Slashdot Mirror
Opera Free as in Beer
nekura writes "Just last month, Opera was celebrating their 10 year anniversary by giving away free registration codes; now they've trumped that by offering Opera for free. Quoth their site, 'Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera's growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made todays milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.' Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now has virtually no reason not to."
torrents :P
save the servers
Just FYI.
Clever signature text goes here.
Yup... Opera has stated in the IRC, Blog, and forums that if you purchased Opera in the last 30 days you can get a full refund. I've purchased Opera no less than 5 times over the years (home, work, family, new version, etc.) and still I don't have an issue with Opera now releasing the product as free. I'll continue to support the product and the company. I like doing that for quality software.
These are the main reasons I can think of, besides the features that are probably common to Opera and Firefox, such as being very fast (I didn't use FF long enough to tell if it was as fast as Opera), having community-built themes, etc.
Basically, it comes "out of the box" ready to go and requires much, much, much less dicking around with to get it Just The Way I Like. This is really important to actual users, believe it or not.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Imagine Firefox with most of its plugins in a smaller, more responsive package, and not feeling that you are using a Frankenbrowser.
Now imagine being able to disable any page's design so that you can improve readability. Also imagine being able to store a number of pages in sessions instead of individual bookmarks. Imagine a button that stores the links of the pages that you have just closed in case that you want to open them again. Imagine true page zooming, a RSS reader, irc chat, and a gmail like mail client in less than 4 MB.
Whenever I use anything else I feel as if I am not getting the whole internet experience.
Cheers,
Adolfo
"Free" has two meanings. The first is free as in cost. Free beer is an example where free means "costs nothing", so some people use this as a shorthand explanation. The other meaning is free in the sense of freedom. i.e. Unrestricted. Free Speech is free in this way, so some people say free as in speech to illustrate they mean this definition.
Software is free in either of these ways. Internet Explorer is free to download so is free as in cost (Free as in Beer). Linux is free to copy and modify, so it's free in the sense of freedom (Free as in speech).
It also has certain positive connotations that many free software advocates like. Free speech is regarded as a good thing. Associating free software with free speech gives it a positive image.
Hope this helps.
http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/01/opera-and-f irefox-extensionsf irefox-extensions-ii
http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/09/opera-and-
http://userjs.org/
What were you saying again?...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I can't let this pass. The first free browser was WorldWideWeb in 1991 from none other than T. Berners-Lee himself.
Cello also predates Netscape.
I have a P910i, and Opera is supplied on CD. It's a rather big application (2/3mb if I recall well) after being installed. For a symbian phone, that's big, so I can understand they choose not to by default.
They can't strip out the "default" symbian browser cause that's rather integrated and heavily used in the UIQ interface. Opera will however be the default browser on UIQ 3.0 platforms where it will replace the symbian browser.
As much as I love Firefox, using it as my main browser and all, that has to be corrected.
Opera is still lighter than Firefox, and still faster, by a far margin.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
As an avid Opera user, and a fan of Firefox, they can similar to a light or average user. I'll assume here that you're familiar with both.
I like to think of Opera as a highly configurable tool for heavy users who like to get their hands dirty with their tools, and Firefox for everyone else. Opera is highly configurable, has nice data semi-permanence features, and there are a million advanced options that speed up use for people willing to learn about what it can do.
If you don't like where the menu bar is, you can move it to the bottom of the screen, or to the sides, or you can move the buttons to a different bar, or move the buttons from other bars to that one. You can liberally re-arrange everything about the interface to suit your particular tastes, and can add and remove buttons and functionality as you please. I've seen people who have all of the functionality of the browser on a single pop-up address bar on the side of the window, and others that spread everything around onto dozens of little areas.
And there are quick and easy buttons available in the interface for everything: from zooming to above 100% to changing your "identify as" to toggling javascript. Basically all of these behave intelligently. If you hold the zoom drop-down button you get a standard drop-down menu to select the zoom resolution you want, and if you click on it, it automatically resets to 100%. And you move buttons by simply grabbing and moving them, which is very easy and convienient.
If you're comfortable editing a simple menu.ini file, you can add or subtract menu options. As a real-world example, you can add menu options for "open in I.E." "Validate HTML" "Validate Links" and "Spell Check" pretty easily to the right-click menu. While these can't be completely new code, you can pipe existing functions together in new ways to create things that do new behaviors.
Unlike Firefox's extensions you can't add extensive code that doesn't already exist. You can, however, run external applications which seems to cover the extreme cases. But if I needed to code an HTML editor in an extension, for example, I would recommend Firefox as a base over Opera. But for nearly all other personal customization, I'd go with Opera.
Data permanence is also a big issue in Opera. If you go backwards and forwards in Firefox, you lose any text you may have typed into a comment box. If you go backwards and forwards in Opera, your comment stays right where it was. On Slashdot this lets you go a couple of links back, launch a new window with the story in it, and go back forwards to what you were writing. It also caches the rendered page, so that going forwards and backwards is instantaneous.
You can also undo closing tabs. I can't tell you the number of times this has come in handy. Unfortunately, comment fields are not permanent across tab or application closures, something I wish they would fix. However, you do keep your history on that tab, which is nice. You also have windows open across sessions. If the application crashes or is accidentally closed, you can re-open it with all of your tabs still in place, and can still go back and forwards through their histories. Basically, Opera crashing is a 3 second fix, while Firefox crashing requires tediously going back through the history figuring out where all of your tabs were.
You can also save all of your open tabs or windows as a session, and can re-open sessions as bookmarks, on startup, etc.
There is also basic psuedo command line functionality, in that you can convert any *.[space]TEXT into http://www.yoursearchengine.com/search?q=TEXT. "g footloose" will search google for the term "footloose". "z firefly" will search amaZon for "firefly." I personally have searches setup for ebay, friend's bulletin boards, language translators, and a whole lot else.
The mail client was the first mail client that I know of to use freestanding searches as virtual folders, but tha
The ______ Agenda
After having drilled ten levels deep into a web site I accidently close the tab. With Opera, just Undo and you're back where you were.
On Firefox, well, lets hope you remember how you got to that tenth level.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.