Network

These settings fine-tune communication between your computer and the Internet.

Browser identification

When a Web browser connects to a Web site, it tells the Web site which browser it is. Some Web sites provide content tailored for particular browsers. But because browsers are in constant development, assumptions made by page designers may not have the intended effect.

If you have problems using a site, try changing browser identification (press F12) and reload.

Tip: Learn more about identifying as other browsers from the Quick preferences menu.

Proxy servers

A proxy server is a computer that can:

1. Store local copies of Web pages so that a group of people (e.g. employees or subscribers) can get quick access to often-visited Web pages
2. Act as interpreter between your browser and a special service
3. Alter or monitor information exchange
4. Speed up Internet communication

Click and enter the necessary information. All traffic over the respective protocol will now go through the proxy server you specify.

To use a proxy, you need to specify:

1. A protocol (e.g. HTTP)
2. An Internet address (e.g. proxy.example.org or 207.69.194.213)
3. A port number (e.g. 5000)

You can get this information from:

1. Your Internet service provider (ISP)
2. The organization that hosts the proxy server you wish to use
3. Documentation that comes with your proxy software

To access certain sites without going through the proxy, enter Web addresses to exclude:

If your Internet provider requires automatic proxy, please enter the Web address you have been provided:

Learn more about proxies

Server name completion

When you enter a single word (e.g. "opera") in Opera's address field, Opera will:

1. Look for a bookmark nicknamed "opera"
2. Look for a computer in your local network called "opera"
3. Add prefixes (e.g. "www") and suffixes (e.g. "com") and look up "www.opera.com"

Tip: You can enter comma-separated lists of prefixes and suffixes.

Note: It takes time to try multiple combinations, so turn this feature off for faster browsing.

Performance

DNS (Domain Name System) is used to translate a Web address (e.g. www.opera.com) into an IP number (e.g. 207.69.194.213).

Turn synchronous DNS on if:

1. Your DNS server can only look up one IP number at a time (ask your service provider)
2. You are using Windows 95 with the Winsock 2 upgrade

Try changing the numerical settings if you have a slow computer or have problems with your Internet connection, but be sure you know what you are doing.

International Web addresses

UTF-8 is an international standard for encoding characters. If you would like to use and exchange Web addresses that contain characters from other languages, you should let Opera use UTF-8 encoding.

Some servers expect locally encoded strings (addresses) rather than UTF-8.

Technical example: If you type in an address with Norwegian letters, for example http://www.example.org/æøå.html, some servers may prefer that Opera converts the address and sends http://www.example.org/%E6%F8%E5.html (latin-1) instead of http://www.example.org/%C3%A6%C3%B8%C3%A5.html (UTF-8).

Server errors

To make messages (the response) from a Web server easier to understand, Opera can display them in a dialog box in your own language.

You have these choices:

• Always show the response given by the server
• Always show Opera's dialog box
• Let Opera make the appropriate choice in each case

FTP

When you access an FTP service with a user name and a path, for example john@ftp.example.org:games/c64, the FTP path can be interpreted in two ways:

Note: Logging in as "anonymous" will always log into the root directory.

Technical tip: Using "//" at the beginning of an FTP path will trigger a log-in (relative) to the server's root directory. This is helpful if you want to log into an FTP server, but not to your user (home) directory.

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