Free Opera

[ffutures]

Copied with variations from very_true_thing.

Opera, which is in my view one of the best web browsers, was formerly sold as adware; if you liked the program you registered, to stop the ads appearing in a little box at the top of the screen.

Apparently so many people have now registered that they are dropping this - from now on it's simply a free program. You can pay for "premium service", which is presumably technical support, but you don't have to.

I'm VERY pleased to see them taking this step - I have no idea if it's actually the right step for them to take, though given the existence of free programs like Firefox I don't think they had much alternative, but to me it's a vindication of the whole shareware principle. I'm not even going to bitch about having paid for it a few times, since that's the way shareware really ought to work.

Anyway, the latest version is at:

http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/850/

Later: Forgot to say that this is a new release that fixes some security issues, bugs, etc., not the same version that they were giving away on their tenth anniversary a few weeks ago. Also forgot to say that this applies to all operating systems, not just windows.

Comments

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Hoorah! I see that this is true for the Mac as well, not just Evil Devil Machines (although the website does default to the latter unless told otherwise). Likewise FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, etc.