As of today, Opera has just released version 8.5 and it is now competely free. No more ads of any kind. (I will actually kind of miss the google adwords because I found some neat stuff with those.)

Just wanted to give some updates to my original post.

Opera 8.02 is out and I’ve been using that. I’m finding that it is rendering more and more web sites correctly. Also, when I try to move over to FireFox, I find I miss Opera’s ability to help me quickly fill out forms.

One program to add to the list is “The Gimp”. This open source, free software is like Adobe PhotoShop. There are Windows binaries out there (Google wingimp). Since PhotoShop’s current version has added product activation and I’m opposed to product activation, I will not be buying it, even though I could get it for $149 upgrade price since I have a licensed copy of PS 5.0. The Gimp provides almost all the main features that you get with PhotoShop and it has some features that are better such as it’s built-in scripting system that puts PhotoShop “Actions” to shame. As more people become frustrated with Adobe’s buggy and frustrating activation scheme, I expect more users will switch to The Gimp.

Speaking of Adobe, there is also an open source PDF generator: PDFCreator. I’ve played with it a little bit and it looks promising.

Instant Messaging: Tired of pop-ups and bloat in your IM software? Try Trillian free version. Works with the major IM networks, such as Yahoo and AOL but it’s much cleaner with no bloat.

As I’m really getting seriously into photography, I’ll probably do a post soon dedicated to image processing freeware.