“Opera Software has removed the banners and licensing fee of their Opera Web Browser, and it is now freeware.”
I’ve been playing with Opera in the past, and I liked it a lot, except for those stupid banner ads. Seriously, you leave Internet Explorer, or even Windows altogether, to get rid of adware (banners ads, toolsbars and all sorts of shit), and then you don’t wanna see a good browser, having banner ads built in!!!
Opera used to be a product you would pay for, but now they are making it available free of charge, though it’s still closed source, proprietary, software.
Then you may think “Where do they get revenue from???”, well Opera actually makes it’s browser for a bunch of cellphones and embedded devices, so they will make money by licensing it that way. I think this move will increase their userbase, because I people will now look at Opera with a lot more positivity. Again, you leave IE to get out of the world of adware and spyware, and no one wanna use a browser that actually has adware built in, I certainly won’t.
But all that stuff is for the past, now Opera is freeware and free of any sort of adware and banners… I’ve been playing with the latest version of a few days, and I must say, it’s a great browser!! I won’t hesitate recommending Opera to anyone looking for an alternative to Internet Explorer, another thing I just wanna add, Opera is highly crossplatform, and available of a great variety of operating systems: Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Windows.