Actually I strongly disagree that it was necessary to stream down Opera because of its lack of user base, because its lack of user base was due to the lack of marketing to point out to users the differences and advantages of Opera 12.17 over its competitors. Had it been marketed well the user base would have certainly climbed, as practically everyone I would tell about Opera's useful features would be sold and converted. Content blocking was such an easy sell for the majority of the population had they known it existed, as was the ability to place the tabs on the left so that one could give them enough width to read the page titles and thus navigate back and forth. It does not take a power user to see the advantage of the tab features that so simplified the usage but are now gone, yet even the simplest of users typically have dozens of tabs open.

Furthermore, just how difficult can it be to develop such basic features such as left hand side tab placement, click on tab to minimize, and basic content blocking. If the software is written well in the first place these are straightforward, trivial, and tiny features to implement.

Given the sophistication of the average user's life in today's world and given the core importance that Internet browsing is to function in this world, it is nonsense to believe that one could not find a significant user base for features that made browsing tremendously more simple and effective. The problem was that hardly anyone knew that a browser with these features existed in the first place. What's the point of developing another browser such as the latest Opera when it has no benefits over Chrome and is just as deficient? There is no reason for anyone to download it when there are no distinguishing advantages. Perhaps the new core is written cleaner so that some of these trivial features can be added.

As a side note, it is actually impossible to open dozens of tabs on eBay without content blocking because every other seller uses adobe flash software that runs rotating galleries that run in the background and consume resources. The simple solution was to block those providers who wrote those poorly behaved nuisance applications and voila, no freezing while surfing eBay. This is still a problem for virtually every browser something that only Opera 12.17 solves.

So while I am waiting for a better browser to appear that has the necessary features for simpler and more effective browsing, I am stuck with Opera 12 and its drawbacks such as a single process engine that on a Core i7 with 8 logical CPUs is a lament, and its inability to implement HTML5 due to its abandonment.