And another: http://www.irider.com/

Could someone explain me one thing?

I paid for my house, my car, my clothes, my computer, my food. I never saw any open source bread. So why shouldn’t I pay for my software?

It’s great that there are free alternatives, and Firefox is a good one, but does that mean that all must be like that? Don’t software developers deserve to get paid? Isn’t that a real job?

I am a computer engineer. Should I make my work for free from now on? By the way, do all paid-software-haters work for free?

Today, I saw ads in TV, in most Internet sites, in the mail, in e-mail, in billboards, in buses, in the subway, in the paper, in magazines, in the radio.

Wrong world to avoid ads… And is $34 (paid only once) that much to have access to the best browser without ads?

For me, I’ll stick with Opera. Firefox’s plugins are both their strong point and their weakness. Without plugins you have nothing. And you have to be technically ‘oriented’ to do your search of good plugins before you have something usable. But everytime to you install a buggy plugin you are in problems. And sometimes they are not easy to uninstall.

For me, Opera is stable and fast. Provides 99% of the functionality that I want and is improving all the time. Just give me a Flash Ad Blocker and we get the 100%. :-)

Interesting case could have been the WinXP N version which is released in Europe. Unfortunately the EU and Microsoft could not agree on a version without IE. Accordingly to MS because of WU necessities. It would have been very interesting to see what WinXP would have costed without IE included.

I’m guest-writing an article (Toolbars) for the 30 days series for Tim, and as part of my research I set up clean installs of Firefox 1.04 and Opera 8 (and I’ve never tweaked the interface of my seldom-used copy of IE). I got out my trusty screen calipers and measured.

Lo and behold, the total height of UI of Firefox and Unregistered Opera was identical. Firefox might appear smaller, but what they giveth at the top, they taketh away at the bottom of the screen. The only thing Firefox displays which Opera doesn’t in this configuration is a status bar.

With the ads, I have to strip away almost every browser interface element to match the amount of realscreen estate Firefox offers, so yeah, barebones. In Firefox, on the other hand, I can compress just about everything I need into one toolbar, earning myself space without having to sacrifice the buttons and menus I need, so yeah, lean.

Why waste time compressing, stripping and closing! F11 does the trick with one-push results. It works in Opera and firefox.

A funny thing also happened. To verify my test, I had to go and download a fresh copy of Opera so that I could get an unregistered ad-supported default version for my test. I then opened up the same web site in each browser (Opera & firefox each in default mode from a fresh installation). I enabled all of the toolbars available in each browser, and then I hit F11 and wa laa!

Opera’s ad disappeared, and only the web content was visible. Firefox had almost as much screen real estate as Opera. However, the navigation bar was still present, and the scroll elevator was still present along the right side of the screen. Not a lot of difference in the total amount of “screen real estate”, but chock up another one for Opera.

Hang around the forums and Opera Community for a while. You’ll soon learn that Opera can do just about anything you want. If it doesn’t, post a question, and your likely to find an eager Opera loyalist ready to fix ya’ up, because we love what we do.