Question

I have developed a Opera extension. It’s working fine. But I need to install my extension in the Windows registry or Windows file system. How can I to do this?

Answer 1

NOTE: THIS QUESTION IS OPERA 12 RELATED
Opera 12 uses another extension architecture than the following Opera versions!

Opera extensions aren’t installed via the registry.

You will find a XML-file called widget.dat in the folder:

C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera\widgets

Each widget has an entry there. I think you’ll understand the syntax yourself, it is quite self-explaining if you have some widgets installed.

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EDIT: I just found out that adding a new entry to widget.dat will install the extension to Opera, but it will be deactivated as it hasn’t been initialised. This usually happens through the javascript/extension engine during runtime.

To enable the script manually, there must be a prefs.dat in the folder wuid-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx noted in the widget.dat, containing at least the following structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<preferences>
  <section id="ui">
    <value id="default-prefs-applied" xml:space="preserve">1</value>
  </section>
</preferences>

Additionally to that, you may have to manually initialise the widget settings within the pstorage folder. The settings are stored as base64-encoded utf-16 key-value pair strings.
So, this encoded structure:

<ws>
  <e>
    <k>YQBsAGUAcgB0AF8AYgB1AGIAYgBsAGUAXwB0AGkAbQBlAG8AdQB0AA==</k>
    <v>IgAxADUAIgA=</v>
  </e>
<ws>

Reads as:

<widgetsettings>
  <entry>
    <key>alert_bubble_timeout</key>
    <value>"15"</value>
  </entry>
<widgetsettings>

(Tag names are freely interpreted 😉 I found a base64 en/decoder capable of processing utf-16 here

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PS: Opera will install widgets by double-clicking them. So you could also execute Opera with the extensions path on the commandline. Opera will do everything for you then.

C:\Program Files\Opera\opera.exe C:\Path\To\Extension.oex