I've reported a bug with Opera failing to load pages and blocking them with falsely reporting them as dangerous.I've asked for them to give us control over safety settings on sites.The last update took any of that we had away from us.
I've found one extension that makes CPU usage to the sky after a time. Avira Browser Safety makes every tab to 30-40%. Maybe it's scans or doing something in the background within every tab.
Go to Opera Menu > About and it will tell you where your profile folder is located. Since your destination system is Windows 8.1 you can just copy the whole folder over and replace. Be forewarned; if you replace the folder it will erase anything you have in your profile on the destination machine. This includes bookmarks, speed dials, passwords and the like.
I have been trying to get away from Firefox based browsers. I like Slimjet 64bit version because it is fast and it offers me one important feature (to me) that Chrome does not offer, and that is a bookmarks side panel that I can keep docked such as what Firefox has. With that being said,their bookmarks side panel does not work as well as the V7 Bookmarks extension does here in Opera. If there was a way that I could get V7 to work in Slimjet, then I would probably use Slimjet exclusively over Opera 30.0. But so far, I have not found a way to do that.
Interesting discussion. I share many of the expressed opinions having been an Opera addict since Version 3 (you even had to pay for a licence at the time, a few decades ago..) I guess it's partly a generation question. These days people don't really question webservices any more and the ancient Pop3 standard seems to have become more or less extinct. For the time being I'll stick with my dual Opera setup until a real reason comes up to move over to web-based IMAP for mail, such as independency from the hardware you have installed your mail client on.
Thanks for the tip. Just did a bit of reading, and I see what you mean. Quite a story! Am very curious about Vivaldi (which I just installed to have a look at).
I do like a lot of the new stuff in the latest versions of Opera, but I really need bookmarks to work normally in my browser, among a few other things.