Opera is now free!

[CHAoS_NiNJA]

The other thread got locked, so I thought I'd make another one.

But yes, Opera Web Broswer is now free! Visit www.opera.com for details.

As fancy as Firefox tries to be, it simply can't top how quick and beautiful Opera is. FF may have more plug-ins then you can shake a stick at, but the last thing I want to do is download a bunch of patches just for my browser to be half-way decent. If I wanted that, I'd use Netscape. Opera works right the first time you use it, and never quits. Thats beauty.

 

[Nazo]

I'm forced to agree in every way. I tried Mozilla and phoenix or whatever the crap firefox was called back then FIRST, so my preference for Opera isn't based on it being the first one I learned to use or anything like that.

Someday firefox may be as good as Opera though. Mind you, at the rate it's going it will never be as efficient (I've tried both on a really really low end system -- eg P1-70 -- and Opera ran more smoothly and ate up all the meager 40MiB of memory more slowly.)


I worry about what may happen if they truly do keep free and paid seperate though. I hate it when a product starts to have missing features and such. But, from what I read, I have the impressin that the paid one is really a service. So you can get direct official help with problems and such.

 

[PaHick]

Opera is nice, but it still cant do all I want it to, not need, want. But I will say ive found some things wrong with Opera 8.50 that I cant duplicate on another machine, but others in their forums have found also. With 8.50 there seems to be more of a website compatibity problem, at times Opera will hang or crash for no reason, sometimes sites fail to load at all(but upon refreshing the site it does load), favicons(mostly ones stored in the toolbar) disappear or flat out fail to load or save, page rendering not as fast as 8.02, and im still having bandwidth problems in Opera.

As far as them being free from Ads and banners, it was the right move definately. There has been more action in their forums since going free. Alot of people, all over, not just in here, switching from IE and FF. They still have a long way to go to compete with FF as the poll here shows. A couple other forums have polls going too, and the results are pretty much the same.

 

[KoolDrew]

I have been using Opera for years and it has always been my favorite. I have tried Firefox and even customizing it to my needs with tons of extensions and everything. In the end, I still went back to Opera.

 

[Nazo]

I have been using Opera for years and it has always been my favorite. I have tried Firefox and even customizing it to my needs with tons of extensions and everything. In the end, I still went back to Opera.

*nods* I tried half a million extentions myself. In the end, I just got too frustrated with the fact that you need several extentions just to get tabbed browsing actually USEABLE (I swear, why do they even bother supporting tabs when the browser makes every effort to pop up a new window or other annoyances despite having extentions trying to override it.) Well, if you think about it, Opera is one of the oldest browsers out there and owns most of the market when it comes to mobile browsers from what I understand. It has had more time and reason to concentrate on maximizing efficiency and such.

 

[Terpfen]

As fancy as Firefox tries to be, it simply can't top how quick and beautiful Opera is.

Firefox doesn't try to be fancy. It's a minimalist, no-frills browser. Just because you can define which new features you want it to have doesn't mean it's trying to be fancy: it means you're trying to be fancy. Opera is a good browser, but let's be honest about Firefox here.

FF may have more plug-ins then you can shake a stick at, but the last thing I want to do is download a bunch of patches just for my browser to be half-way decent.

How are these two thoughts connected? By the way, Firefox has the same plug-ins Opera does: Flash, Adobe, etc. Don't confuse plugins with extensions.

 

[Carnival Forces]

wow, opera w/o ad banner = i need to try now!

Opera was my first non-IE browser, ah, the good old days

 

[swatbat]

I had tried it years ago and thought it was ok but not as good as ie. When they made it free I downloaded it to try it again. I must say I think it is lightyears ahead of firefox and is pretty much on par with ie. Right now I use it on my desktop but am going to install it on my notebook when I get around to it.

 

[Nazo]

... is pretty much on par with ie.

Crap no! Firefox beats the living daylights out of IE -- that is, when five year olds on the other end of the world aren't busy ensuring your PC won't boot up thanks to the trillians of security holes in just IE alone. Considering that Opera is better than Firefox, I don't even want to think about how far behind that makes IE...