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The Internet

Opera Free as in Beer 937

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
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."
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Opera Free as in Beer More

Opera Free as in Beer

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  • Torrents (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrianJOpera ( 916094 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:28AM (#13602854)
    torrents [opera.com]
    save the servers :P

    • Re:Torrents (Score:5, Funny)

      by endoplasmicMessenger ( 883247 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @10:30AM (#13603862)
      BTW, Opera has torrent support built in. So once you install it, you can go get the torrent!

      Oh, wait...
    • I do like Opera, but it's missing the two main features I love about Firefox. Google Toolbar and Adblock. I usually don't use Adblock all that much cause I'm one of those people that actually click on ads on web pages I use...you know, to give them a little income and as a way of a "thank you". But some places the ads are just way out of control so Adblock comes in handy.

      But there's no way I could function without the Google Toolbar now. I use it all the time, not to mention the built in spell checker. If O

  • Good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Metasquares ( 555685 ) <slashdot.metasquared@com> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:30AM (#13602860) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)

      by varmittang ( 849469 )
      I'm just wondering how they are going to make money now since the banners were supporting the freebees and the subscribtion or whatever for the paying customers. Are they going to do a thing where you have to pay for adding on personnal extentions to Opera or something?

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Cyn ( 50070 ) <cyn.cyn@org> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:45AM (#13602987) Homepage
        I don't think Opera was making much money with their free desktop browser anyway.

        Their main profits are from embedded devices (PDAs and the like) that buy licenses to use their browser, because it's fast and small and has good support of all the desired features these days.

        Course, I haven't seen a recent version of Netfront - they may be losing ground to them, or they may still be way ahead...

      • Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)

        by Tyler Eaves ( 344284 )
        My impression is that the real money was in licensing it to cell phone makers anyway.

        • Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)

          by FireFury03 ( 653718 )
          My impression is that the real money was in licensing it to cell phone makers anyway.

          I've not understood how this works - Sony Ericsson "recommend" using Opera on the P900, yet they bundle the crumby Symbian browser instead. Why don't they just bundle the devices with Opera on the ROM since presumably they've paid a licence fee for it (so their customers can install Opera for free).

          • Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)

            by packman ( 156280 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:27AM (#13603326) Homepage
            I have a P910i, and Opera is supplied on CD. It's a rather big application (2/3mb if I recall well) after being installed. For a symbian phone, that's big, so I can understand they choose not to by default.
            They can't strip out the "default" symbian browser cause that's rather integrated and heavily used in the UIQ interface. Opera will however be the default browser on UIQ 3.0 platforms where it will replace the symbian browser.
            • They can't strip out the "default" symbian browser cause that's rather integrated and heavily used in the UIQ interface.
              This sounds oddly familiar.

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)

        by It doesn't come easy ( 695416 ) * on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:46AM (#13603002) Journal
        According to Opera, their revenue was equally split between advertising, the fee, and search engines (not sure what this is -- does Opera run their own search engine?). Considering that no more than 3% of Opera users ever paid the fee, and considering you can still pay for premium support, it doesn't sound like it will take much to make up the difference. I, for example, never tried Opera becuase of the fee. Now I will install it and use it or Firefox, depending on which one gives the best experience (IE lost any chance of consideration as long as it is the security problem that it is -- and as far as I can see Microsoft will keep IE tightly integrated into the OS and thereby maintain it as the premium vector for security issues in Windows. It's bad enough I can't remove it, I'm surely not going to use it). I would bet that many others will do the same for Opera.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:58AM (#13603077)

      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.

      People have been saying the same thing for as long as Opera has been around - "nobody will pay when the competition's free!" And yet they've managed to stay in business for the past ten years. Maybe people are willing to pay for quality software even if there's a cheaper alternative.

    • Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)

      by loconet ( 415875 )
      Make no mistake, IE is not free. It is as free as the bread they serve you at restaurants (stale, cold, moldy bread at that).

    • Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)

      by bcmm ( 768152 )
      IE is not free, even as in beer. IE for Mac is now abandoned. Recent versions of IE work (legally) only in Windows. Being included in Windows is not the same as being free (again ignoring widespread violation of relevant laws).

  • No reason? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rockclimber ( 660746 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:30AM (#13602865)
    Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to.

    Except those who want free as in speech.

