Minimal Widescreen

Here's how it looks:

This work-in-progress crams any useful control into the status bar.  From left to right, we have the following:  

* Menu button
* toggle button for the panels (which are along the left edge) 
* Opera Sync button
* Opera Unite button
* the status text
* the standard navigation controls (with a "Clear" button to the left of the location bar)
* any extensions, an extension visibility toggle button
* a few leftover mostly standard page view controls (the unfamiliar fourth one from the right is a direct link to the Content tab of Site Preferences so that a user easily can enable and disable plugins and other content items on the currently displayed page).

Beyond that, the only thing that needs to be visible are the tab.  Since my jump from CRT to LCD monitors decreased my pixel height by 10% and increased my pixel width by 20%, and since I keep a very large number of pages open at once, I decided I would have more benefit if the tabs were along the right edge of the window instead of along the top or bottom edges.  Web pages simply aren't made for 1920 pixels of width (or even for more than 1280, for that matter), so there's little downside to using this real estate, even if a good amount of this vertical bar is unused.

Caveats:

Opera 11 is pretty uncomfortable with moving extensions to a bar other than the Address bar.  The "Hide Controls" toggle was added at the suggestion of some random web forum to help them pop back up, but on occasion I have had to go to Opera's "Manage Extensions" page and disable/reenable the extensions I want to show.

Large statuses ("stati"?) can shift the navigation controls left and right.  This is a minor issue (but it was a major issue when I tried to put the status to the right of the "Go" button).

Opera doesn't like it when you move the Menu button.  This hasn't been a real problem, but if you hit the "Alt" key alone to bring it up, you'll notice that it pops up at the top/left of your tab bar, no matter where you put the button itself.  At one point, the Menu button on the lower left disappeared inexplicably, and the only way to bring it back was to turn on the normal menu button using the Appearance interface, then drag it to the lower left, then disable the button's original location again.