Opera is now free Permantly.

That's great news. Even though I'm back to Mozilla and loving it, I found Opera to be a very feature rich browser which deserves attention. The inbuilt function to read text (Windows Only) is a feature that has to be applauded in it's approach to help the handicapped or for those who simply prefer to listen then reading things. Mouse gestures are very nice as well.

Now I can get along with Opera and if someday I use it again, I will, if possible, support it. I simply don't use applications that force me to pay for them by adding crappy-ware, banners and other things...

Seen as the ads have been removed I have gone ahead and installed it, I won't be using it for normal browsing - just to check my website designs with

actually i'm curious about one thing , how come an ads that sit at the corner of a computer screen somewhere on top of it can cause great depression for computer users , infact i had only got rid of that ads in my freebsd , now that corner is still empty and blank , i donno what to replace that with(more hot speed buttons??) , i find no reason to get rid of that ads in my linux distros , opera whether its free or no-ads dont really matters much in the functioning of the browser itself ...

i still use firefox and dillo ...

Same here, will use it to test my websites but not for day to day use.

The whole toolbar is narrower without the ad from what I can remember. I haven't used opera for years and I remember the toolbar being quite deep because of the height of the ad for one. Also the ads I used to get kept flashing and changing, that annoyed me.

QUOTE :: "Also the ads I used to get kept flashing and changing, that annoyed me."

oops , i forget about that
i usually turn off everythings flashing , animated , noise and things that done behind the scene automatically , yah , i can still remember whenever i do a fresh install of opera , smilies and ads can really dance , thats rather annoying ...

Excellent!

Personally, I'm sticking with Firefox, but I think this will be great for web standards in the long run. The more browsers there are out there, the more the developers and web designers will be forced to comply with standards.

Opera has been my favourite browser for a couple of years now in Linux and windows.

I've noticed it slow to start up in linux but it is still marginally faster at most other tasks than Firefox.

The email client is decent but I prefer Mozilla mail and Kmail.

It would be nice to see linux distros include it as standard equipment.

Opera is faster than any other browser, a few hours ago i would never have said that as firefox was a firm favourite but Opera with no adds is now accsessable to all.

if you like speed then Opera is ya browser, even though you have get use to it but that doesnt take long

Does that mean I can get a refund? LOL
Opera has always been the fastest and most stable browser for me in linux and win...bloze.