Finally Opera became free changing it’s state from adware to freeware.
It’s a good day for us all. It’s a (as I said previously) a great motivation for Mozilla folks since it’s
the first Firefox’s competitor on the modern browsers mainstream market.
Unfortunately it still has “MSIE 6.0” in user-agent name – and this is the very last thing that melts the competition. Once this will be fixed, all arguments of low Opera market share will disappear.
Another issue is the money. Opera seems to be pushed by Firefox to make this step, that’s obvious. I’m not too happy to hear some marketing bullshit like “After 10 years we suddenly discovered that users don’t like adverts in their browser! So we took it away. We are so cool!
Anyway, it’s a great time on the browser market. The web is speeding up, technologies are finally once more being developed, we’re moving toward the new way of creating web applications, and modern web browsers are able to handle those new technologies. The web is free, and users are the winners of this competition.
From my point, as a Mozilla coder I can promise you that we will be working hard to bring you the best tools, easiest to use, with the greatest engine under the hood. Heads up to Firefox 1.5, and, you can just start sniffing what’s for Gecko 1.9, what’s for Mozilla 2.0, what’s for Firefox 2.0, soon to beta-release Lightning, and some plans around Thunderbird (not mentioning pre-1.0 Seamonkey and Camino). Think twice before comparing Mozilla technologies with Opera, Konqueror or Internet Explorer.
Saying that – for users, this day is a good one. Opera – welcome to the free world 🙂
6 replies on “Congratz to Opera!”
> Opera is either in great financial condition and browser
> market is the way they want to advertise themselves, or
> they’re in bad shape, and realized that it’s ‘now or never’ for
> them. My bets are on former one, but we’ll see… soon…
Don’t bet before you check their financial reports… they employed about 150 people last year, in Q2/2005: sales growth: 44.5%, revenues: 187 014 TNOK, espences: 105 724 TNOK.
Sorry, I took the revenues/expenced from all 2004. In Q2/2005 revenues were 40 417 TNOK, expences 32 609.
They are doing quite well.
That’s great news… but I also wonder why they didn’t „fixed” UA String. I was sure that they had promised it before.
As I said this is great news, but I expected this move. Giving away activation code is huge marketing trick. I use Opera from time to time and, despite bigger viewport after adpanel was removed, I don’t feel comfortable with this GUI.
I wish good luck to you and other mozilla programmers. You’re doing a great job! 🙂
I’m just curious what will the users who actually paid for Opera 8 say about this. I would have felt cheated if I had paid for something that two months later became free of charge. ;-))
Riddle: yes, and I wrote about this in previous post – http://diary.e-gandalf.net/?p=109 . We should learn from them on how to gather press…
marcoos: They have support for free. Hoah! 😉 I’m wondering what will they do with their “comparsion sheet” where they were so proud that they give support to their users (of course plenty of users use it.. sure ;)) so they’re better than Firefox 🙂
The comparision is still good for Opera: For 29$ you get premium support for one year. One phone to Mozilla support costs 39$.