After announcing the ad-free version

Sep 24, 2005 12:05 GMT  ·  By

In the attempt to increase its market share, Opera has launched the free version of its browser, which no longer includes ads. Analysts consider that this was possible because the integrated search engines pay Opera a certain fee.

Regardless of the way Opera has decided to offer their application free-of-charge, it seems that initiative has been successful, users downloading the browser 1.6 million times.

A similar interest was showed a few months ago when Opera introduced the last version which was downloaded in four days by 1 million users.

Opera also announced a partnership with Answer.com and a version of the browser for cell phones.

Before the 8.5 version appeared, Opera has had a market share of 1%. The Norwegian producer hopes that the new free version will allow the browser to beat Firefox, which has a market share of 8.6%.