I've frankly never seen any point in SS myself. I tended to loathe it, as well, due to the huge gaps you would get at any resolution hgher than 1024x768... frankly it was lazy coding - they couldnt be bothered to make it dynamically resizing to your screen resolution.
When I play RS, I have everything right there in Opera, at my fingertips. Sure, some of the things are not as fast to access as in SS, but I dont care, really.
Agent Waffles wrote:
-Chat
-Screenshot taker
-Price checker
-Timers and Counters
-More convinient highscores.
Let's look at these one by one.
Chat - Opera has a built-in IRC client, and accessing the server irc.********.net allows you to use swiftswitch IRC right within Opera. If you like, you can unmaximise the chat tab, too, by pressing 5; so when you are talking on IRC your view of RS is not completely gone.
Screenshot taker - Ok, so this one is not in Opera, but there are many screenshot takers out there. I have one built-in to the non-standard drivers I use for my gfx card. Just press Ctrl + `, and a screenshot is instantly dumped into a folder in my documents.
Hiscores, Price Checkers - A custom search engine in Opera (i believe this is also available in Firefox) can do the job for this, and for me, this key sequence will bring up a new, unmaximised tab with Zezima's hiscores:
Ctrl+T rshs Zezima Enter 5
Or this one would bring up the price of a dragon chain in an unmaximised window:
Ctrl+T rsp dragon chain Enter 5
To set up these search engines, I used the search boxes on the RS official hiscores for the first, and the Zybez price checker for the second. Simply right clicking on the search box, selecting create search, and making some keywords is all you have to do.
Timers and Counters - For this one, we can use a nifty little
coundown timer Opera widget, or the
Multifunctional Analogue clock widget, which can do countup, countdowns, an alarm, or just tell you the time.
As for guides and stuff, it is entirely possible, and easy, just to make a new tab, unmaximise it so you can still see runescape (in case of random events etc), and open up tip.it or zybez or whatever you like, then open up the guide.
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Clearly with a good modern browser like Opera or Firefox, and some sensible , you can completely eradicate the need for SS.