    • Re:No reason? I think not. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LLuthor ( 909583 ) <lexington.luthor@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:35AM (#13602910)
      Its easier to get Opera to make a change to their browser than Firefox. I needed a specific CSS feature that was used by my company on its pages, and neither FF or Opera supported it properly. I submitted the bug to Opera and to FF. I also wrote a patch later that week for FF. The FF developers completely ignored me and my patch and any further requests. Meanwhile, Opera's next beta had the problem fixed with no further interaction from me, except for an email request for a way to reproduce the bug. FF is open-source only in name and the fact that I can see the code. Every part of the development is totally closed.

      • One question: (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hummassa ( 157160 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:41AM (#13602955) Homepage Journal
        was the CSS feature in question a standard CSS feature, or something non-standard your company used from IE?

      • Re:No reason? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by poptones ( 653660 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:49AM (#13603024) Journal
        What are you talking about? The fact you HAD the source code to the firefox browser allowed you to solve the problem within your company with no dependance upon anyone else. Whether or not the Firefox developers moved your patch into the distribution, you still had the problem solved within your infrastructure because you were able to patch Firefox yourself.

        Open source does not mean the project leaders will solve every problem for the asking. Open source means you have the freedom and the information required to solve the problem yourself.

        • Re:No reason? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:54AM (#13603052) Homepage Journal
          What if this on a website that clients use? It is a lot easier to say "Use the latest browers" than "If you want to use firefox, you have to use this custom built version I made so it would be compatible"?

          • Re:No reason? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by FireFury03 ( 653718 ) <slashdot@NoSPAm.nexusuk.org> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:13AM (#13603204) Homepage
            What if this on a website that clients use? It is a lot easier to say "Use the latest browers" than "If you want to use firefox, you have to use this custom built version I made so it would be compatible"?

            Sorry, if you need to use a bleeding edge browser to view a public web site then that site is essentially broken - you need to provide support to browsers at least a year or so old if you want the site reachable to the masses.

          • Your right and wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

            by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:27AM (#13603324) Journal
            You see being easy to use is NOT what opensource is all about. It is the fact that YOU can modify YOUR copy of the sourcecode so that YOUR binary will do what YOU want it to do.

            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?

        • Re:No reason? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:02AM (#13603107)

          Whether or not the Firefox developers moved your patch into the distribution, you still had the problem solved within your infrastructure because you were able to patch Firefox yourself.

          That's a distinctly sub-optimal solution. What happens when the next version of Firefox is released? Is he supposed to make the changes to the new version too? And after that? Is he supposed to maintain a separate fork for as long as he needs this feature?

          Open source does not mean the project leaders will solve every problem for the asking.

          No, but there's at least a reasonable expectation that they'll apply a patch that adds a missing feature.

        • Re:No reason? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:05AM (#13603132) Journal
          Open source means you have the freedom and the information required to solve the problem yourself.

          If you're a developer with deep insight in the Mozilla codebase.

        • Bull (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:09AM (#13603162)
          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.

          • Re:Bull (Score:3, Insightful)

            by bunratty ( 545641 )

            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.

            No, that's not the F/OSS mindset, just your misunderstanding of it.

            Do car manufacturers expect drivers to fix their own cars? In some cases they do, but most people just take their cars into a shop for even the most minor maintenance.

            The F/OSS mindset compares open software to normal cars as we have them today, and closed software to a car with its hood loc

          • Re:Bull (Score:3, Interesting)

            by kabocox ( 199019 )
            What the hell ever happened to putting the user first, to valuing and maximizing the benefit the project provides to non-developers?

            That's for that other software building model. Closed source and pay some one else to do it.
            If you don't like the way an F/OSS project has neglected your bugs/features, then you fork and fix it yourself. No one else is going to do it for you unless you pay them.
      • Every part of the development is totally closed.

        What you really mean is, "I would like to get someone else to change thier code and they didn't want to!"

        The whole point in this Free Software stuff is, if you think this is a bad thing, you're free to make a competing version. If enough people have trouble like what you're describing, they will join forces and either your fork will work out, or you'll be able to convince Firefox to change thier minds.

        Thier policies toward code changes have nothing to do with

      • Re:No reason? I think not. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by BZ ( 40346 )
        Could you please point me to the Mozilla bug in question? Better late than never...
  • Now if only the local troupe would also follow suit, oh wait, no Wagner. Nevermind.

