I fired up my browser and was pleased to see the little update window telling me there was a new version. Happy day, 8.5 has been released. I downloaded and installed it. I was very happy that it did not put the banner back up since I was given a code during Opera's 10-year anniversery. I surfed over to Opera.com to see what was knew. Holy shit, its free now! This has been expected in the community for awhile now but it was good to see the day come. I hit some of the common news sites to see unintelligent banter of Opera fanboys saying that FireFox users now have nothing to lord over our heads, FireFox fanboys talking about all these extensions you can add to FireFox that make it cooler than Opera (and for some reason half of them they mention are normal features of Opera), and like two smart people saying they use x browser but it is cool to see another standards compliant browser out there to help persuade Microsoft to push for standards in IE7.
Eventually I got back to Opera.com to see what else had changed. For the most part, it is just a couple of bug fixes and security patches along with removing all the banner and registartion stuff. But they also started using Browser Javascript by default. Basically, this is a set of replacement javascript functions for pages that arbitrarily decide Opera can't handle their site because it is Opera. A good example is MSN.com. On quite a few occasions, they would use browser detection to see if a user was visiting it with Opera and send them a page that rendered horribly just to make it look like Opera could not display pages right. Anyways, this file will help kill some of these issues. Once a week, the browser will see if a new version of this file exists, grab it if is does, and start using it thus fixing more issues. Opera has had User Javascript for awhile now, which basically lets the users do the same thing by hand, and they still can, but it is cool that they automated it like this.
