[ale] Free Opera goes Ad Free

[aaron]

I thought it worth sharing here that the cross-platform Opera web browser has 
gone _totally_ Free, including ADVERT FREE,  with their latest 8.50 release. 
While the ad banner on the previous free versions was fairly unobtrusive, it 
is still nice to have the ads disappear altogether and reclaim the screen 
realestate for browsing. 

Though the program isn't open source, Opera has always been very active in 
supporting the Linux platform.  Since ~version 7, their feature set for Linux 
has been identical to their offerings for more commercial platforms, and 
their download page lists package choices for at least 60 Linux distro / 
release version combinations.

I have developed a slight preference for Opera over Mozilla / Firefox, 
especially in the areas of more functional features, more customizable 
interfacing, more "skin" choices and having a ZOOM capability for page 
rendering (: which becomes increasingly handy for folks with aging eyes :). I 
almost never catch a page these days that Opera won't properly render, and 
recent updates have improved Javascript functionality so that Opera works 
great with all the latest "AJAX" based web service offerings like Gmail and 
Maps.Google.

Based on my long time usage of the Opera browsers on various platforms, I can 
highly recommend checking out the Cost Free, Ad Free, Opera 8.50 at 
<http://www.opera.com>

peace
aaron