Opera 8.0 : nothing spectacular, nothing justifying going up a whole version number.

But there is an interesting point:

Opera is offering a free license for Opera 8 automatically once 250 unique referrals from your site have been logged.

All you have to do is create a My Opera community account [and link] to Opera using the affiliate link.

So all it would take is a fifth of my daily readers clicking, just once, this shiny pretty link tomorrow, and I’d be rid of ads on Opera. Not that I care much about them (or almost at all, actually), but, hey: it’s possible, it costs absolutely nothing to anyone, and it flatters my ego (if it works out — otherwise I’ll be dead vexed), so why wouldn’t I do it?

I wonder about the profitability of the idea, though. If every blogger gets a free Opera registration, who’ll still be there to give them money?

Oh, and don’t just bump up my counter, download and install it, for real: even though the Swiss army knife aspect of it can be a deterrent, it’s only a 4MB download, and a good browser, but most importantly it’s a revolutionary and still unique email client (at least until Tiger ships), Spotlight before Spotlight: click a button or press ‘K’ to say you’ve read a message, and it disappears from your inbox (it’s so obvious when you explain it, you wonder how people can tolerate the way other clients work); click its sender in your contact list, or type a word it contained in the search box, and it reappears instantly. You’ll never have to manually file each read message according to its sender: a simple search will bring it back any time you want to read it again. It takes most people a few days to adjust, but once you’ve gotten used to it you can’t go back.