Opera Offers Browser Bargain

In a bid to get more universities and colleges to use its Web browser, Opera Software launched a special licensing program that lowers the cost of the browser to as little as $1 per copy when purchased in volume.

Opera won't specify the exact number of licenses that an institution of higher education must agree to buy to qualify for the $1-per-copy price, but it has to be more than 50, said Opera spokesperson Live Leer on Tuesday. The standard per-copy price for educational users is $20, with volume discounts starting when an institution purchases 10 or more licenses, she said.

"When a customer wants to buy over 50 licenses, we talk to them individually and come up with a deal, but 50 is not enough for the $1 price," she said.

The Opera Web browser is an alternative to the browsers given away by Microsoft and Netscape Communications. Opera, in Oslo, offers a free browser, but that version contains advertising.

At-School Surfing

Opera's program for higher education can be seen as an extension of the Global Donations Program launched in May. The donations program provides free licenses to elementary schools, as well as to organizations for the physically challenged and to Web designer schools and programs.

Jasper Kalkman, IT administrator at The American School of The Hague in the Netherlands, said the school looked at Opera but chose not to use it. Instead, the school opted for Internet Explorer on machines running Microsoft's Windows and Apple Computer's Mac OS operating systems.

Some machines running Mac OS X also have the Chimera browser installed, according to Kalkman. "[It's] a beautiful and very fast browser," he said. Chimera is a browser for Mac OS X based on the Mozilla open-source browser code.

Opera lists nine universities on its Web site that it says use its browser.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer, however, dominates the browser market and is used by 96 percent of Internet users, Internet researcher WebSideStory said in late August. Netscape is used by 3.4 percent of Internet users, leaving only 0.6 percent for "other" browsers (including Opera), according to the researcher.