Opera goes free

[francis]

They've finally seen the light! (http://opera.com/free/) So now their market share will inbcrease so it's going to be another browser that you'll definatey have to test against. Yay! Boo!

[David]

:lol: So that free licence stunt a few weeks ago was just that - a stunt.

I have to say that there is a lot to like about Opera. I prefer their implementation of tabbed browsing to that of Firefox and of course the page zoom is really impressive.

I think Francis is right, this will definately increase the general usage of Opera. This is both good and bad in equal measure. It does now look as though we're entering another era of browser wars.

Maybe they'll all get together and work on a common rendering engine...

...blimey! was that a pig?

[francis]

Originally posted by David@Sep 20 2005, 12:13 pm
Maybe they'll all get together and work on a common rendering engine...
Stop! Please!

With IE7 looking so promising, it looks like it's boon time for CSS developers (hopefully they'll fix a boat-load of DOM issues as well). Although there's actually no release date for IE7 - MS promised a beta by the summer, and that's what we've got. When that actually goes into a live product, who knows...

The free Opera is acutally a new version - 8.5 - so if you grabbed the birthday freebie, it's out of date already!

___

Later: I've been using it for an evening and, after a bit of playing, it's actually not bad. Which is weird as I've used it on-and-off before but never got any further than that. Maybe it was the "I don't want to get too attached as I'll have to keep paying for it" thing. The UI still sucks a bit, but it does have some nice touches and is waaaaaay faster than FF or Safari. Anyone played with the in-built mail client?

Nice touches found so far:
CMD+Z (not sure what that'll be in Win) opens the last closed tab.
Double clicking a word brings up a menu where I can look in up, copy it to a note (notes are cool) or, if it's a URL, go to there
Paste and go is built in
Loads of in built styles so it's easy to emulate text only browsers - good for testing accessibility
In built spell checker for form fields