Opera 8.5 Released

After years of selling their web browser, Opera Software is now giving it away. As of version 8.5 of the Opera browser, its free of adds and free as in beer.

I have been using it all day and its nice. Admittedly, its lacking some of the extensions I have grown to love from Firefox but overall its nice. I especially like the extremely fast load times when pages are being loaded from cache. “All browsers load pages fast if loaded from cache you moron”, you say. But let me tell you, I am a hardcore Firefox fan but Opera beats it hands down in that department. Personally, I think it loads new web pages a little quicker too. There are other things that I like about Opera such as the “Trash” icon on the top right hand corner. If you close a page accidentally or not, click on the Trash icon to select which tab you wish to restore.

Opera reminds me of Firefox but with most of the extensions I already want at the core of the Opera browser itself. Some would say that Firefox and Opera have different missions. Firefox wants to be a minimal browser extended by plugins and Opera wants to be an end-all browser ala-IE. Try it out, its pretty slick nonetheless.

Get it at http://opera.com/index.html.