Opera has made their eponymous browser (v8.5) free, as in beer ( http://www.opera.com ). Used to be you suffered banner ads for free, or paid $39 for a no-ads version.

Opera works nicely here with the UT, which is a pretty good test. Compared to FireFox 1.0.6:

- Mousewheel works better when composing messages
- Clocks next to unexpanded topics now disappear after being clicked on to "acknowledge" messages as read
- Sounds now happen when replies or agent messages show up (work in IE, never could get them to work in FireFox)

The browser loads much faster than FireFox and overall seems a little crisper in operation.

The only very minor thing I don't like as much as FireFox (so far) is that the menu bar isn't as customizable. In FireFox I set it up so there are buttons to the right of the menu pads, and I can have a full-width address bar. You can't put toolbar buttons on the menu in Opera.

I'll be testing over the next while on JavaScript-heavy and other intense sites to see how it works. But, so far, pretty good.