  • Next Step (Score:4, Insightful)

    by someguy456 ( 607900 ) <someguy456@phreaker.net> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:31AM (#13602869) Homepage Journal
    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?

    • Re:Next Step (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sH4RD ( 749216 )
      Never, as long as Opera still makes it's real money on mobile phones powered by the Opera engine.

      • Re:Next Step (Score:3, Interesting)

        by plumby ( 179557 )
        The real question is - are they going to bother updating their desktop browser any more if their profits all come from the mobile version?

    • Re:Next Step (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:44AM (#13602983) Homepage

      How about "Never"... Opera actually make a PROFIT out of their browser business.. which is certainly better than "survival". Their main profit comes from their device platform but some people are indeed willing to pay for a better quality browser.

      Opera is much better, and quicker, to use than either of the other popular browsers out there, and some organisations will continue to pay for Opera based on that responsiveness and security. More often people will pay for the mobile browser however. If there is common code between the two then Opera would be releasing the crown jewels for free and would cease to be a VIABLE company.

      Open Source is NOT always the only answer, some people have to make a living.

  • Can someone please explain to me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Conspiracy_Of_Doves ( 236787 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:31AM (#13602872)
    the advantages of using Opera over Firefox?

    • Re:Can someone please explain to me... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Errtu76 ( 776778 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:40AM (#13602948) Journal
      smaller binary name == less chance on RSI while executing it from the command line

    • Re:Can someone please explain to me... (Score:5, Informative)

      by simetra ( 155655 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:49AM (#13603020) Homepage Journal
      • pop-up blocker, mouse gestures, etc, built in; no need to download/trust/install extensions from god knows who
      • changing settings, you don't need to close and re-open it every bloody time
      • built-in IRC client
      • built-in email client
      • built-in bit torrent client
      • highly-configurable thru gui, not through text file hacks
      • produced by an actual company with an actual interest in quality moreso than freedom/clunky-breakiness

      These are the main reasons I can think of, besides the features that are probably common to Opera and Firefox, such as being very fast (I didn't use FF long enough to tell if it was as fast as Opera), having community-built themes, etc.

      Basically, it comes "out of the box" ready to go and requires much, much, much less dicking around with to get it Just The Way I Like. This is really important to actual users, believe it or not.

    • Re:Can someone please explain to me... (Score:5, Informative)

      by adolfojp ( 730818 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:49AM (#13603023)
      Imagine Firefox with most of its plugins in a smaller, more responsive package, and not feeling that you are using a Frankenbrowser.

      Now imagine being able to disable any page's design so that you can improve readability. Also imagine being able to store a number of pages in sessions instead of individual bookmarks. Imagine a button that stores the links of the pages that you have just closed in case that you want to open them again. Imagine true page zooming, a RSS reader, irc chat, and a gmail like mail client in less than 4 MB.

      Whenever I use anything else I feel as if I am not getting the whole internet experience.

      Cheers,
      Adolfo

    • Re:Can someone please explain to me... (Score:5, Informative)

      by slapout ( 93640 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:13AM (#13603203)
      See 30 Days to Becoming an Opera7 Lover [tntluoma.com]

      Opera does a lot more than most people realize.

    • Re:Can someone please explain to me... (Score:5, Informative)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:49AM (#13603510) Homepage
      As an avid Opera user, and a fan of Firefox, they can similar to a light or average user. I'll assume here that you're familiar with both.

      I like to think of Opera as a highly configurable tool for heavy users who like to get their hands dirty with their tools, and Firefox for everyone else. Opera is highly configurable, has nice data semi-permanence features, and there are a million advanced options that speed up use for people willing to learn about what it can do.

      If you don't like where the menu bar is, you can move it to the bottom of the screen, or to the sides, or you can move the buttons to a different bar, or move the buttons from other bars to that one. You can liberally re-arrange everything about the interface to suit your particular tastes, and can add and remove buttons and functionality as you please. I've seen people who have all of the functionality of the browser on a single pop-up address bar on the side of the window, and others that spread everything around onto dozens of little areas.

