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Opera Offers Free Licenses For Educational Use
Opera Watch writes "Opera Software today announced that it would offer free licenses to higher education institutions. This is a change from the previous cost of $1000 (US) for unlimited licenses. It remains to be seen, however, whether Opera will allow schools to give standard Opera licenses to students to use on personal computers/laptops within campus at no additional cost, that came with the $1000 license fee. This comes after a respected university advised its students not to use Internet Explorer, for its lack of security. Opera Software said they are doing so in an effort to meet the student and university need for security on the Internet."
I think it's funny that the developers are now going to beat IE with the same tactic that MS used to get market share for IE... free browser.
;)
Of course this one it a bit more secure.
Here I come to save the da... *thud*
I gotta get me a shorter cape.
I really thought Firefox was perfect after switching from IE sometime ago around the mid-Firebird stage. Loved it and with addons such as Gmail Inbox in the taskbar and Adblock it's obviously great, but it still has some major stability issues. Regardless of OS or computer I've used it on sometimes it'll just crash for no reason (kinda like gaim) and it's simply annoying when you have 10 tabs open and have to go to each again.
At very least it should remember the tabs you had opened (is there an extension for this?) while they get their shit together, I'm thinking of giving Opera another serious go, as long as it's more stable then it can easily win me over, I don't mind seeing the ad and if it's good I'll pay for it, I just want a browser I can *trust*.
Opera does everything i want without me having to find extensions
Firefox doesnt
though im probably in the small minority that doesnt even notice the add in the top right at all unless i specificaly look at it
They must feel the pressure of Firefox...
They should have made the program free for everyone and look elsewhere for sources of income. Firefox is gaining market share at a steady pace and if Opera doesn't act now, they'll be out of the game.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Opera Software said they are doing so in an effort to meet the student and university need for security on the Internet.
Gerv
The definition of free was used 'as in beer' well before 'as in speech'. Just because RMS uses 'free' in such a sense doesn't mean everyone must. Actually it was a mistake of RMS by using the same word (he could have used 'liberal' instead).
As a suggestion, please don't preach such a lecture onto slashdot.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
So 'we' say Opera, FF etc are all secure and IE isn't. How true is this? I'm seriously asking, not trying to flame.
It seems to me that some are defining 'secure' as 'doesn't have the same security issues as IE'. IE is the biggest browser and obviously should be the target of a hackers energy, but is there anyway of putting a finger on the exploits that will come when Opera, FF etc are big enough to warrent hacker time?
Is there a way to evaluate this? It seems like simply something you have to wait and see. That the security is only available to the minority, by partial fact that it is the minority.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I used to be heavy Opera user. Now I'm exclusively FF user. Not 100% happy with both. You've heard about their selling points, here's what pisses _me_ off (BTW - I use either a dialup line or traffic limited b/b line. If you have a fat free pipe you may not care about this):
Opera:
1) No option to ban loading images from third party sites. (In FF it's "Load Images.. for originating sites only").
2) No option to "Block images from this site".
3) Some versions are more buggy than others. A bit of a checkered pattern.
4) I miss history for forms. I like when I can type a couple of letters on Google search and search again for that stuff in FF.
5) I dunno, v8 kinda fixes it but I can't help feeling that the rendered page feels somewhat watered down or something. Can't explain it better.
FF:
1) Image-less browsing is rudimentary and is a PITA. Please - can I have a button on taskbar to toggle - "show all images / show cached images / no images" like in Opera! Also - when I right click on an image to show it - feel free to show it inline. Also - don't ignore the (known) image size for image placeholders.
2) Since 1.0pr(?) this "You need a plugin" popup bar SO pisses me off! NO! I won't fucking install Flash!!! Shove your ads....
3) Back button is slow sometimes.
4) Tabbed browsing / MDI does not hold a candle to Opera. I tried TabBrowser Extensions but they help only so-so. And they are buggy.
5) It loses a cache all too often. With "modern" pages having hundreds of kb's of images it's an annoyance sometimes. Not to say that offline browsing suffers.
Both:
1) I _SO_ crave for an option to disable iframes "from other sites". Combined with image blocking it would've killed stupid ads dead.
2) Option to save a web page with images and CSS to a single MIME file is a killer feature (in MSIE, gah) when you need to have something after doing your web research. A matter of convenience of course but imagine that Linux kernel would've been distributed as a set of *.c.bz2 files.
Perhaps you should consider The GIMP vs. Photoshop. The GIMP is free and works well, but the comercial version of the software is better because they have greater funding for R&D. All the makers of the GIMP can do is try and copy and keep up. Firefox and Opera are similar. Opera creates innovations and Firefox copies them through extensions. If you want Joe Average to switch browsers AND use all these nifty new features he has never even considered from using IE, you can't expect him to go out and research several different extensions which do the same thing in diffrent ways, and possibly won't work version to version. Opera does almost everything Firefox can do with extensions right out of the box, and it's still smaller. I can tell my mom over the phone how to do mouse gestures in Opera, but I can't tell her where to get extensions to do the same thing, how to install them and how to keep them current nearly as easily. If you have not tried Opera recently, go try Opera 8 beta. www.opera.com Customize it to get rid of the clutter, skin it how you like, use the awesome mail client, even get it to read web pages to you...just give it a fair shot. As far as the whole free beer thing....why can't anyone sell software? I don't understand the position many of you on this board take that all software should be free. Why do you think people make software? Most do it expecting to be paid for their work. If a company like Opera ASA makes a really good product (which they do) and they use open data standards, why does it hurt your feelings so much if the source is closed? There has to be a model for commercial software for innovation to continue.
Competition produces innovation, lack of competition only produces stagnation. Certainly there is room for IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Galeon, Edgar-ware Surfer (coded in Mom's basement! for Lappy 486's), etc.
Personally, I *love* Opera. I got hooked on it when I got sick of IE vulnerabilities, and when I switched Firefox was still a gleam in a developer's eye named "Firebird", and Mozilla was so new and buggy it was unusable. I carried Opera with me when I dumped Windows altogether - even though I have Firefox, I still prefer Opera. I like the mouse gestures, I like the zoom feature, I like the configuration options. Yes I know Firefox can do it too with extensions, but for me, Opera is familiar, I've got it set up just how I want it, it works, it renders pages fast, so I don't want to mess with it.
As for Opera thanks but no thanks I have the desire to keep using as much really free software as possible promoting further development.
...but I use GNU/free software when it empowers me. Having GIMP empowers me to make a choice about buying Photoshop. But if you can't use software because it's not GNU/free, then you're not freed - you're enslaved to only use the software people are willing to give away for GNU/free.
I'm not going to force myself to use inferior software (not claiming that this is the case here) for no reason. To me, Opera delivers a better product. So other products are OSS. But if that can't deliver, does it matter? No. If you want to preach to anyone but the fanatics, you have to show that this leads to better qualities. Faster. More stable. More secure. More standards-compliant. Great extensions. More flexible.
If the can't argue price (or TCO), you can't argue features, if you can't argue quality, if all you have is that it is GNU/free, noone cares. RMS can preach all he wants. People don't use OSS software because it is OSS, they use it because it is better. Perhaps that's the OSS process, perhaps it's just a bunch of brillant people who could have done the same with a commercial product. But if you can't deliver, it's a dud either way.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings