@ff34 I don't have that, could it be part of an extension?

Maybe click the cube in toolbar and disable all pinned extensions to see if it disappears.

Or disable all extensions and close app, then reload and see if it has gone.

The Opera VPN was one of the few things keeping me with Opera but earlier this week it got me banned from my email account and I can't get back in.

The Opera VPN is a bit of a joke when comes to privacy because the IP's are registered to Opera, so it is obvious you are using a VPN and it is easy to add the Opera VPN's to a blacklist.

I was just replying to an email and suddenly got locked out,

So I decided to test the paltry 4 choices we get

Optimum
Europe
Americas
Asia

3 of the 4 were actually Opera Servers in Pakistan, the 4th could not be determined. No wonder I got banned, and it seems that the Opera servers are not doing enough to stop unsolicited mail or hacking because the reason for the block was alleged breach of terms and conditions.

I only write a handful of emails a day and do not participate in scams or hacking, I would not know how.

To be honest I think Opera lost it's USP when it sold it's soul and used Google Chrome as a base code. There is no way we can know what is lurking inside that code, certainly YouTube techs who monitor the traffic of all the browsers suggest they do not protect privacy adequately.

Opera does not have it's own add-on library, instead it used Google so Google determine if an app can be developed. The number of apps available for Firefox has always been their strength but they moved to a new platform which left many developers in the lurch. Firefox also became bloatware (as did Opera), so Opera had a chance to grab the old Firefox and fork it.

Those forks exist and run their own library but they do not have the resources of Opera, it is not too late to have an Opera lite.

The amount of memory and CPU that Opera takes up is absurd and there is very little in settings to reduce this. Even the first Microsoft Explorer had ways to use less memory (for example not loading images.

On an iPad or iPhone using Safari I can have hundreds of tabs open with no performance degradation on the device. Yet with opera, more than 6 and it gets flakey, also I am not convinced I get the memory back if I close those tabs.

So I guess I am going to have to find a fork of the old Firefox or use one of the more esoteric browsers.

For now Opera is no longer my default and I have disabled the VPN, I still do not have my email back and was also blocked from other sites that do two factor authentication, their emails are sitting in the inbox of the now defunk email account. All this because of Opera VPN.

I have had to turn off hardware acceleration as that appears to be using nearly 500mb of ram, so you see bit by bit Opera has less going for it. This makes me sad because the one thing we need is strong competition to Google, such a mistake to use their code.