The Opera browser is now free and ad-free
 

Press release

I'd say it's slightly superior to Firefox in some respects, and now it is completely free.
Moreover it comes from the same country as a famous moderator :E

Opera - best browser and email client by far.

Opera as a browser and email client is very good indeed. I paid for it (a while ago) and don't regret it. The only thing it lacks is a scheduler.

Interesting that they're now releasing Opera for free - as a combo it's pretty unbeatable for speed and security.

I use Firefox almost exclusively because what with Thunderbird (the email client) and Sunbird (the scheduler - still in beta) it just works for me. And I can X-platform with the Linux boxen.

Gotta admit that Outlook (NOT Outlook Express) is very polished - pity about the security worries (and Microsoft's persistently unpleasant behaviour).

I've been an Opera fan for quite a while, but recently i've slipped towards Firefox (even if 1.0.6 keeps crashing on me). Out of the box Opera is a fair bit better - in fact, Firefox comes behind Safari too - but i'd be hard pressed to do without some of the Firefox extensions. The brilliant Adblock and NoScript in particular, but CustomiseGoogle, SessionSaver and PasswordMaker too ... and I keep finding more

I used to use Opera on my old system and it was always ad free. :)

Think it was F10 or something similar to get full screen mode which meant no ads...

. Still had the overhead on the bandwidth I think but it was and is a very good browser.