Despite Opera releasing this series of versions into production, the product does not feel production-ready. I qualify this by the large number of bugs I continue to encounter, with a significant portion of the bugs being severe. I regard Opera crashing as well as the loss of all (>140) tabs as severe. I regard missing bookmark folders, display issues, lost Tab Islands, etc. as minor issues.
My work is mostly performed within a browser, and for this I use 3 Windows-based browsers, with Opera being my primary. I won't go into why Opera is my primary other than to say it has a ton of fantastic features and that I have used it since the early days. However, I do use other browsers because none of them are perfect and there are certain sites that just don't work properly in Opera, for example certain Microsoft admin sites.
Recently though Opera has made life difficult with the many bugs, some of which I am encountering repeatedly and that cause a lot of extra work for me. For example, I use 5 workspaces with approximately 30 open tabs in each, and I have many of the tabs in those workspaces grouped into tab islands. I am organised. Every now & again Opera loses all my open tabs which means (a) I have to use a 3rd-part extension to record my tabs so I can restore what Opera lost, (b) I have to restore & manually reallocate the tabs to their correct workspaces and (c) I have to manually put tabs back into the correct tab islands. And this has happened several times. That is a lot of repeated fixing for something that is supposed to be production-ready.
I have reported numerous bugs over the long time I have used Opera. I am sure others sometimes report the same bugs, as well as many others I haven't encountered. Opera never indicates to the bug-submitter if the issue has been replicated and resolved. If the bug is easily reproducible it is easy to test if its been resolved in a future release (sometimes only after many future releases), but often the bug is not easily reproducible. Opera should notify the submitter when it has been addressed. Because I never know which of my bugs have been addressed, sometimes I have to re-submit a bug that occurs again after an Opera update. It might be that Opera still has this bug open, or they may have closed the bug and hoped it was fixed, but I never know which.
I am sure Opera cares about its community of users. Tell us how we can more effectively help you improve the product other that simply submitting bugs or posting on this forum.
Likewise, please think how you can better address the issues your community raises via bug submissions, suggestions and blog posts like this.
Thank you.