Finally, this is the topic I've been seeking! I'm running 12.16 and it suddenly stopped functioning correctly about twelve hours ago, early Friday evening, PST.

Opera would launch alright and after that, it wasn't responding normally to anything. Not only a matter of which webpages visited, even just getting the Opera menu to appear, or launch a new tab, every single action required a wait so long (during which Opera was hanging and non-responsive) that by the time the screen was active again, it had usually forgotten what it was doing.

Definitely an Opera issue, Firefox has continued to work normally on the same system.

After reading the thread, I tried disabling JavaScript. That single change made Opera act normally ~ except that, of course, no page requiring JavaScript will work correctly, which is a definite problem. No video sites, no registration forms or buying features, such as using PayPal, no Captcha, etc.

Once I read here and discovered the JavaScript issue, I found that there were lots of threads from people who've just encountered this issue in the past couple of days, such as here, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19607558/javascript-is-not-working-in-opera . See the myriad related threads linked there.

At least this somewhat isolates the source of the issue. But what changed within the past day or so to cause this? I see someone mention a Java update, but my browser responded to disabling JavaScript. Would the Java update somehow impact functionality related to JavaScript?

Moreover, what is a secure and stable solution?