It most certainly has to be a regional thing, as when I swapped my VPN to anything else beside US and Canada, with my other options being optimal location, Germany, Singapore, and Netherlands, I'm good. Switch to either Canada, US, or my local IP, and I'm using that other layout.

@aimzz I just tried it on my Edge and Chrome again. Those still work fine. I can't test Firefox since I don't have it, though.

I can only think of two possibilities. That the last update, or two broke something, again, or it's something on Google's side.

@leocg So this issue does not duplicate when you use a US IP?

@leocg My IP location would be in the US. Is it just a location based thing or something?

@leocg On my end, I only have Avast, and I'm using the built in adblock on Opera.
I out my laptop to sleep last night, and turned it on today, and it showed the old layout when I first used Google about two hours ago. I just updated to the recent version about two hours ago, and it was still an issue until I turned on VPN.
I did a test when the layout switched on Opera, and much like others, the new layout was there on Chrome, but Opera had been reverted to the old layout.

I've also got the same issue as of May 26 as well.
As @joelkuiper has stated, enabling VPN seems to clear up the issue, as far as my end goes, and I'm running the latest update as well.

Version:
45.0.2552.881 (PGO) - Opera is up to date

Update stream:
Stable

System:
Windows 10 64-bit (WoW64)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36 OPR/45.0.2552.881

That is odd, to say the least. I'm using the most recent version of Opera 28 Beta and it's fine for me, but 27 is still painfully slow. What version of Opera 27 and 28 do you have?

I'm still using Opera 28 Beta, and it's still running smooth for me, aside from a few hiccups. It's really weird that Opera's acting like that now.

It's times like that where I wish Opera still asked me update like it used to instead of auto-updating.

How would you ever know if you answered "no"?

On an older version, like the O12 series, Opera would have a prompt pop-up to tell me that there was a new version and gave the option to take or leave it, where I'd usually leave it until it was vetted by other users, so I could wait if there was a bad bug like this or if it was alright.

I decided to bite the bullet and just switch over to Opera Next (or Opera Beta, whatever they call it nowadays), and much to my surprise Opera 28 runs smooth and clean, much like the Opera 26 stable did. I'm going to have to chalk up the Opera 27 issue to a bug in that specific version. It's times like that where I wish Opera still asked me update like it used to instead of auto-updating.