Interesting exploratory piece by Om Malik which probes why Opera became free. I’ve already seen one user who paid for Opera exclaim that he was annoyed to see that another piece of software he paid for was now free. Apparently Opera sold about 100,000 licenses at 39 bones each per year. That’s some scratch to be out, so Om Malik dug around and hounded the Opera PR team to find out why:

I found out that the decision to give away the browser came after the company stuck “compensation deals” with some of the search engines. Apparently, the premier tenant for browser’s built-in search window, is Google. “The current most important deal now is with Google,” company spokesperson Eskil Siversten wrote in an email. The company indicated that it has similar referral-for-dollars agreements with the likes of eBay and Amazon.

Mozilla has switched from non-profit to profit over deals like this so there is naturally more than a small side business to the ‘free’ browser market.

One of the first things I noticed in my first look at Opera 8.5 was how Google was the primary search and then I wondered how easy it was to tweak the search. Reader, Hallvord R. M. Steen replies:

Depends on the definition of “easily”. You need to edit an INI - file, or download a third-party tool that gives you a GUI for it, written by an Opera fan. It’s not as simple as it should be.

The Firefox plugin architecture is one thing about Opera that I definitely miss.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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