I had this happen yesterday with opera 27 too. Deleting the google cookies and then restarting the browser fixed it.

What behavior were you trying to get it to do? If you were trying to make it so that it switches tabs in the tab strip order (instead of recently used order), there is a setting for that:

Opera Menu | Settings | Browser | Uncheck the box for 'Cycle tabs in most recently used Order'.

Anyone concerned about security really shouldn't be running windows xp in the first place

What behavior were you trying to get it to do? If you were trying to make it so that it switches tabs in the tab strip order (instead of recently used order), there is a setting for that:

Opera Menu | Settings | Browser | Uncheck the box for 'Cycle tabs in most recently used Order'.

I've run into this issue before (for me it was caused by importing cookies from another browser into Opera).

Going to Preferences | Privacy and Security | Cookies | Click 'All cookies and site data' and delete any google/gmail cookies should sort it out.

Once you've deleted any google cookies, logging into gmail should create a new one that works properly.

Really happy to see native context menus in the webui's

In reality, there are only 5 primary engine lines currently being used for Windows browsers: all the variants within the KHTML/Webkit/Chromium/Blink lineage, Gecko, Trident, Presto, and EdgeHTML.

Firefox are going to abandon Gecko, aren't they?
So - what are we're gonna be left with then?

1. Chromium.
2. Chromium.
3. Chromium.
4. Chromium.
5. Windows' Edge.

Firefox is not abandoning Gecko, and definitely aren't adopting chromium. They have an experimental new engine called Servo, but it's mainly for research purposes and they plan to integrate parts of it into gecko over time.

They've hinted on the desktop team blog that it might be possible to add RSS feeds to news in the future (http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2015/11/o35-initial-release/#comment-2356219206), but afaik currently no plans for integrating them with sync (but that would be a great feature I agree)

You can change the thumbnail it uses by clicking on the speed dial to open the web page, and then click the Heart menu on the Addressbar. From there you can use the left/right arrows to toggle through available thumbnail images for that site.

The Speed Dial is now a Folder in the Bookmarks Manager. So (assuming you're talking about items that you already have bookmarked) in the Bookmarks Manager you can just Drag and Drop (or Copy and Paste) items into the Speed Dial folder to add them to the Speed Dial.

I highly doubt they made the change 'to borrow code from chromium'. They did it because now that there's a tab menu, it makes sense from a UI perspective to have recently closed tabs there, but having the tab menu show a list of all closed tabs wouldn't really work well because it would result in a huge list that would push the 'open tabs' part of the tab menu really far down...

I really can't understand this design logic. They added a tab menu, which for me was completely unnecessary. This adds 0 additional functionality. I already have a tab bar which is far more convenient (for me) to navigate tabs (34 open now) then a long scroll down menu. I can easily visually identify the tab I want to move to and do so in a single click without any additional steps of opening a menu, scrolling to the page I want, and clicking again.
Then they moved a very functional component (recently closed tabs) to the unnecessary menu that I don't need and would rather not even have on my browser. In addition, as a result of this UI change, if I understand correctly from what has been posted here, they were forced to limit the functionality of the useful component. Nice trade off. Seems like a win/win. Insert sarcasm here.

You're ignoring the other functions of the tab menu... it also serves as a place to quickly access sync'd tabs from other devices, and it can also serve as a useful tab overflow when you have a ton of tabs open (when you have many tabs open, it's difficult to differentiate between tabs on the tab strip because they become very small and you can't see the titles, whereas on the tab menu you can see the full title of each tab, you can preview tabs without having to actually switch and potentially lose your place, and the list is scrollable).

The tab menu has legitimate, useful functionality. I can certainly see why people would want the ability to see a larger list of recently closed tabs, but I don't see any reason to throw the tab menu under the bus.

How do you remove the "Tab Manager" icon from the browser. It serves no purpose to me other than to take up space and piss me off.

http://i.imgur.com/snbzvqS.png

"When modifying existing UI, never add elements without giving the user the option to remove them" - One of the Principals of UX.
This can also be summed up with "People don't like change", "You can't please everyone, so don't force your changes on them", and "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The tab menu Icon literally does not take up any 'usable' space... It's located under the min/max/close buttons where there was nothing else there anyway...