If you want to own an ad-free version of the Opera browser, today's your lucky day.

In celebration of their 10th Anniversary they are giving away FREE registration codes today (August 30, 2005) only. :)

Go to:

http://www.download.com/Opera/3000-2356-10005498.html?part=dl-Opera&subj=dl&tag=button

...to download Opera, and then go to:

http://my.opera.com/community/party/reg.dml

...to get your free registration code.

Zoinks! Thanks so much for this info!

Very cool! Opera (http://www.opera.com/) has been my browser of choice since version 5. Many prospective users are turned off by the ad bar (even though it's the same Google AdSense ads you see on thousands of Web pages), so a free registration code may be what's needed to get folks to try Opera.

I've used Firefox (http://www.getfirefox.com/), and in my admittedly biased opinion it's good but it's not quite there yet. It's still a better option than Internet Explorer, of course, but if you're willing to take on a slightly steeper learning curve I'll always recommend Opera.

I haven't tried Opera in a couple versions but I hated it when it did (and that had nothing to do with the ad bars. Ads don't bother me.

But I'll probably grab one for testing purposes.

Cool. I haven't touched Opera for a couple of versions, it'll be interesting to see how the software has improved.

Thanks!

Thanks I jumped on this.
BQ

What's Opera got that Firefox doesn't?

What's Opera got that Firefox doesn't?
A true MDI tabbed interface without extensions. Access to configuration settings through the UI. Built-in mail, usenet, RSS/Atom client. Engineers who are paid for their work.

Like I said above, Firefox is a damn sight better than Internet Explorer. For my purposes I find that Opera edges out Firefox in both technical specs and usability.

I'm sure it is different now, but I stopped using it because I couldn't ever get it to not crash when I have more than four tabs open.

I don't generally use the advanced features of browsers (I don't want my RSS/email/usenet on my local machine) so all I ask is that it not stop working in the middle, have tabbed browsing, and display the pages in the way they were intended (actually, if IE had tabbed browsing native I'd still prefer it for the stability). When two consecutive versions had the problem with crashing I moved on. I'm sure it was a problem somehow between my computer and Opera but I've no complaints with Firefox so I'll probably stay.

Who knows though. Now that I have it back on my machine I may fall in love.

I'm sure it is different now, but I stopped using it because I couldn't ever get it to not crash when I have more than four tabs open. I currently have two sets of tabs (two windows which each contain a set of tabs), totalling 27 tabs. This is low for me. The only time I see crashes in Opera, the cause seems to be plugin interaction: Java, Flash, that sort of thing.

... all I ask is that it not stop working in the middle, have tabbed browsing, and display the pages in the way they were intended (actually, if IE had tabbed browsing native I'd still prefer it for the stability). I should note that the MSN toolbar does implement tabbed browsing in IE, but through a half-*** tabbed browsing hack. Opening a new tab actually causes a new instance of iexplore.exe to launch, which is then "folded" back into the calling process.

Also, Avant Browser and Maxthon are two which use the IE engine but provide tabs and other advanced features neglected by Microsoft.

Who knows though. Now that I have it back on my machine I may fall in love.

Do feel free to ask if you have any questions about Opera. I try not to evangelize or be unrealistic about the learning curve, but it is truly the best browser I've used, and I've used them all.

I went ahead and grabbed one of the free licenses for Opera and I'm sure I'll spend some time playing with it a bit. My past experiences with it have been that it is a very powerful browser, but that way too many pages for my taste didn't render well with it.

I work for a fairly large web site and we made the decision quite a while back not to even test our sites with Opera due to its extremely low market share and the much higher liklihood that pages built to usual standards would not work properly with it than with IE, Netscape, or Firefox. Basically, it wouldn't be worth the extra development costs to fix the fairly large number of pages that don't work in Opera but work fine in the other, much more commonly-used browsers.

I'll be interested to take a closer look at the newest version and see how much better it has gotten.

-Jeff

I've tried it, and it won't play the java games that I have on my hard drive. Firefox does ok with them. This in on a Mac OSX.

I've tried it, and it won't play the java games that I have on my hard drive. Firefox does ok with them. This in on a Mac OSX.
That's likely more related to the JRE on your machine; try updating to the latest (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/java/) version.