Opera is now free!

Opera have removed the ad banner and licensing fee and have made their browser completely free. This move was inevitable since FireFox has been commoditizing the Non-OS bundled browser market. Here's what Opera says about going free:

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.

Opera will still make money by licensing their browser engine to others. For instance, Adobe uses the Opera rendering engine in GoLive to preview content for the desktop and mobile. The Opera for mobile browser is also currently still a paid product and even comes bundled with some mobile devices. Opera has most of the features a typical user might like including tabbed browsing, simple clean interface, download manager, mouse gestures, sessions, url shortcuts and skins. It has some additional features as well like an RSS reader, mail client, a very nice sidebar and an IM client.

Being cross-platform, fast, feature packed and now free, Opera should give FireFox decent competition and shake up the browser market share numbers for sure!

Links

• Opera.com
• Opera 8.50 download