      And there are quick and easy buttons available in the interface for everything: from zooming to above 100% to changing your "identify as" to toggling javascript. Basically all of these behave intelligently. If you hold the zoom drop-down button you get a standard drop-down menu to select the zoom resolution you want, and if you click on it, it automatically resets to 100%. And you move buttons by simply grabbing and moving them, which is very easy and convienient.

      If you're comfortable editing a simple menu.ini file, you can add or subtract menu options. As a real-world example, you can add menu options for "open in I.E." "Validate HTML" "Validate Links" and "Spell Check" pretty easily to the right-click menu. While these can't be completely new code, you can pipe existing functions together in new ways to create things that do new behaviors.

      Unlike Firefox's extensions you can't add extensive code that doesn't already exist. You can, however, run external applications which seems to cover the extreme cases. But if I needed to code an HTML editor in an extension, for example, I would recommend Firefox as a base over Opera. But for nearly all other personal customization, I'd go with Opera.

      Data permanence is also a big issue in Opera. If you go backwards and forwards in Firefox, you lose any text you may have typed into a comment box. If you go backwards and forwards in Opera, your comment stays right where it was. On Slashdot this lets you go a couple of links back, launch a new window with the story in it, and go back forwards to what you were writing. It also caches the rendered page, so that going forwards and backwards is instantaneous.

      You can also undo closing tabs. I can't tell you the number of times this has come in handy. Unfortunately, comment fields are not permanent across tab or application closures, something I wish they would fix. However, you do keep your history on that tab, which is nice. You also have windows open across sessions. If the application crashes or is accidentally closed, you can re-open it with all of your tabs still in place, and can still go back and forwards through their histories. Basically, Opera crashing is a 3 second fix, while Firefox crashing requires tediously going back through the history figuring out where all of your tabs were.

      You can also save all of your open tabs or windows as a session, and can re-open sessions as bookmarks, on startup, etc.

      There is also basic psuedo command line functionality, in that you can convert any *.[space]TEXT into http://www.yoursearchengine.com/search?q=TEXT [yoursearchengine.com]. "g footloose" will search google for the term "footloose". "z firefly" will search amaZon for "firefly." I personally have searches setup for ebay, friend's bulletin boards, language translators, and a whole lot else.

      The mail client was the first mail client that I know of to use freestanding searches as virtual folders, but tha

  • Great News for Standards Compliance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stinerman ( 812158 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:31AM (#13602874)
    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.

  • Yeah, right. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Levine ( 22596 )
    Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to.

    Yeah, cause I was just biding my time with Firefox until Opera was free. Right.

  • My reasons for not switching. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alranor ( 472986 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:32AM (#13602881)
    Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to

    AdBlock Plus
    BugMeNot
    CustomizeGoogle
    DictionarySearch
    Farkit
    Gmail Notifier
    Nuke Anything
    Plain Text Links
    Switch Proxy Tool
    Greasemonkey

    I'm glad there's a version without the annoying advertising, but it wasn't that which was keeping me from using Opera.

  • Hopefully Microsoft will do this as well! (Score:4, Funny)

    by mynickwastaken ( 690966 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:32AM (#13602882)
    I hope that Microsoft will decide also to give Internet Explorer for free. My desktop is full of banners and popup windows.

  • And vice versa (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:33AM (#13602889)
    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?

    • Re:And vice versa (Score:3, Insightful)

      by real_smiff ( 611054 )
      hello? a browser that doesn't use 200MB RAM, 200MB VM, sometimes take minutes to restore and requires periodic restarts to get these numbers down? and is fast on slow computers. as a >1 year firefox user and advocate, seeing that firefox 1.5b hasnt really fixed these problems, i'll be trying Opera again now its free & advert free... sorry, but my time is more important than The Cause ultimately. Maybe firefox is ok for people who don't visit that many sites, or who restart often the browser/computer

  • thinking of switching? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by illtron ( 722358 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:35AM (#13602906) Homepage Journal
    Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to."
    Who *thinks* of switching? It's not like you have to invest in new hardware.

    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.

  • Cool, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by inkdesign ( 7389 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:37AM (#13602926)
    ..how far is the ceo going to swim [opera.com] this time?

  • Nope, no reason at all, except... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:40AM (#13602945)
    printing [opera.com]


    Oh, and site compatability.


