Opera launches support for RSS

Opera Software has just released Version 7.50 of the Opera browser which now feature RSS support inbuilt into their mail utility. According to ABC13 Christen Krogh, Opera VP of engineering says of RSS “In some means or another, it’s there to stay.”. The irony of the release is that for its free edition Opera co-operates with Google for customised ads for the browser (and hence revenue), and Google refuses to support RSS as a standard for syndication, blantantly pushing Atom through sites such as Blogger. Although we won’t be switching any time soon (the ads are annoying), the RSS support and other recent improvements to Opera means that they could be seen as a reasonable alternative to IE and Firefox, however at $39 USD to remove the ads we can’t see a huge change over to Opera given the many free alternatives to the product, both in browsers and RSS readers.