leaving behind only the minimum required to browse the web, this way I’m able to maximize the area used for what really matters. Recently i start using one really neat webapp called Bundlr that lets me save and organize images, videos, tweets and some other type of content in a single place that’s always available for me and for the public (the premium account allows private bundles), something similar to Pinterest but way better.

The app works just fine, but since my browser is Opera I’m obligated to use their bookmarklet in bookmarks toolbar to select and capture the content i want to add to my bundles. This isn’t good because, or this bar steals space from my screen or i have to turn it on and off every time i want to clip something. Chrome users have an extension that solves this problem in a beautiful and practical way, adding a button right next to the address bar.

Well i just need something similar in Opera, so i tried to do the same thing and create an extension to opera that transforms the bookmarklet into a button. The final result is in the picture bellow:snapshot

And it works pretty fine!

I could upload this thing to Opera Addons website but they don’t allow the extensions to run external javascript, so probably this one will not be accepted. For those of you who want to try it, here is the link to the file.

Maybe on a future post i’ll explain how to do a simple Opera extension and what steps were needed to transform the bookmarklet in an extension.

Edit: just updated the extension to better handle secure connections, following a recomendation from the bundlr team.  (19-07-2012 )

By Gonçalo Valério

Software developer and owner of this blog. More in the "about" page.