>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.

Update after further use:
- Tab support is funny or not correct
- Some sites such as MSDN render with too large and too small fonts on the same page
- Strange font choices/rendering on some sites e.g. titles on Slashdot
- No multi-page option for back/forward buttons
- Poor video support on popular sites e.g. Yahoo, CNN
- "Wand" password-remember "feature" driving me nuts - haven't tried to figure out how to disable it yet
- I take back the speed comment, it's in general slower than IE (fastest) or FireFox (not quite as fast as IE)
- Custom rendering of some web controls e.g. checkboxes are non-standard, look strange on some pages

Verdict: an interesting experiment but I'm going back to FireFox 1.0.7