With regrets I have to call it quits for Opera.
I do a lot of research online and I am constantly bombarded with Shockwave failure notifications, to the point where it has become simply impossible to continue using Opera, even though i like everything else about it.
I have read a lot of posts about the problem, I'm not quite sure if it's due to Apple or the browser itself, but regardless there does not seem to be any solution as of now. This also seems to be a long standing problem.
Too bad, because it is a great browser.