Opera Turns 10, Now Free. Today Only. Hurry.

There’s just something ‘wrong’ about having to pay for a browser when so many web browsers are so good and soooooo free. Safari. Camino. Firefox. Mozilla.

You get the idea. The popular Opera browser costs money. Except today it’s free.

Personally, I like Safari. Not because it’s free. Not because it’s from Apple and an integral part of Mac OS X. Safari works very well for me, it’s minimalist approach is endearing.

That lack of a bucket of features doesn’t bother me in the least. After all, it’s just a browser. Click a bookmark, open a page. What else is there?

Actually, there’s plenty of extras in other browsers. Even the venerable and aging Mozilla browser also doubles as an HTML web page editor, which comes in handy when checking the code of other web sites.

Feature for feature, it may be that OmniWeb is the best browser on the planet. It’s fast, it looks nice, it feels like a ‘Mac’ application. OmniWeb isn’t free.

Others love Firefox because it’s free, fast, stable, and looks and feels pretty much the same on Mac as on Windows as on Linux.

Pure Mac users also give high marks to Camino, which is the Mozilla Firefox browser engine with a Mac-like GUI. Look and feel is similar to a ‘Mac’ experience. Features are modest, speed is good.

Among the world’s popular, cross-platform browsers, Opera also has a legion of followers. Opera comes in a handful of versions. One version doesn’t cost you money but makes you watch advertising for the privilege of using a browser loaded with features.

Frankly, there’s enough advertising on the web without having to get more of it just for the benefit of using a popular browser with many features. I’m more inclined to want to stop advertising, than get more of it.

Opera, though, is different. At $39, Opera might seem a bit pricey, but at least it’s not Microsoft. Some people will pay money just to not use a Microsoft product.

So, you’d like to try out Opera but don’t want to fork over $39, right? And you don’t want to be bothered by more ads, so the ‘free’ version is out of the question.

Opera just turned 10 years old. To celebrate, Opera is giving away free registrations for a day. The day is today and it’s about half over.

Assuming the link stays up, if you Click Here and enter an email address, you’ll get a list of Opera registrations. One for your Windows PC, one for your Linux computer, one for your Mac, one for your Sun Sparc, one for your BSD server, and one for your Linux PowerPC.

That’s a nice gift for what amounts to a very good browser for your Mac (or PC, or…) for nothing. Are you getting what you pay for? You get to be the judge.