Some websites or servers monitor your web activities for various reasons, often to provide you with relevant information or to remember your login details to make it easier to log back in. You can change settings for the following items to control the level of monitoring you want to allow.
Plug-ins are external, third-party applications used to display images and video clips, show files, or play audio that the browser is not able to handle by itself. Some of the most popular plug-ins are Adobe Flash, QuickTime, and Adobe Acrobat. For more information, see our Plug-ins document.
Plug-ins are separate applications and, as such, are not covered by Opera’s security settings. This means that a plug-in can make use of its own cookies even if you have disabled cookies in Opera.
JavaScript, or ECMAScript, is used to add functions to webpages, such as making image links change when your mouse hovers over them, manipulating browser windows, or receiving and sending cookies.
These scripts are safe, but they can sometimes be used intrusively. JavaScript cannot access applications and information outside the webpage on which it resides.
Some websites track your browsing behavior so that they can tailor suggestions and information for you. If you prefer to opt-out of online behavioral tracking, you can set the option “Ask websites not to track me” in .
Some websites register the site that referred you to them; this is called “Referrer logging”. This information can be used to deliver webpages that have some bearing on the site from which you came. If you prefer not to allow a website to know where you were before visiting it, you can disable this option. Note, however, that some sites depend on referrer logging to work as intended.
To disable referrer logging, go to and uncheck “Send referrer information”.
If you visit a website that offers web services such as photo applications and face tracking, a dialog displays from the address field badge telling you that the website wants to access your web camera. The dialog offers you choices so you can control the level of access to allow. See: Opera Help — Camera support
Some websites may want your geolocation details so that they can provide more information, such as restaurants in your area and so on. A dialog displays from the address field badge telling you that the website wants to access your geolocation information. The dialog offers you choices so you can control the level of access to allow. See: Opera Help — Geolocation
On rare occasions, some sites may greet you with a page saying something like “You do not have a secure browser; please download xx [another browser]”. This type of warning is not correct; Opera is one of the most secure browsers around. This happens, though, because some website designers still design their sites to work for specific browsers only, rather than use agreed web standards that work for all browsers. Further, some may mistakenly believe that only certain browsers support advanced security. These websites “sniff” your browser’s user agent string to either grant or deny access to the site. If Opera’s user agent string is not defined for the site for any of the reasons mentioned above, access is automatically denied.
What can you do if you do see a message like this?
For the rare cases where access is denied and the website will not render in Opera, changing Opera’s “identity” is the only solution. You can do this by following the steps below:
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