Opera is still among the paid software. you have to buy the browser or use it for 30 days as shareware.
Now with 5.02 opera breaks it’s tradition and started offering opera for free with ads showing in it.
You can buy it and use it without the ads.
Opera is wonderful for its measly 1-2 MB size. It has builtin Email client and news client although they aren’t that great.
The browser itself is fantastic in that it seldom crashes like IE, and has all plugins (nearly)since it directly interfaces with Netscapes’ plugins.
That’s bad if you don’t have netscape already installed. But there is a work around to that.
The browser is highly configurable, fast to load, and extremely stable. You can open multiple windows simultaneously,
all within Opera. Javascript is near about completely supported since ver 5.
It is overall a great browser.