I have to agree with rderasta. I see and understand the limitations mentioned by blackbird71, but when I downloaded the Opera 16 and found I couldn't choose my own search engine, I switched to Chrome. (By the way, I use Duckduckgo right now) The only thing that brought me back was discovering that I could still get Opera 12. Opera 12 is superior to Opera 16.

The Opera 16 browser offers nothing special. It looks like Chrome, yet has less ability to personalize it. On top of that, Chrome has the Google universe of functionality behind it and will probably be growing more customizable in the future rather than less.

This disturbing shift in Opera's philosophy appears to me to be a move in the wrong direction. So wrong in fact, that if the source is truly the new rendering engine, Opera should revert back to the older engine. Opera's users have always preferred Opera, because there were more choices and options with Opera to personalize the browser than with Internet Explorer. Speed is important, but only up to a point. That point is parity. If Opera is roughly as fast as the other major browsers, speed isn't a deciding factor anymore for most people. After that point, the issue becomes which browser do I, the user, feel most comfortable using. The answer to that question is going to depend on how much each user can personalize it. Opera's unique niche was having lots of included customizable features. Firefox's niche is having tons of customizable addons. (I didn't get Firefox; because the more addons you use, the slower that browser becomes.) Chrome's niche is simplicity and speed. Internet Explorer has just been trying to keep up and remain the standard.

The reason I bothered to look for Opera 12 at all was because I recalled how great it was to make the Opera browser my own...not because Opera 12 is faster than Chrome. I'm not comfortable with Chrome because of irrational (perhaps) fears that my privacy is in serious jeopardy with Google collecting so much information about my internet traffic. So, to keep your customer base, my suggestion is that Opera keep three words in mind when you make the next version: personalization, privacy, and parity. I think these three are what matters most to people now...in that order.