[ontheotherhand]

I remember the ads being easy to tune out.. they were never animated and didn't take up much space. The speed and way better UI of Opera made it more than worthwhile. Same goes for Eudora... yeah, I miss the days of ads that weren't totally shameless and dumb and mixed into everything all the time.

Though it's kinda hard to talk about this with a straight face on a "hacker" "news" website where one out of three links is a blog post by some over-excited, under-developed yuppie kid (not talking about age here; consider Bill Gates, who never grew pubes and is getting grey already) about something that happened in, before or after their startup.