Opera free, again, forever

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.

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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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.

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.

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!