Waarom plotseling Opera 8.00 ?
76P4 := 76 + 4 = 80
Niet dus...
As with the move to Opera 8.0, this seems to make sense from a tecnical point of view. Opera 8.0 has a new core, which has had a major overhaul, and the underlying technology is in fact vastly improved. In addition, the user interface has changed a lot too.
Forte Agent 2.0 was in a similar situation. They had to spend a lot of time rewriting the entire program using a different toolkit, which took a lot of time, effort and resources. To the end-user, everything appeared to be almost exactly the same as it used to. But the fact is that Agent 2.0 is a completely different program from Agent 1.
A lot of people complained about the upgrade fee, because they couldn't see all the major changes under the hood. Forte would have been wise to simply change the user interface a bit more, although people did expect more features, too.
In the case of Opera 8.0, there are also many changes under the hood, and they are not immediately obvious to most people. Does that mean that these major changes are simply irrelevant? Certainly not. And it does render the "marketing gimmick" argument moot. The biggest reason for moving to 8.0 is actually based on technical changes, both to the core and to the user interface. Calling this Opera 7.6 would simply be misleading from a technical perspective.
Add to this that the upgrade from Opera 7 to Opera 8 is actually completely free, and I think you will see that this was not a move to squeeze more money out of our customers. In fact, we've just given all Opera 7 customers a free upgrade, and added to this, we've changed our license terms so that there is only one license for all desktop platforms, which means that you can install Opera on any number of computers in your own home, regardless of the (desktop) operating system used. Yes, that's right. You can install the registered version of Opera as many times as you like with just a single license.
I hope that this will finally put all conspiracy theories to rest.