A new day for Opera

Opera's press release says it best:

Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download - completely free of charge - at http://www.opera.com.

Why would you want to switch to Opera? There are a lot of different reasons, depending on your needs and how you use your browser. Here's a brief feature list: http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/. Chances are, you won't use every feature, but you'll find a few new ones that you'll fall in love with. If you want to learn more about Opera's capabilities, check out 30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover. If you're a real power user, you'll eventually find nontroppo's amazing Opera wiki, which uncovers even more things you can do with Opera.

For Opera users who are upgrading from the previous version, here is the changelog for Opera 8.50: http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/850/

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Does this change in business model mean that Opera no longer cares about its desktop product? Absolutely not!

Here is a comment from Haavard, a well-known Opera employee, about that: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/show.dml/22892

Also, Opera Watch just posted a new interview with Jon S. von Tetzchner, the CEO of Opera: http://operawatch.blogspot.com/2005/09/opera-ceo-goal-to-become-2nd-most-used.html

This isn't the end of Opera's desktop browser. It's a new beginning. The developers at Opera Software are still working hard to push the product forward.

Here are some blog posts by Opera developers talking about what they're working on for the next big release:

http://weblog.timaltman.com/node/794
http://my.opera.com/olli/blog/show.dml/22674

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Speaking of blogs, some of you might be interested to know that Opera's new community site was recently unveiled. It's more than just forums devoted to Opera discussion. If you sign up (which is totally free-of-charge), you can use the free blogging and photo album services, amongst other things. It's actually very cool and easy to use. To use those services, you don't even have to use Opera (though I'd recommend it). Since readers of this blog don't necessarily want to hear me talk about Opera all the time, I'm moving most of my Opera commentary (except for big news like today's) to my new Opera blog called Opera Otaku.