been using this for a while as well, and it's pretty awesome: anytime I'm browsing on someone else's non-add-blocked machine I'm like 'where the f does all this crap come form?'
Obviously I'm being sarcastic but I can't believe I actually found that browsing experience acceptable. If you told me today to use an ad-supported browser (or pay for a browser) I'd laugh and laugh and laugh.
I really liked Opera, and the ads were easily replaced by a white bar using some ipfw rules.
But until I can get a proper noscript implementation I won't use a browser. Right now, as far as I know, Firefox is the only browser that offers a proper noscript implementation alongside a good adblock plus.
Last I checked, the Chrome alternatives only filtered out JS after it was initially loaded. And in Opera I've never heard of any such offering.
Yep. You can do the same thing with "enable plugins" which handles Flash and other plugin-related technologies.
Opera doesn't need noscript because it's built in by default. Opera also made it extremely easy to toggle JS on/off if you want manual on demand control.
It's great for testing web sites you're developing because it takes about a second to test a page without JS, then reload and test it again with JS.
It bogggles my mind how Opera has almost no usage. Chrome, FF and others usually copy what Opera implements first. That whole "button and tabs in the title bar" look as been in Opera forever now.
I dont' remember this being very simple to use. Compare it to noscript in FF where you just click a button in the lower right corner, or upper left, and get a list of that domains JS so you can block or unblock with yet another click.
I do wonder if they would have been a major browser (20%+) if they had abandoned that approach a little earlier. They have historically been ahead of the curve on.. almost every feature, whilst consistently having some of fastest loads and lowest memory use.
Well, two big browsers most people do pay for: Safari and Internet Explorer. But they come "free" with the OS of course.
Similarly you pay (indirectly) for Opera on a few platforms.
Chrome isn't really free either - I assume Google uses all that data to build a profile in order to better sell (better?) ads -- still their main source of revenue AFAIK.
So that leaves Firefox, Opera (for *nix/OS X/MS Windows) and a few minor browsers as truly free. I suppose you could add IE to that list, if you run it under wine. And possibly Safari for windows if that still exists?
If Opera went payware again I would happily pay for a license. Of course I would feel they were then obliged to listen to my crazy ideas about browser 'improvements'.
Opera is the only piece of non-OSS I can't live without.
I remember the ads being easy to tune out.. they were never animated and didn't take up much space. The speed and way better UI of Opera made it more than worthwhile. Same goes for Eudora... yeah, I miss the days of ads that weren't totally shameless and dumb and mixed into everything all the time.
Though it's kinda hard to talk about this with a straight face on a "hacker" "news" website where one out of three links is a blog post by some over-excited, under-developed yuppie kid (not talking about age here; consider Bill Gates, who never grew pubes and is getting grey already) about something that happened in, before or after their startup.
https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/adblockforope...