Opera goes Free!

Today is a day to be happy - the Opera Web Browser has finally gone totally free. Hot on the heels of giving away free registration codes to people for their tenth birthday party, Opera Software has decided that enough is enough and has totally removed any trace of banner adverts from the free version of their web browser.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the Opera web browser over the years. I remember using it first at school when a friend of mine brought me a fantastic web browser that he had been told about which fit entirely on a floppy disk. I was immediately smitten by the fact that it ran quickly and took up almost no space. Even 8 years ago when I tried the browser for the first time, fitting the entire application onto a floppy disk was an accomplishment. Try doing that nowadays - it just wouldn’t happen (the current installation file for windows is ~3.5Mb. Still excellent, but not quite good enough to fit on a floppy!). And so, for a time, I was happy with Opera. But it grew larger, and I didn’t like some of the changes which were made, and I moved over to Mozilla.

I sincerely hope that making Opera completely free will encourage more people to use it. Opera isn’t my browser of choice, but I hope that if a greater number of people choose to use a greater number of web browsers then a greater number of websites will be written which take into account standards and will therefore work in more peoples’ browsers. Well, I can dream, can’t I?

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workingwith.me.uk is a resource for web developers created by Neil Crosby, a web developer who lives and works in London, England. More about the site.

Neil Crosby now blogs at The Code Train and also runs NeilCrosby.com, The Ten Word Review and Everything is Rubbish.