Opera 8.50 Released: Now completely free of charge!

In what could be considered a very surprising move, and one that easily could shake the browser market, Opera has made it's award winning browser available to the masses for free, void of it's built in Advertisement Banner, giving people the choice of one of the most powerful, flexible and a very secure web browser.

Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download - completely free of charge - at http://www.opera.com.

"Today we invite the entire Internet community to use Opera and experience Web browsing as it should be," said Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Removing the ad banner and licensing fee will encourage many new users to discover the speed, security and unmatched usability of the Opera browser."

Opera was previously available free of charge with an ad banner. Users had the option of paying a licensing fee to remove the ad banner and receive premium support.

"Opera fans around the globe made this day possible," said von Tetzchner. "As we grow our userbase, our mission and our promise remain steadfast: we will always offer the best Internet experience to our users - on any device. Today this mission gains new ground."

In contrast, seeing as how Opera made their browser available for a day on their 10th anniversary, some may have seen this move coming. Regardless, Being one of the fastest and the most standard compliant browser, Opera may well have opened a new chapter in the browser wars.

Source: http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?category=main&id=30512

for more, please read:

http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2005/09/20/

http://opera.com/?transform=none


Edit: Edited topic description

Truely opera supporter
from opera to firefox, now back to opera.....hehe
firefox? how long can it be?

exploit here and there

Using opera to surf LYN now
Is there any way to emulate firefox's adblock?

so we are using the opera now? anyone try this opera? better than IE and FF?

Still no RTF formatting in GMail, so sticking for Firefox for now.

in the preferences>general "block unwanted pop-ups"

I mean ad-banners, not pop-ups

Something like this

here's some ad blocker (but i haven't tried it myself)
http://www.operaadfilter.com/

or using ccs:
http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/opera/
http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/op...r/AdBlocker.css

opera user since the paleolithic age!!! hahaah...since Opera 5...i still have Opera 5 in my comp....damm cool...

Firefox? nah...

free? wow...the best freeware since Winamp...

so.. which is better? firefox or opera?

The answer is: The one suits you the best

There is no point using the one that most people said is best
But rather use the one that you think is the best. So why don't try both and judge yourself?

haha, lazy to dl opera atm

Just downloaded opera and installed.

Anyone found lowyat.net main page got a little bit run out of place. For example the search bar and the menu beside the search bar.

opera makan ur pc memory la
need a lot of memory

not like this la
firefox also makan alot when u open long and a lot of tap

Memory consumption is totally up to the usage
Open 5 tabs with all flash animations and expect to get something like 50MB of usage

And another thing is, the more RAM you have, the more your browser tends to utilize in order to make the program run much smoother. There is no use to have 2GB of RAM but the utilization is low.

When opening exactly the same pages, Firefox resource consumption might be 10% more than opera, or it could be the other way round, but IMO neither of this matters. For PC with at least 512MB of RAM, Firefox or Opera will run just smooth without hindering PC performance.

So I don't see much point of comparing against one another.
Anyway there is a thread for browser wars so please kindly discuss there and leave this thread for pure Opera 8.5 discussion from now on
http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopic=194434

Sorry for any inconvenience caused

I was wondering why my firefox wont open in tab and i already set it.Everytime also open new window

Firefox thread is here
http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopic=84927

Please stay on topic

never use before.. but might go and download to try and do some comparison with firefox.. i use firefox by default on my laptop and IE on my desktop (u know lah, parent's using and the like simple thing.. too lazy to explain if they ask y not use this or y want to use this..)

I like the mouse gesture a lot. Lately it's becoming a habit that I seldom accidentally [right-click]-[left-click] to go back a page in Windows Explorer, lol

i just downloaded opera. seems that opera is more faster browsing than FF

bringing up an ol' thread for some useful link for opera

- how to speed up opera

- opera performance enhancements

of course opera is faster than firefox
btw...can sumone tell me what is mouse gesture?sorry if this is a noob q

Hold down right mouse button, move it slightly to the left and then release the button.
Opera will ask if you want to use mouse gesture. Say yes. See what happens.
After that, hold down right mouse button and move it slightly to the right and then release the button. See what happens.

BTW you can also try press right button & click left button; Or press left button & click right button.

If my explanation wasn't clear, better just read this: http://www.opera.com/features/mouse/

this might be a noob question....
but why r u guys stil discussion opera 8.5??? since i m oledi usin opera 9...
sorry in advance to those who thinks this is a noob question....

opera 9 = preview/beta version
opera 8.51 = current version

hmm will check this out

oh.. ok.... thanks for telling me tat....

Been using opera since the 5 version which has a banner ad ...

Ditched IE every since then ...

Didn't really use mouse gesture after I changed to the mouse with back and forward function ...

Something I wish to see in Opera in the future is that, it'll be able to Q downloads like download managers (flash get and et cetera) ... It'll be a cool feature to have in Opera

Opera 9 preview still having problem with Google ads.



I want batch downloads

I use Opera9 preview1 at October.
the most excited feature is adding opera:config where as same like firefox about:config,
so the user can do the tuning or tweak on it.

So don't always say Firefox copy opera features, it could be the other wya round too

Anyway, Opera is very much a decent browser to use and of course it'll be much better if it has better compatibility

Opera Labs is online at Last!

http://labs.opera.com/home.dml

Showcases many of opera 9's new features.

At the time of this posting, however, download links Opera 9 Technology Preview 2 are not live.

opera user and basically love the features

beeen a user for years now ... gettng 2 used 2 it alreayd

firefox ? nope, not till Opera crashes on me but thats not going 2 happen much really ?

whats up with that TORRENT FEATURES

can opera download any extension just like FF?

wanna wait n c tha torrent features in opera 9

wow the speed hack made the browser browse at extremely fast

how to install the Adobe plugin to the Opera. i want to open file using the Adobe to view it but cannot make it in Opera. can anyone tell me how to do it? thanks..

Opera user since opera 5 too

most of the time i go cc or frens hse where they use ie or firefox...hell, so hard to use them :S

I'm suprirsed by the new opera.

I really love the new FTP interface compared to the old one. The new interface makes browsing through FTP easier.

Someone mentioned speedhack, what's that?

anybody tried the torrent features yet?
how'd it go?

i also don know how to do the torrent in the Opera. seems not many users around here.

Well, if you try Opera 9.0 TP2, the bittorrent files handling is much more intuitive

^yeah, almostthere is right.
if you click on torrent file it'll come up with this box.

that's if you're using opera 9 tp2.

i don't know bout opera 8.5.

I dont know why, but my opera keep on crashing. Today got like 4-5 crash. Example : (See attachment)

My current version is Opera 9 beta.
I'm trying Opera 8.5 now. If it's still crash, gonna switch back to Mozilla.

u using skin? still crash even if u use default skin?

i don have problem with that and now trying the torrent of it

Opera torrent feature seems very simple. It only allows you to set port & download location. It handles everything else.

While downloading, it gives you some information like total transferred, # of seed & peer connections, and active transfers.

One cannot do other things like setting up schedule, download specific files & adjust priority. Therefore I will keep using utorrent.

Opera BT is too simple, it doesn't have DHT support yet and also lack of those features that eek-1 mentioned.

So I recommend hardcore BT users to stick with the old client rather than using Opera BT, at least for the time being

Currently using opera 8.5 I have not encounter any crash yet