1. Opera has also option to show only cached images and option to load selected image.
2. Chrome has not option to disable images.
It did have a hard time recovering from the early backlash against it for not being open-source, belying the involvement and contributions of Opera engineers to the open standards web.
So I think it showed the ads for about 6 years? Just curious.
> Up to this point, Opera was trialware and had to be purchased after the trial period ended. Version 5.0 (released in 2000) saw the end of this requirement. Instead, Opera became ad-sponsored, displaying advertisements to users who had not paid for it.[25] Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google. With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera's default search engine).
So 2000 through 2005.
This seems to be borne out by the more specialized History of the Opera web browser page:
> Opera 5, released on December 6, 2000, was the first version which was ad-sponsored instead of having a trial period.
[snip]
> Version 8.5 was released on September 20, 2005, Opera announced that their browser would be available free of charge and without advertisements from then onwards, although the company still sells support contracts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_browse...
> Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google
is suspicious - I remember that when Opera was showing ads it had an ad bar above (or below) address bar. So maybe I got served ads but didn't consider them as such.
Or maybe I just idealize my youth :)
Right, I forgot. One question: isn't loading of selected things used for any element, not just images? So I could disable loading of header div and such?