Opera Goes Free
2 years, 11 months ago 
It seems that Opera has decided to drop the advertisements in it’s browser, and go freeware. To make up for the loss in revenue, they are now offering premium support for serious customers (read: businesses). I think this is a great step forward, and I’m sure it will encourage a much wider takeup of the browser.
Personally, I’m not an opera fan. I think that it’s a little too feature packed for my liking - i know that might sound ridiculous - but I like most of my software to be fairly slim, well trimmed and do the job it was made to do very well.
Opera, Browser, Freeware
September 20th, 2005 at 11:21 am
You do know, that out of the box, Opera simply loads the browser component, other features are not enabled until you specifically ask for them. The first load footprint on an Opera without any features loaded is smaller than for example Firefox (no disrespect to it - it is excellent and it’s larger footprint is to accomodate the flexible XUL). So by default you get a stripped down fast browser, that does the job of browsing excellently. If you choose to the use Mail or RSS, then it will adapt the UI to add those features and load the respective code (which is really small by the way, ~100kb by my reckoning).
September 22nd, 2005 at 10:41 pm
For me Opera has always been the quirky semi-standards compliant browser, much better than IE but not in the same league as the more ’serious’ browsers such as Netscape, Mozilla and (more recently) Safari. However, I have been farily impressed with the functionality and standards compliance of Opera 8 - and now with the removal of the ads we may see Opera finally take it’s place alongside the uber-browsers (IE 7 most definitely excluded).