It's really about convenience. I've enjoyed Opera from the very beginning and lament the loss of customization in the new versions. The bookmark bar is ok, but there is no convenient way to turn it on/off when you want the screen real estate. (Going to the settings menu is NOT convenient.) On my Presto bm bar, I have it set for text only and abbreviate the titles so I can fit most on the line. Even as it overruns, the older environment conveniently provided a dropdown for those bookmarks that wouldn't fit. The new environment forces a useless icon to hog space on every bookmark and there seems to be no dropdown when the bar fills.
It is the little things like this which made the Opera environment so useful, and I hope that the developers can appreciate this element of what has been lost.
+1. That's precisely how I've long used the Presto Opera bookmark bar: no icons and custom text only, with most of my text titles abbreviated to just 1 or 2 characters. With that arrangement, I can instantly access any of currently 73 critical bookmarks (or bookmark sub-folders) by title and bar position without even having to use the dropdown. Many of the sites are 'technical' sub-sites bearing the same icons (9 with the same icons, in one case), so even if the icons were tiny (which they're not), there would be no way of telling them apart without having to mouse over them and carefully hunt for the right one by URL.
Even though I realize many users never go to such customizing lengths since they don't use a browser as a tool but instead more as a browsing appliance, I'm still rather surprised at the reaction from the various Opera devs last summer, who apparently had no realization that some users had so wedded their browsing techniques to many of Opera's unique features. Whether that realization had any effect in returning at least some kind of bookmarks bar to Opera, I don't know. But I do know that if a capability of nicknaming the bookmarks on that bar using custom text instead of icons were added, along with a dropdown/scrolling ability for out-of-sight bar bookmarks, the bar would again become considerably more useful to some of us. Many times the simplest, seemingly minor things can make a great difference in the usability of a tool.
This is one of about 5 such things keeping me using Firefox as my primary browser instead of New Opera these days.