Again most handy, thanks - although the requirements for summaries including "It must be composed of grammatically correct and complete sentences" might give some programmers issues as they boldly go from programming into prose 😉
Yes. Opera is based on the same renderer as Chrome. They dropped support for NPAPI some time ago.
That said, Oracle, the makers of Java, have also announced they will drop support for NPAPI. You've got 3 to 9 months, depending on the release date of Java 9, before its gone.
If you are not paying for the product then someone is paying for it on your behalf. Opera makes money by selling speed sponsored dials and search engines. When Opera updated it added the new speed dial to the list because that sponsor had paid for it since you last installed Opera. If you remove it, it should not come back.
I really hate how these forums negate paragraphs!
It uses its own formatting system called Markdown. You will find a link at the bottom of the page explaining how to use it.