Requirements:

Ramdisk enabled (as temp directory variable; will need around 5MB in the Ramdisk for the application, disk cache is set to 5MB).

Intro:

This is a modular, ready-to-go plugin. The FREEWARE Opera 8.51 is included as a compressed self-extracting executable to save space. This is really my personal Opera plugin, but I think it will be useful to some other people and can serve as a very lightweight alternative to other browsers, especially if you're a bit pressed for space on your booting device. This file size falls between OB1 (1MB) and the next smallest browser plugin, K-meleon (5.4MB on cd); it's only 3.5MB heavy on cd and is tweaked to use little memory/space once running in the RAMdisk (this can be further tweaked). W3C/DOM compliant, JS, CSS, tabbing, popup blocking, etc. etc. And a mouse isn't required. :) Or you can enable the mouse gestures.

Most of the precustomizations were done to my preferred specifications:

* NO Java (Java also disabled in INI setup). 
* Flash is included in all Opera browsers since version 5 or so, but in 
  this package it's merely disabled (avoiding spastic Flash advertisements).
  To enable, just hit F12 while in Opera and click "Enable Plugins." 
* No frills - standard skin, minimal toolbar, Hotlist closed by default, personal bar 
  and a few other GUI things turned off for more screen space (I put back the toolbar, 
  though, since my Opera has no toolbars), slightly tweaked custom menu.ini, animated 
  GIFs turned off (sorry, I hate ani-gif banner ads; you can turn it back on easily). 
* All-purpose-search field (default to Google) in the lower right. 
* Can emulate other browser types if some sites have bad browser sniffing. 
* Popups set to requested-only by default (ignore unrequested).
* Homepage set to a local keyboard shortcut help file.
* Some other things I'm not remembering. Sorry. The overall look is similar to K-meleon.
* Opera is set as the default browser for HTML documents thanks to registry entries 
  provided by other forum Opera users.
  

Customization:

I tried to make this a modular plugin to make customization easy, something the normal Opera install is. You should use only INIs generated from an Opera 8.5 install because it is considered a major internal iteration and certain settings are not compatible with Opera 7 and may not be compatible with 8.0x. The main plugin executable is static, but if you're already an Opera user, there are certain optional customizations you can do (when editing the INI files, remember that the file format is Unicode/UTF-8):

• opera6.adr (bookmarks), opera6.ini (user settings), and other *dat files (e.g. cookies4.dat) should be in custom\profile\ folder.
• If you add your own *.ini files, search and replace all local paths to +temp+\opera851\! I've added a sample INI file (SAMPLE.INI.TXT) for you to look at in case you're not sure about the format. (The three custom INIs with local paths you can add are OperaDef6.ini, opera6,ini, and mail\index.ini.)
• To customize the Opera browser GUI language, you will need to download the appropriate language file *.lng add it to custom\, and edit the "Language File" string in your custom opera6.ini to point to it (+temp+\opera851\*.lng).
• Other customized files should be in their associated folders (e.g. a custom menu INI in custom\profile\menu\, or custom search fields search.ini in custom\).

There are a few other Opera plugins on the forum with or different features/setups if you need it, but it should be fairly easy to add customizations to the custom\ folder if you look at the required directory tree structure. Note that this file structure assumes a single-user installation; in a multi-user environment, your profile will exist under
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Opera\*
or elsewhere, if you changed the profile path as I did in my personal installation.

[your install path]		[plugin]
   \opera8*\              \opera851\custom\
	    \classes                       |
	    \defaults                      |
	    \images                        |
	    \mail                          \mail
	    \profile                       \profile (main user customization settings)
	    \program                       \program\plugins (netscape plugin emulation)
	    \skin                          \skin
	    \styles                        \styles

For a lot more information on using Opera, go to their site. Opera has since removed the off-line help files from the installation, but I included the keyboard shortcuts reference file.
Customizing Opera
Also try searching their very active user support forums for other issues and questions.

Other notes:

Information for target drive (%temp%) and no-overwrite are embedded within the self-extracting executable itself. Technically, Opera is supposed to be able to function with a relative path (see the "portable Opera" projects). It has also been a known 'issue' that Opera does not expand path variables like %temp%. I had found previously that it tends to work better with a full path anyway. For these reasons, I implemented the sed method in the 7.23 version of the plugin. The Opera batch file will work as long as there is some version of sed.exe in the system directory.

Thanks to other Opera users on the forum who worked on other plugins after which I initially modeled the 7.23 plugin on which this 8.51 is built, (Juan, oscar, Teletom for old K-meleon, etc.)

Comments, suggestions, problems?
- oion