Opera Web Browser: GTK / KDE Integration – File selector windows

My Opinion:

Opera is a great browser. It’s fast, elegant, very original, first to the market with new features and it’s feature rich out of the box! To me it’s mail client is very slick and fast and outshines most competitors. It also allows you to shift between operating platforms like Windows, Mac and Linux (I use Kubuntu) seemlessly. It absolutely makes the learning curve – zero when it comes to your critical daily chores. Sometimes I’ve felt it makes working so boring, because it’s got most things you need for your daily activities and there is absolutely no switching between applications. It also works great as a web browser. Most of the problems people report with Opera are mostly due to non-standard compliant web pages and they’ve patiently warded through this and now even the world is thinking about web standards, compliance and reliance on open web technologies and Opera has been doing this for as long as I can remember.

That said, in Linux, there are some minor things that might irritate you like the file selector boxes still using the QT toolkit, which by the way is very primitive. After some working around and googling and binging (!), here are some solutions. These tweaks worked in OpenSuse and Ubuntu’s latest iterations, can’t say about the previous versions as of now. 

GTK Integration – File selection window

To use the native GTK file selector window, please go to the opera config page (type opera:config in the address bar). If you go down the options, you will find the option to click “file selector”

In that change the dialog toolkit value to 1 and you will find that Opera starts to show your GTK file selector window.

KDE file selector

I read somewhere that if we change the file selector value to 2, it would use the KDE toolkit for dialog windows, but unfortunately that isn’t the case or it didn’t work that way. And this was highly frustrating for any KDE+Opera user. Then when I was testing OpenSuse 11.2 with KDE and was going their firefox integration. Then I found that they had introduced a patch for the special window specific overrides in the System Settings under KDE.

That’s where this workaround takes place. Along with the applications listed there in the window specific overrides likes Firefox, Thunderbird and Gimp, I added Opera and to my shocking surprise, it worked like a charm. Here’s the entry and how it looks after adding Opera to it.

And voila, KDE integration works in Opera as well and boy it’s been a relief. Only thing with this is that you will not be able to save your files in any network locations as of now. Don’t know if it’s a bug or work in progress, but that’s how it stays.

P.S. The Opera Devs are doing a great job of doing away with the QT toolkit and bringing in native GTK/KDE integration with their latest 10.50 Web Suite for Linux. Do check their snapshots here. Here’s a sneak peak at how it looks. It’s awesome and it’s really fast! Please note, it’s still in alpha.. so no complaints on the bugginess. It’s still cooking!