Opera, long criticized by being in a difficult competitive position because it was a commercial browser, has stripped the banner ads and licensing fees and decided to make its base browser free.

Here’s a few Digg users comments:

blitz: “Changes nothing for me, I still won’t use it.”
wastern: “if only they had done this 4 years ago they may be where firefox is today….day late and dollar short”
tactusben: “Still no good. They still charge for the Series 60 version of Opera, and that’s the only reason why I’d use it.”
nomore: “I like Opera. It seemss faster, sleeker, and a lot more light-weight than Firefox”

My hmm
I have downloaded Opera a few times but haven’t ever used (at least that I can remember anyway). It wasn’t the fact that it was a pay browser that bothered me because I have actually paid for another browser called iRider. In fact, that was one of the very first things I wrote about on this blog (the 2nd post here ever). iRider is up to version 2.21 and I still think it’s worthy of a download but admittedly I don’t use it very much these days, some 2+ years later. One of the things I like about iRider is it seems happy being a niche player and doesn’t mind the commercial price tag.

Opera has never seemed to be that way to me and I couldn’t see the one “gotta have it” install feature. Yeah, I’m one of those holdouts who didn’t jump because of the tabbed browsing. I didn’t fully appreciate tabbed browsing until working with Firefox, actually, and then that seemed like a feature no browser should be without.

So this morning I downloaded and finally installed version 8.50 of Opera. I noticed even at 3:37am when I tried to go to the download page I got an error message a few times trying to get to the file. Their server must be getting pounded by all the people who had the banner-ads supported version or from the looky-loos like me who were finally ready to give them a shot. BitTorrent users, can get an Opera torrent here.

Opera installation and configuration
The installation process was smooth and surprisingly fast. These days I sort of expect it to take 30 seconds or a minute for a version 8 of any product. When I first launched the Opera browser there was a noticeable pause (like 8 seconds or so). One of the criticisms I’ve heard about Opera was overhead. I noticed that Firefox with 8 tabs and eight extensions installed and running was consuming nearly four times the overhead as Opera with three tabs and no add-ons or toolbars. IE with one tab and four toolbars was consuming slightly more memory. A better, more fair test would be with stripped down new installs of each browser, but I didn’t see anything abnormal out of the box anyway. Perhaps the experience worsens as Opera is used more. I’ll have to come back to this one after running it more.

The Opera browser first launched fully maximized and showed a page highlighting the various features. The very first thing that struck me about the toolbar layout was the skinny height/width toolbar area (pictured below), which I thought was a plus. Not as bloated as IE or as tall as Firefox. I’ve never cared for big icons in the browser toolbar area. That area should be as lean and mean as possible so the user has more actually browsing space.

Of the features they were toting, tabbed browsing was #1 on the list. Integrated Google search was #2. I noticed from their dropdown menu that I could also search: Opera, Amazon, eBay, download.com and Google search. Could I easily add customized search? This answer wasn’t there in the form of a “add custom search” option and I didn’t easily find. Darn.

Opera feature #3 was a Password Manager. No use for me since I use a Pockect PC to desktop password management program. Next the Trash can. In the upper right corner there is a trash can that works a little like the Windows recycle bin in that: “If you mistakenly close a Web page, you can re-open it from the Trash can. Try it by closing the tab you’re reading right now (click the red X). Go to the Trash can and re-open it!” Ok, I closed the tab and just as it promised, the first item in the dropdown list was the Opera startup page (quote above from this page). This is a slick way to handle browser history, but I don’t know that I’d call it “brilliant.”

#5 on the feature list is Sessions which allows saving collections of open pages as a session. I do open collections of pages each day so having a one click sesson would be handy. I tried making one for all the sites I keep open in tabs. It was as easy as going to FILE -> SESSIONS -> Create session and adding a unique session name. I named this “startup” checked the box that said: “Show these pages every time I start Opera” and clicked OK. I then restarted Opera. Eight seconds or so later, the session I saved was there with the three open tabs. Nice!

Since the start page was gone I wanted to return to it but my trash can was empty. Bummer, that it doesn’t remember between sessions. So that trash gets taken out on each browser restart? Bummer if you are working on something and it crashes.

The #6 highlighed Opera feature was the security bar which indicates whether HTTPS is enabled by putting a lock inside a yellow highlighted box inside the browser URL window. It sure makes it obvious to see the security level. I checked this out by visiting and logging into my Sharebuilder account. After entering in the password and submitting a popup appeared for something called Wand, which wanted to know if I wanted Opera to remember this each time. From the dropdown menu there were options for this time only, every time or across the entire server. I chose the none of the above option, but I could see where this could be handy for sites with logins where security wasn’t as important. I went back to the digg.com tab I had open and chose the entire server option for that login.

Something else I noticed in the browser URL window was the blue RSS button on the digg homepage. I clicked that and easily subscribed. I did the same with MakeYouGoHmm which gave me the choice of RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3. Nice to know it recognized this offered both choices. The built-in Opera RSS Aggregator reminded me a bit of Outlook in the way it was multi-paned. It even had a quick reply box — which didn’t work. That would have been cool if they could have passed the information in the quick reply to our comment form. No dice.

In the bottom of the Opera startup page, there are links to tutorials, a community site, a photo album service and even a free blog hosting service. The Blogging force was irresistable and I decided to check that out and whip up a quick test blog. I’ll save the details of experience for a different post.

The only real disappointment I had starting out with Opera is that I didn’t try this out sooner. This is definitely a browser worth trying out and testing more extensively.

Will I use it more than my trusted one-two Firefox/IE punch or will it go the way of iRider? Too early to tell, but I’m certainly impressed so far. At least I didn’t go for the uninstall right away. Give this a try. There is nothing to lose now that the ads and licensing are gone.

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• Flexbeta: 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE
• Tabbed browsing in IE via MSN Toolbar
• Create an Opera RSS feed widget without any programming knowledge