Filed under: Internet, News, Windows, Macintosh, Freeware, Browser Tips
Opera free, again, forever
by Victor Agreda, Jr. Sep 20th 2005 at 8:00AM
First it was free for a day. That day spilled into the next. And now those days are forever. Opera, once driven by either ads or fees, has decided to just forget about all that e-commerce hooey and just be free. From 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 today’s milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available."Ah! Premium support, so that's how their going to make their money! No pushing in line please.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
tevetorbes said 8:52AM on 9-20-2005
Great news! I've been a Firefox user for a couple of years now, but Opera has always impressed me with its polished interface.
Heading over to download a copy now.
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Holt said 10:49AM on 9-20-2005
This is a good deal, I like Opera a lot and now that it's free, I can recommend it to friends without any real hesitation.
And they're mobile-phone browser is still a commercial product, I suspect that that is going to be, if it isn't already, their main draw for cash.
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Gardiner Westbound said 1:05PM on 9-20-2005
.
I liked Opera and used it for a couple of years. It had some nice features Firefox still lacks. Hopefully Opera has corrected the page rendering problem with some websites. Major upgrades required another licensing fee. That was a turnoff. The Opera e-mail client was interesting, but I could never get it to work correctly.
I've been on Firefox for about a year. It runs very well and, with the rich selection of extensions, has a terrific feature set. I can't see myself switching to anything else anytime soon. Thunderbird, the Mozilla e-mail client, runs OK but needs work.
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Greg said 2:39PM on 9-20-2005
Opera makes their money off embedded browser technology, in mobile phones and other electronics. The consumer browser market is secondary for them, but I suspect consumer market awareness of Opera is generally a good driver for the embedded business line.
Prior to Firefox, they were the only quality IE alternative around, but I suspect that Firefox put the squeeze on their consumer browser market share. Eliminating the costs of the consumer browser makes sense; it allows them to compete with Firefox more easily and helps them keep a profile in the overall browser market.
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Zonta said 10:11AM on 9-22-2005
They got my e-mail address in return of serial number last month when they celebrated 10th birthday. If they had decided that Opera would go free, why ask for my e-mail address without stating that it won't be shared with third parties? Spam, of course!
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