You could have gotten a free copy of Opera on their 10th birthday already. But if you’ve missed that opportunity there’s some great news from Norway. Opera announced today it will be offering Opera for free! No more ad-banners and licensing fees. They will only charge you money for Premium Support.
“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.”
Cutting through the marketing bull: its free now and it’s marketshare will probably rise as it is another good alternative to Internet Explorer. Which is rapidly becoming archaic. I encourage people to at least try it once (or take a look at firefox ;-)).
Get your free copy of Opera now.
So how will they make money from a free browser now the ads are gone?
Well, Opera also builds browsers for mobile applications like PDA’s and phones. Those aren’t free. Licensing fees and paying for Premium Support will probably fund the development of the free version.
To at least be competitive in the browser market they eventually had to be on the same price level as IE and Firefox. Which is exactly, for free.
How does Opera compare to IE and/or Firefox?
Why don’t you take a look for yourself. I never liked the old Opera versions because the UI was terribly cluttered. But I must say that the new 8.x versions are a sight for sore eyes. Mind you, under the hood it still sports an e-mail-, news-, rss- and bittorrent-client (and what not?).
(Thanx Webdrain for the tip)
4 responses to “Opera giving away their browser for free”
Opera Goes Free!
Opera is now freeware. Opera is a web browser, which is far older than Mozilla, and has a decent sized user-base. It has similar features to Firefox.
What effect will it have on Firefox?
*Looking into my orb*: Opera will reclaim their *lost* marketshare from Firefox in the coming months. Untill IE 7 comes out and all will be business as usual. 🙂
Seriously. Whatever will happen to Firefox (or IE 6/7) is pure speculation. As I see it. Those who just want to browse probably will stick to IE. Those who want to customize, control or alter their online experience probably want to stick to Firefox. And those who want a complete browsing package in one, well there’s Opera. We’ll see.
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I was determined to see what all the fuss was about with Opera, so I stuck with it, for about 2 weeks.
Having used it, I can safely say that it ROCKS!
It has tons of cool features, that you discover by accident.
Where I work, everyone has switched over. So, I’d be surprised if Opera didn’t take off as a serious contender.