The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

I've just updated the spam module on my site to take advantage of the rewrite, so please let me know if you run into any problems. I had turned on trackback moderation because I found a bunch of trackback spam that hadn't been caught. I've turned it back off now, so I hope things work out.

Merlin is the name of a small falcon, an Ancient, and as Olli mentioned, the code name of our next major release. Since we released Opera 8.5 today without banner ads, we thought we'd tell everyone some of the things they have to look forward to in the future from Opera. We've been working hard on the next major release for quite some time and we're getting ever closer to releasing a preview.

Here at Opera, we like acronyms. In QA, we use acronyms and abbreviations every day. We have stuff called SPARTAN, OASIS, SNORRE, BTS, etc. In fact, we like acronyms so much, we've stuffed a bunch of them into Merlin. You might recognize a couple: XSLT 1.0, WF2, a new IMAP back-end, and some CSS3 Selectors. Of course, we can't fill Opera with just acronymns, so we stuck in designMode (rich text editing). Oh, there's more, but we can't reveal all our secrets now.

Don't worry, we also had to fix a bunch of bugs. So, we made OBJECTs and IFRAMEs respect z-index, improved our margin-collapsing code, fixed problems with width inheritance for positioned elements, and nearly completed support for Acid2. There's way, way more to talk about, but that'll come later.

Enjoy 8.5 and look forward to Merlin. It's going to be great!

It's True.

As of today, Opera for Desktop is free[1] 365.242199 days a year. No more ad banners. More space to see what's important: the Web. And Kiosk Mode for everyone (I know this alone will convince like five more people to use Opera)!

Mark this day. September 20th will forever go down in history as the day Cal Ripken, Jr. took a day off from baseball after playing 2,632 consecutive games. Oh, and the day that Opera went free, too!

For those of you that already registered Opera, don't despair! You helped us reach this point. You made all this possible. And you still get premium support. For everyone else, premium support will be available as a yearly subscription.

If it's been a while since you tried Opera, give us another try. You're bound to find something you like.

Browse the Web better: Get Opera.

[1] Free as in beer, that is.