@leocg I think what is being missed here, is that this was working in the previous release. All the settings for permissions are correct. popups are enabled, Ads and trackers are enabled.
Something in this new release has changed.
@pete_forman gmail went offline with Opera Developer on Linux again. To restore it this time I just used ctrl+F5 to reload without cache rather than deleting the cookies for gmail.google.com. I can live with that.