@bvm42
New Opera is entirely different browser that have an absolutely opposite concept/ideas/direction when it's compared with the old product.
As it is, Opera 12 has features I love, but it's not super reliable any more (leaks memory, gets into states where it won't open connections to web sites, etc.).
Try 12.14, x64 builds.
My first impression is that it's Chrome with some minor tweaks but without such essential features as bookmark sync.
So it is. It's ordinary Chromium-based web-browser with a few of specific features and options.
Is there any way to have multiple rows of tabs? Without this, it's impractical to have more than a dozen tabs open at once.
Not sure if it's possible with the UI which is built on Chromium (even as an new UI's layer).
Is there any quick way to toggle loading of images on/off? Opera 12 has a button in the button bar.
Unlikely.
Fit to width? Again, Opera 12 has a button.
No, of course.
FTW feature is based on the special rendering mode in Opera 12(thats unique for Presto rendering engine). It wasn't implemented by competitors.
FTW was considered (by the Opera devs) as one of the most confusing feature that frustrated a lot of non-experienced and newbie users:
"...Presto-based Opera had become overloaded with features, a number of them confusing rather than helping our users — you can’t imagine how many reports we’ve gotten from users telling us that their favorite site was broken, simply because they had turned on fit-to-width by accident, for instance...."
Details: http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2013/07/the-vision-behind-opera-15-and-beyond/
Fast forward?
Hmmm... I don't think. Too "geeky".
So far, I've only discovered one Opera feature that I like, is in the new Opera, and which Chrome doesn't have: the z (back) shortcut. But in Opera 12, I customized this to be Back | Close, which makes it even more useful. I don't see any capability for keyboard customization in Opera 26.
They won't implement mouse gesture customization ( "too geeky feature" - http://i.imgur.com/fDSjYZq.png ). Why they should implement keyboard customization? There is no way to get back these "geeky" features and an extensive customizability (what typical or an average user never care about).
Incidentally, OperaMail was a huge failure for me. I installed it and pointed it at my old accounts.ini (on a machine where I had no mail, just news feeds). It spent a long time reading the .mbs files, and when it finally came up, there were zero feeds.
Opera Mail (as an separate application) is a dead born product. It's a stripped down version of Opera 12 with a number of useful features removed.
Thousands of messages when I tell it to "Read Feeds", but they're all mixed together. When I go to "Manage Feeds" there are no feeds. Big disappointment.
RSS feed reader was replaced with Discover.
Anyway, Google Corp that dictates trends on the Internet declared that RSS became obsolete.