I am more than grieved to hear the horror stories of Opera's latest release. I've not updated, but all I've heard is this comparison with Chrome. I am a very long time Opera user, exclusively since almost the beginning of the browser itself. Other browsers annoy me to no end, probably because they lacked the many wonderful features opera gave us. I work as a developer for a major enterprise social software company and completely understand the needed change. Opera has never been given consideration in our company, despite my consistent reporting of bugs in which I was always told, "we do not support Opera". Instead we rather cater to moronic people who still insist on using antiquated versions of IE. So to hear the rendering engine would be changed delighted me to no end. Not because I am a fan of WebKit, I am not. I just wanted to see Opera get the chance it deserved and knock these other browsers down a notch. Then my guts where ripped out and stomped on to find out everything that I base my whole Internet experience on would be trashed with Presto.

I call foul on Opera, I hope this issue is resolved in the near future. But rarely do corporations really care what we as loyal users think or need. I am almost ashamed now for being an advocate and turning so many people on to Opera. Really, I never cared about the compatibility issues Opera had. Yes sometimes it was annoying, but my anger was always towards the site itself. Somehow I always found a way around these problems, even if it meant using a substandard browser for a few minutes.

So I anxiously await the outcome of this fiasco and hope to see Opera return to its former glory at which time I'll update. Until then I will try to find the best open source browser for my needs. We can't use Opera 12 forever, might as well switch back to Mosaic.