Happy Birthday Opera

Today my favorite browser Opera celebrates it’s 10th Birthday ONLINE! In 1994, two engineers at Telenor (the Norwegian phone company) developed the Opera browser for the company’s intranet.The following year, two members of the team — Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivars?y — left Telenor to establish Opera Software to develop the browser commercially.Opera was founded on 19th August 1995.Opera v 2.1 final was released in December of 1996.Click here to see the timeline.
There is gonna be an open for all virtual party at http://my.opera.com/community/party/ .The
party starts at 13:00 GMT or 18:30 IST.The IRC channel is already online at irc://irc.opera.com/OperaParty ,go ahead and start chatting.Brianj the community manager has confirmed me that Jon and Wium Lie will be available for chat.Jon is scheduled to join around 16:00 CET and Wium Lie around 17:00 CET.It’s gonna get crazy! According to Opera watch it will also feature music, games, prizes, photos and a HUGE surprise!

There has been a lot of speculation as to what the BIG SURPRISE MAY BE.One of them is that Opera
for Desktop is going to become completely free.This speculation was triggered off by Heise
Newsticker’s report that Opera is considering an alternative new business model for the
Desktop.Daniel Gold of Opera-watch added fuel to this.
He wrote

Until version 5, Opera didn’t have a free version of its desktop browser. In the year 2000, however, it introduced the free version with ads.Here is what Opera said at that time: “Before this release [version 5], between 1 and 1.5 million people worldwide used Opera. A sizeable number, but we were dwarfed in comparison to our competitors. Finding one’s niche and prospering can be good for many companies, but for us it posed a particular problem. A lot of sites were
being constructed just to work with one browser, in effect shutting Opera users out. Therefore we felt the time had come to let Opera out in a free version, so that millions more could enjoy Opera’s Internet experience. Opera 5.0 for Windows was ‘set free’ in December of 2000, and during the first month 2 million users downloaded the browser.”Removing the ads would have an even greater effect on the number of Opera users. The rest of the Opera products would also
benefit from such a change.

As expected there hasnt been any response yet from Opera but Jax – Opera’s Core technology developer said “The desktop Opera is crucial to what we do (and profitable, incidentally), there is no benefit
in leaving it. We were not, are not, will not merely be a phone browser. Don’t worry about it,
no point in suggesting it either.”

To me that seems like a strong suggetion that an ad-free version of Opera isnt in the cards.

Another possibily is the announcement of Opera v9!Dan1el an Opera forum member has recieved at his sites with the browser useragent identifying as Opera v9!Another member of myOpera forums AutisticCuckoo has got hits from opera.com domain, with an UA string of ‘Opera/9.0!
Operawatch had earlier reported that “Opera is currently working on a major upgrade for the rendering engine of the
Opera browser”.The only thing that is known about this core is that it would have better results
with ACID2(would probably pass it by the time it gets relased).So it is a possibility that Opera
v9 is being internally tested and a beta release may be made today.

A new revamped Opera community site is also a possibility.
But these are all speculations.The actual announcement may not be related to any of these.But,there is no harm in guessing :>> .
And before i forget, you can get an ad-free version of Opera,if you act now! Click here for instructions.This offer is valid from 12
a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).

That’s all for now.

Three Cheers for Opera!

Update:Opera has finally revealed what the surprise is.They are not going completely free,but are giving away a free key to everyone.Grab them from while they last