    Seriously, I love everything about opera except printing. I browse using opera, print using firefox, and access MSIE-only sites (just a few that really don't work; most just say they don't) with konqueror.


    patchwork, patchwork, patchwork.

  • Opera (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:40AM (#13602947)
    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.

  • Some info on their new revenue model (Score:5, Informative)

    by ziggamon2.0 ( 796017 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:40AM (#13602949) Homepage
    Cut and paste from their investors FAQ:
    1. Search partners

    The Opera Browser features integrated search and shopping bars, and partner companies pay a fee to Opera every time a user utilizes the integrated search or shopping bar. Opera cooperates with a few select partners it feels can contribute value to its product and users. Deals with companies like Google, Fast, Lycos, InfoSeek, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay are showing constant growth in revenues for Opera.

    2. Rendering engine as a separate product
    Opera delivers a full-featured, embeddable version of its desktop browser that can be integrated into a wide range of applications. Adobe and Macromedia are important partners in this segment.

    3. Opera Web Mail
    Opera provides a free and a pay service Webmail. When users pay for the premium service, Opera splits the revenue with Outblaze, the company that operates the service.

    It seems to me they have made a very wise choice. Being ad-free will increase the popularity of the browser tremendously, and thereby increase their incomes from sponsored search partners, like Google, which will probably more than compensate for their incomes from the paid browser, and annoying ads.

  • Looks splendid so far... (Score:3, Informative)

    by TractorBarry ( 788340 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:51AM (#13603040) Homepage
    Well I've just downloaded Opera 8.3 and so far my impression is that it's a splendid thing as following 10 minutes of using it there's one thing I'd like to mention...

    Currently I'm posting from a works machine where you have to go through a proxy server to get to the internet. We also access a number of local intranet seites plus our own local "development" intranet (which consists of a single crappy old box)

    Now out of IE, Firefox and Opera, Opera is the only browser which will allow me to browse the internet, the intranet and our local intranet.

    All three browsers have identical proxy settings but both Firefox and IE won't browse to "http://ourserver" - despite there being an entry for "ourserver" in my hosts file and despite their proxy server settings specifying "ourserver" on the "no proxy for these addresses" list.

    So top marks to Opera.

    P.S. The only reason I didn't post this from Opera is because I've forgotten my password (which Firefox has kindly cached for me :)

  • Reason not to switch (Score:3, Informative)

    by Gropo ( 445879 ) <groopo@yah o o .com> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:56AM (#13603060) Homepage Journal
    Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to.
    Well, here's one salient reason keeping me from switching:

    A certain amount of Opera's UI functionality doesn't conform to OS X (or sensible) standards. A single-click in the address field, for instance, selects the entire string. No other text manipulation field or application acts like this. It's not as though saving me those extra two clicks to select the entire string trumps everyone having to learn a new modality (and having to devote extra thought to our UI's).

  • I'm not sure if I like this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by slapout ( 93640 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:18AM (#13603246)
    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.

  • Switching? Maybe not, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Random BedHead Ed ( 602081 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @10:05AM (#13603663) Homepage Journal
    Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to.

    Well, they certainly have no reason not to try Opera. Switch? I do appreciate the open development model of competing browsers like Firefox. As someone who cares about open standards and think the web will get better the more we embrace them, I like the fact that Opera is not Microsoft. Nothing against Redmond, but it matters a lot to me that browser's design is done independently of any server's design.

    I'm using the Debian 3.1 version on Ubuntu right now and have to admit it's a pretty snappy browser. It renders Slashdot nicely. I may keep playing with it, but I'm not sure I'll switch from Firefox with Deer Park coming out soon. These browsers are pretty much on par, so I think I'll take the open source one.

    I feel kind of bad for Opera. That the browser is now free is an indication that the company realizes it can no longer sell its flagship product. You know, for money. That's got to hurt.

  • Firefox, it's not you, it's me (Score:3, Interesting)

    by skryche ( 26871 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @10:34AM (#13603897) Homepage
    I love Firefox... it just gets better and better, and I love OSS success stories.

    But I've always been happy to admit: Opera's the better browser. And now that it's completely gratis, it's going to be hard to justify my Firefox habit.

  • The problem with opera... (Score:3, Informative)

    by netcrusher88 ( 743318 ) <netcrusher88@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @11:27AM (#13604485)

    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.

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