Giving Opera Another Shot

Okay, so I ran across a program called Ad Muncher at BetaNews about a week ago, and decided to try Opera 8 again using it in the background. While Ad Muncher creates some problems (specifically, using FilePlanet with K-Meleon), it works very well with Opera. But it's shareware with a 30-day timeout, and I don't think it's worth $25 when I can just use Firefox with the Adblock extension.

And that's a shame, because Opera 8 really is vastly improved over the six and seven branches. There are still issues with standards compliance; I'm writing this in Opera and the Blogger preview function doesn't work at all. But it's nice and fast and most of the interface weirdness is gone (or maybe I've just gotten used to it). I also like the download manager, which is integrated into a new tab, more than Firefox's and at least as much as I like K-Meleon's. Unfortunately, it's cluttered up more than ever thanks to feature creep, though the download size is still relatively small at about two-thirds the size of Firefox 1.0.3. They've also gone the Netscape route by planting links to Opera all over the UI. You get five Opera bookmarks, two Opera searches, an Opera home page, and of course those big Opera banners in the free version.

So basically, its the best Opera yet, but does that warrant spending $40 to register it when Firefox, K-Meleon, and Avant Browser are all freeware and can handle everything Opera has to offer except email? And Thunderbird is also OSS and therefore free as well. Sure, its 5.7MB, but its also the best freeware email client ever written.

I'll keep using Opera 8 until the Ad Muncher trial expires, but then I'm done.

Update, 11:00pm:

Almost forgot about this. I realize that the Opera people are excited about actually having a popular product for once, but really, what the hell is this?