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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
They had no hope of competing with Firefox and IE, despite the merits of their browser, so long as they charged for it while the other two were free.
Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to.
Except those who want free as in speech.
Obviously Opera has realized that a browser with a cost can no longer survive in this post-2000 market. However, I wonder how long it will take until they open source it?
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
the advantages of using Opera over Firefox?
Technoli
I'm certainly glad that they are doing this even though I don't plan to use Opera in the near future. More alternatives will push web developers to use standards instead of just coding for IE.
Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to
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I'm glad there's a version without the annoying advertising, but it wasn't that which was keeping me from using Opera.
I hope that Microsoft will decide also to give Internet Explorer for free. My desktop is full of banners and popup windows.
Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to.
And anyone who wasn't on the verge of switching has virtually no reason to do so. I mean, this is all well and good, but Firefox is working rather nicely, why should I switch to Opera? How is Opera going to make my browsing experience better in a way that cannot be replicated via Firefox extensions? And how will Opera provide to me the functionality that I have via Firefox extensions that isn't part of Opera?
In my experience, people get fed up with IE and just switch. There's nobody out there who's thinking, "gee, the fact that just about everything out there is better than IE is tempting...but, man I sure do like Microsoft!"
Sorry, but nobody was holding out for free Opera. If you couldn't take IE's shit for another day, you're already using Firefox, not waiting for an also-ran browser to stop charging.
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Free beer with every copy of Opera is best.
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If you have bought a license during the last 30 days I think you are entitled to a refund.
:-)
You still get premium support if you have registered. Some people value that much more than removal of 40 pixels of ads
Nicolas Mendoza
Prepare for MSIE 7
I agree that this is a reason not to use it for people who want free (as in freedom) software.
However, I think those people are clearly in the minority.
Finally, I don't like you implying that people who disagree with you on free software don't value freedom, that's just stupid and insulting.
Opera is a really good web browser. It is fast, renders most pages really well, and has a good UI. However, the spot where FireFox beats it, is in the Extensions department. Extensions are what makes firefox the best browser out there. The Web Developer extension makes web development a breeze, and FlashBlock makes sure I don't have any animations hogging my CPU cycles unless I want to. Oh, and the Javascript Debugger is the best tool ever. It's not the best debugger, and ironically, is kind of buggy itself, but, it has saved me hours of infesting my code with alerts() in order to find out the problem.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
was the CSS feature in question a standard CSS feature, or something non-standard your company used from IE?
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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.
Well FireFox is a web browser as well so you can't rule out the posibility that Opera is trying to compete with it.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Definitely.
That's the same reason I actually ordered my copy of Slackware 10.1 from the Slackware Store, even though it was available free for the taking.
The way I see it, I got more than a year's worth of use out of Slackware 9.1, and I didn't pay anything for that (being the first version of Slackware I tried). I figure I got way more than $39.95's worth of use, so I showed my support by actually purchasing the next release I wanted to have.
I don't have an aversion to paying for quality software.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
This is the fundamental issue I have with the F/OSS mindeset--you have the source, so you can fix things yourself, and to hell with everyone else.
First of all, let me be the 5 millionth person to point out that not every user has the skills, tools, time, and inclination needed to fix things. (Yes, you were responding to a person who did provide a fix, but I'm talking about the more genral case.)
Second, the inherent selfishness and short sightedness of this F/OSS mindset is very damaging to the whole community's image, and ultimately, to the success of projects. What the hell ever happened to putting the user first, to valuing and maximizing the benefit the project provides to non-developers? Until the F/OSS community stops acting like a bunch of petulant kids and starts behaving like responsible adults, this will be a very serious problem, one that many people within the community don't even see.
I have mixed feelings about this. Opera has so many features that (to me) it is worth paying for. I hope that they will be able to maintain it without the income it's sales generated.
On the other hand, hopefully many people will now check it out and see what a great browser it is.
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It does not mean YOU can alter MY copy of MY sourcecode. Or even to force me to distribute YOUR alteration.
Sure in the case were you are unable to distribute your alteration to those who need it it sucks donkey balls. Just as IE's total domination of the browser market sucks donkey balls because it still means I can't use many many many features that work beautifull in every real browser out there.
So firefox in this case showed both how opensource works, namely that he was able to modify his own copy of it to do what he wanted AND showed why doing doing web development is such a pain in the ass. Because ultimately you can't develop for the browser on your machine, you have to write for the browser installed on your clients machine. Even if that is netscape 4.
Next time I get a snide remark about a C programmer building 100% clientside software for Windows 2000 only I am gonna go postal. PHP/ASP/Perl may be joke languages but crosscoding between browsers is the ultimate challenge. Doom3 engine, PAH! Try just getting a bunch of left floated images to center. Now that takes brains.
What do you mean I sound bitter?
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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
Unless you are taking an ideological stance in which you do not use any closed/proprietary software(including windows, office, etc.), in which case it's justified, or if you are a Firefox developper and need the source, I don't see that as a strong argument. The fact that it's open source doesn't mean much beside for development and ideological reasons. In the end it's a product.
Now, you may not like Opera for other reasons, or you are happy with firefox and don't see why you'd switch, that's fine. But not trying it because it's not open source is pretty stupid IMHO.
Now, since they are mostly similar, I don't see a lot of people switching from one to another, but that's something else and has nothing to do in the fact that it's open source or not. Those using FF don't see why they should switch, and Oepra users don't see why they should switch. Some will switch because of a couple of features or other reasons, but they both do a pretty good job.
Maybe I'm an open source traitor, but I do like open source and see the advantage of it, but if a closed source software does a better job, or is really cool and innovate, and the price is right, I'll gladly pay to encourage the company. 20-40 bucks for a software I use everyday? That's fair. Now it's free, which is even better. I use tons of open source software whenever I can, but I still use some closed software too. I donate or contribute to open source projects whenever I can, just as I pay for a closed software if I like it.
Did you patch and compile your Firefox? Or did you just download binary like 80 millions other users?
is that they don't use standard keyboard shortcuts, i.e. F6 for jump to URL bar(FF, IE, Safari, Netscape, Mozilla), Ctrl-T (or Apple-T) for new tab (FF, Safari, Netscape, Mozilla). I have a friend who uses Opera and every time I go to show him a page I have to have him click things for me because STANDARD keyboard shortcuts DON'T WORK!!!!111one
</rant>
But I have to say, the built-in mouse gestures is a cool feature.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Bare firefox doesn't cut it, it's stripped to the bone compared to Opera's feature. My fox, the one I want to use and that makes me keep in instead of switching to opera, has something like 40 extensions. These hog a lot of memory, yet are what makes Firefox superior in my opinion. Bare firefox blows, it's still slower than opera and doesn't have a tenth of Opera's features.
XUL is based on Javascript, not firefox, and I don't give a damn about what you think, the reality is that Opera is faster in 95% of the DOM operations, and has much better optimized loops than firefox (proof of that one being that reverse-counting in a for loop yields 50% improvement in looping speed for firefox, and just about nothing for Opera). Try these getElementsByClass emulations if you don't believe me.
Yes I can, of course I can, extensions and extensibility are what allow firefox to be above Opera for most users, without extensions Firefox is little more than a standard-compliant IE, the only thing is has being the JS console (which Opera has) and the DOM inspector (which opera, to my knowledge, doesn't have)...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler