Replying to you from Opera 11.01, but I think the following Opera features have remained constant for a while and will probably apply to your version:
If you use F12, the quick preferences menu will appear, to let you turn off a lot of features, plus a link to edit preferences for specific sites.
Using the main menu>tools>preferences will give you wider selections of similar choices. (Caution: the shortcut for this in Opera is normally Control+F12, but AVOID this shortcut in tc, or you will end up at Desktop 12 wondering what happened to your browser!!!)
I would also recommend going into Opera>Tools>Appearance>Toolbars and select the Status Bar and View Bar, you'll then have a quick way to move in and out of displaying images or not, and to switch from "Author Mode", which includes style sheets, etc., to User Mode which is basically a text browser that you can choose to enhance in many ways through the Opera>View>Styles menu.
And once you know Opera well and want to get even more ambitious, you can try typing opera:config in the address bar to see the thousands of configuration options available. She's very, very configurable....
If I sound very chauvinistic about this, it's because I'm on a dialup 56K connection, and the ability that Opera provides to turn off unneeded features has been a lifesaver. With User Mode, and script and images turned off, and with Tinycore's own incredible speed, and adding Opera Turbo in the 11.01 model, browsing on 56K seems virtually as fast as broadband, so you can understand why I'm devoted!!
The further advantage, of never having seen a graphical ad or had an unwanted pop-up in the past three years of intensive browsing, leads me to feel that Tinycore and Opera are a wonderful combination.
There are a few downsides, in the form of some sites, such as eBay that have some features (but not many) that aren't Opera compatible, but on the whole I've found that the extra time required to learn such a highly configurable browser has been repaid to me many times over. And now having Tinycore to underly it is just wonderful....
A security note: If you want to update to the current version of Opera the day it appears (and updating can be absolutely critical with browsers to avoid spoofing and fake certificates), you can do so in Tinycore by downloading the current bzip2 Linux version directly from Opera and installing it in your home directory.
However you may want to consider that running it from /home/tc/ as I do, instead of as a .tcz would not be advisable unless you can make your backup read-only or remove it to protect it from accidentally backing up after risking contamination online, as otherwise you would be losing the "pristine state" which is so significant a benefit in tinycore extensions. I find this is a compromise well worth making for my browser, but for any other use I would definitely stay with .tcz's. However, you may well find it preferable to make a .tcz extension of it....
Opera, in it's most recent version it's a virtually self-contained package, needing only libxft and of course bzip2 for unpacking. I do a clean boot, go directly to the download site, download it , get offline immediately, then in terminal as root, "bzip2 -d -c /home/tc/operaversionname.linux.tar.bz2 | tar -C /home/tc -x" [allow some time here for the unpacking], and when the prompt returns, "su tc" to get out of root, cd into the directory Opera has created in /home/tc/ and run "./install", and follow the prompts.
Once you run Opera for the first time and configure it the way you want (NB: I always do this offline, so I can do a clean backup without online contaminations), close Opera before making your backup. This way you avoid beginning with the "resume after a crash" dialog box when you restore from backup at boot.
Apologies for getting so carried away on this subject. Hope some of it will prove useful to you.
Regards, Harnessmaker