A Better "Delete private data" Dialogue for Opera 7.6

Opera 7.6p4 introduced a new, simplified "Delete private data" dialogue which offered just three options: Delete, Cancel and Help. This was done mainly to slim down the dialogue from the deluge of checkboxes it had been in previous versions. A win-win solution for novice users who just want to cover their tracks.

However, for advanced users who use this dialogue, an Advanced tab was included which spawned a drop-down menu which contained all of the old checkboxes. No issue, right?

Wrong.

A design feature of drop-down menus is that they close after each selection is made. For users wishing to change some or all of the available options, clicking, finding and selecting each option they wish to change becomes a task in tedious mouse usage, forced upon them by bad design.

Presto!A better design would be to have a "one-click" expanding Advanced tab which contains all of the available options to select. This makes changing any option a one-click operation (at most, two clicks) instead of two clicks for each, and the menu of available options is not hidden between choices.

Above is a javascript-driven example of the concept. Except for having no resulting function, the buttons and checkboxes work just like the real thing, so feel free to click away.

Simple dialogue
Advanced dialogue

By GreyWyvern
Document version: 1.1 - December 10, 2004