I 'member.
I have used it, off and on, since the days when I paid for it. Yup, all those years ago, it was not free. You could use a trial version, or you could suffer though ads (eventually). You could also crack it, as keygens were available, but I felt obligated to pay for it 'cause it was pretty good.
Opera was the first, for many things. So, I continue to install it and use it. I didn't like the early transitional versions of Opera when they were moving to the Chromium codebase, but sometime around version 21 to 23 they managed to make it usable again.
I had no idea it was a paid browser back in the day. TIL
>Version 8.5 was released on September 20, 2005. Opera announced that their browser would be available free of charge and without advertisements, although the company still continued to sell support contracts.[37] Enhancements included automatic client-side fixing of web sites that did not render correctly, and a number of security fixes.
Strangely, I don't see how much it cost on Wikipedia and I don't actually remember what it cost. It was like $20, I think.
Back in 2005 I hate to admit it but I was an apple guy at that point. I was all apple installing OS X servers into business and moving them to mac. I've since learned the error of my ways though.
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