I'm not happy about it, but it came down to Opera just no longer seemed to be working. I don't know if there was a new update or something, but Opera became utterly unusable on my machine. I openly and freely admit my computer isn't any spring-chicken but the lags to the point of unusability pushed me over the edge; at it seemed to happen over night. Pages, Flash and otherwise, just took ages and ages to load and when loaded were virtually unnavigable.

I've used Opera for years, probably for close to 10 years, and it's always been a great browser but since going to a Chrome platform it seemed to become more and more problem-prone.

I hope the lags I've been experiencing are due to some other issue that'll be worked out in a future update or something but, as it is, I just cannot use Opera.

The browser I'm using now works fine with no lags or slowdowns.

One feature I miss from Opera 12.x is tab stacking. Have a lot of tabs open? Group them together. This has been missing in the Chromium Opera. Not sure why, if it's a matter of the "under the hood" things like on how tabs manage resources, I would think there'd be a way to maintain this operation while still having the visual benefit of stacked tabs.

Right. I got an add-on/extension that "forced" YT to use Flash, and it didn't change or impact the audio issues.

I honestly do not know if this is a problem with Opera or one of the other related sites/software but I usually get good, quick, advice and help here so thought I would give it a shot.

First of all, when did YouTube stop using Flash for their videos and switch to HTML5?

In either case, when playing a YouTube video the audio has a "popping sound" to it, it sort-of sounds like a poor speaker or mike connection and the audio is a little bit stuttery. And it's not a hardware issue as audio works fine everywhere else on my system. This seems to be a recent occurrence since the audio was fine late last week but the last couple of days the problem cropped up. (In an Opera or Flash update?)

Opera version is: 32.0.1948.25
Flash Version is the latest one: 18.whatever.

I've uninstalled and re-installed Flash several times, rebooted the system a few times, esp. after the reinstalls, dumped caches and cookies and more or less everything I can think of. Malware and Virus detectors come up clean.

Any thoughts?

I've been having extensive problems with Flash since the latest upgrade to 30. Keeps crashing, resource/system hogging. Whenever I open a Flash-intensive site the computer fan speeds up and things begin getting slower.

Every time I do the "disable thing" and then click on the button above to restart Opera it causes by computer to literally BSOD. (Windows Vista.)

This is terrible, and I hate this type of advice, but... Give up on Opera 12. It's dead Jim. I know, I know, I loved it too as I'm not a fan of the Chromium model but it is what it is. I'm surprised Opera 12 is usable on any level for anyone anymore since various Google features no longer work in it and myself was starting to have trouble with Java and Flash being stable in it.

As for Opera 2x, 3x, whatever the heck it is (since somewhere, apparently, we skipped like 10 different versions of Opera between 12 and the Chrome model) not sure why you'd have trouble with your settings and such not transferring over in any updates. Myself it all usually goes off without a hitch, never have had to reactivate settings, reinstall extensions, etc. The only thing I can suspect is there's some hiccup in your settings or your system preventing a smooth transition. Though, I'm uncertain what you mean by "all back to normal."

Moving the location of the "recently closed tabs" menu/function just seems unnecessary and spiteful. I, and likely all of us, already were pre-programed to know to look for it in the regular Opera menu only to find it missing and had to go hunting for it again. Now I have to re-train myself to know where to go for it. Why just up and change something like that?

Monitoring the file(s) over the last couple of days, in which I've not closed the browser or rebooted the computer, the "Session" and ".dbak" files are at 5,344 KB and the "journal" file at 16 KB.

Browser, so far, runs fine, though, pending a closing and re-opening and/or a reboot of the system. It sometimes can get a day or two of good use from the browser before the Flash starts acting up. Will keep a monitor on the situation. But if it's anything like how it's been recently I'll get problems before too long.

They don't seem that big.

Session: 768 KB
Session.dbak: 768 KB
Session.db-journal 16 KB.

Though when I was in Safe Mode I removed Flash Player, again, so I will re-install it and try it things out to see what happens. If it's like last time I will soon have the same problems. Won't be until this evening as I currently have to head to work.