SillyDog701

[Antony]

Opera has released Opera 8.5...
It's completely "free."

No ads, no registration, no license fee.

According to Opera,

Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.

Screenshot of Opera 8.5 on Mac OS X 10.4

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412.5

[Pu7o]

cool! Maybe this means we'll finally see more Opera users?

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; en) Opera 8.50

[Pu7o]

It doesn't seem to want to show any images at all!

EDIT: ok, this was fixed by changing to "Show no images" and then changing back to "Show all images". Still don't understand the reasoning for this sudden problem.

UserAgent: Opera/8.50 (Windows NT 5.2; U; en)

[Pu7o]

Sadly, it seems that Opera went back on its promise of stopping to spoof as that poor excuse for a browser that's included with Windows. The default useragent is still MSIE 6.0, even though they said by 8.10 i'd be removed, and we're already on 8.50 !

UserAgent: Opera/8.50 (Windows NT 5.2; U; en)

[Andrew T.]

Opera has released Opera 8.5...
It's completely "free."

No ads, no registration, no license fee.

According to Opera,

Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.

My question is, if they have removed ads and the registration fee, how will Opera sustain their business model in the future?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4

[Andrew T.]

Sadly, it seems that Opera went back on its promise of stopping to spoof as that poor excuse for a browser that's included with Windows. The default useragent is still MSIE 6.0, even though they said by 8.10 i'd be removed, and we're already on 8.50 !

Did you install the software on top of a previous Opera installation? I've found that if you had Opera 8.1 set to, say, "identify as Opera" and you install Opera 8.5 over it, Opera 8.5 will identify itself as Opera from the moment you run it as well.

UserAgent: Opera/8.50 (Windows 95; U; en)

[Antony]

Opera has released Opera 8.5...
It's completely "free."

No ads, no registration, no license fee.

According to Opera,

Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.

My question is, if they have removed ads and the registration fee, how will Opera sustain their business model in the future?

I don't know, but take example of Netscape. Netscape decided to make Netscape (Communicator, then) free in January 1998...

Then in November that year, AOL decided to buy Netscape...
(we know the rest...)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412.5

[DJGM]

My question is, if they have removed ads and the registration
fee, how will Opera sustain their business model in the future?

According to this article at TheRegister.co.uk

The browser was previously available free of charge with an ad banner.
Users had the option of paying a licensing fee to remove the ad banner
and receive premium support. One to three percent of users purchased
this license and that along with revenue from search engines and the
sale of ads made up the three almost equal revenue streams
for Opera's PC business. Opera will continue to sell premium
support at the reduced price of €24 per year.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050910 SeaMonkey/1.0a

[beanboy89]

Sadly, it seems that Opera went back on its promise of stopping to spoof as that poor excuse for a browser that's included with Windows. The default useragent is still MSIE 6.0, even though they said by 8.10 i'd be removed, and we're already on 8.50 !

Did you install the software on top of a previous Opera installation? I've found that if you had Opera 8.1 set to, say, "identify as Opera" and you install Opera 8.5 over it, Opera 8.5 will identify itself as Opera from the moment you run it as well.

Here's my experence with the UserAgent spoofing with Opera 8.5: I had previously had a registered copy of Opera 8.02 installed on this Windows 98 SE system. I had set the UserAgent to properly identify as Opera. Before I installed Opera 8.5, I'd uninstalled my previous version of Opera, and deleted it's program folder. After installing Opera 8.5, the UserAgent was back to wrongly indntifing as Microsoft Internet Explorer. Thankfuly, a trip into Opera's "Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network > Browser Identification > Identify as Opera" will set the UserAgent back to what it should hanve been in the first place...

UserAgent: Opera/8.50 (Windows 98; U; en)

[Fulvio]

I changed to identify as Opera, from way back, and it alleges that it is identied as Opera. I will have to see, because I selected the location of the download file, and, I had a great time finding it. I believe that it was in an App.Data folder. This was the location before, and now: C:\Documents and Settings\myname\Desktop\

UserAgent: Opera/8.50 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)

[Josh]

I have thought this was about time. I have always thought Opera made most of it's dough off of Smartphones instead of desktops. When all of the apps you are working against are "free", being payware makes you stick out like a sore thumb.

I only hope the folks who have brought Opera get something back...

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)

[Antony]

I hope this free approach would help Opera gaining market.

Competition is good, but must be in a fair way...

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412.5

[DJGM]

I hope this free approach would help Opera gaining market.

Competition is good, but must be in a fair way...

Indeed . . . with Opera going freeware, and Firefox soon to hit 100m downloads within the next
few weeks or so, Microsoft has now got some serious cause for concern in the browser market.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050910 SeaMonkey/1.0a

[jsjag]

cool! Maybe this means we'll finally see more Opera users?

Wow now I've done it, added to my browser confusion. I have been a devout MO Suite user but since my D/L of Opera, I just don't know. Opera has a really nice/good interface, easy to use and easy on the eyes. I could also swear that Opera is quicker at rendering pages. It sure does boot faster.

What I can't give up is the calendar that is associated with MO Suite and Composer.

Also the email client in MO does some things different than Opera. One of those things is that MO Mail sets up a tree for email accounts. Opera sets up one tree and then you must choose (from menu) which accounts you want to see (all or certain accounts).

I am very new to Opera and maybe it has a calendar and you can do the same tree as MO Mail. I can give Opera a thumbs up ....a 10 on my list.

Now I keep flip flopping back from MO to Opera.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716

[James]

Well... I'm one of those who bought a license for Opera a few years back and yet I'm glad to see that they've finally gone the same route as Netscape and are giving their browser away, free of charge. While I use Opera, my primary browser is still FF and my primary email client still TB. I see some advantages and disadvantages to each suite. I sure do love the rewind and fastforward abilities in Opera. The email client takes some getting used to but once you get the "hang of it" it sort of becomes second nature.

UserAgent: Opera/8.50 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)