I've went through the feature list, there is not a single one that interests me.

Web Page Preview on Tabs:

Its faster to click on it than to wait for the preview to appear

Torrent Downloading:

I honestly prefer a full program for that, uTorrent

Opera Mail:

Gmail is better, and I prefer using the full gmail, not a program that downloads the emails, or syncs them

A Built-in RSS Reader:

Could be ok, I still prefer Google Reader online

Opera Notes:

I like to have my notes synced everywhere, if i can view them on my phone it could actually be good.

Mouse gestures:

Firefox has that (with an extension), I tried it but never liked it. I tend to play with my mouse all the time, and triggered gestures by mistake

Reload page every x minutes:

Most apps now have an auto refresh like Facebook or Twitter. And honestly F5 is really easy to do. Also there is a firefox and a chrome extension to do this

Clone Tab:

For the twice in a year where I might need this function, it takes 1 second to do this manually

The preview on tabs can be made visible without the need to hover over them, simply by extending the vertical size of the tab bar. (Or horizontal size, since it's possible to have a vertical tab bar on the left/right in opera).

Admittedly Opera's torrent client is pretty limited and weak in comparison to a full client, but it's certainly useful for non-techies who don't have a clue what a torrent is when they just wanna download something.

You can sync opera notes along with all your other stuff. (Incidentally, Opera was the first browser to include sync.)

Opera aint limited to mouse gestures, but also has voice gestures, if you're into that kind of thing, although I'm with you and rarely use them.

Clone tab doesn't merely copy the current location of a tab, but copies over the whole history of the tab too, which is often useful if you wanna navigate back but without losing what you're currently doing.

I think there's more unique features of Opera than the ones he describes here. In particular I like the fact that Opera contains a full stacking/tiling/tabbing window manager, and you're not limited to "tabs which consume all the space". Nice to browse two webpages beside each other. (The tiling features could do with some polishing, but they're non-existent in other browsers.)

I was a long time user of the software, but I primarily use Firefox now, due to a growing number of problems I had with Opera and the lack of customization you can do with it (since after all, it's not open source, and configuration is done with crappy text files). It's worth a try though, Opera have continuously pioneered many of the features in all the browsers we use today.

> Mouse gestures: > Firefox has that (with an extension), I tried it but never liked it. I tend to play with my mouse all the time, and triggered gestures by mistake

Opera's built-in mouse gestures are infinitely superior to the FF extension, and are actually very useful. Tabs and mouse gestures were the reasons I went with Opera a long time ago. They also had some useful keyboard shortcuts that were pretty handy ('z' to go back in history, 'x' to go forward, etc) which made it perfect for quick surfing since my right hand manipulated the mouse, while my left hand was naturally positioned over these keys.

Unfortunately, there came a time when Opera suffered some intermittent and annoying crashes. I switched to FF, but it was much slower and the gestures were horrible. Finally, when Chrome came into the scene, I switched to it and never looked back.

Also, since my switch to a Macbook Pro, I can use the double-finger swipes for backward/forward navigation, which are really the only useful gestures for me.

It's only faster to click the tab once. The Web Page preview appears instantly after the first one when hovering over the other tabs. You can't click all tabs faster than you can hover over them.

I have my notes, bookmarks, speed dial and saved passwords synced everywhere, as I use Opera everywhere.

You can't clone tabs with all history manually in 1 second. The history part is what makes the feature really useful.

In Chrome, you can clone a tab by command-clicking the reload button.

In Firefox by holding control and moving the tab.

Or Middle clicking the refresh button.

Or right-click the tab->Duplicate Tag, or Ctrl+Alt+T.

And my axe.

The preview tab feature is standard in SeaMonkey. But I guess no one - except me - uses SeaMonkey (it also has built-in Mail).

I bought a copy of Opera when it first came out. I used it for almost two decades. I played with every new feature - tabs, news reader, gestures, per-site customization, integrated web server, etc. Over the years I've collected tens of thousands of bookmarks.

While the quality varied over the years it was always good until about 2009 when I finally had to give up on it. I could find no way to stop their integrated URL autocomplete function from causing the browser to freeze every time I hit a keystroke as it searches my huge history - a known issue they aren't ever going to solve.

Obviously there are things I could have done to resolve that problem, but once they gave me a reason to switch I took a fresh look at the browser landscape and realized my needs today are better met by using a multiplicity of browsers (Chrome/Safari/Firefox).

I had similar experience with it. Particularly if you had your search engine set to "history search" and you hit backspace, the browser would crash. There were several other bugs causing frequent crashes too that never got fixed. I've been using Firefox for the past year or so instead and had very few crashes.

And don't forget that Opera also has an integrated IRC Client (admittedly, it's not the most pretty one out there, but hey, it's something).

Plus, Dragonfly is nothing short of awesome.

"but hey, it's something" is usually not worthwhile.

It also has/had:

- Tabs that can be placed in all four corners

- Tab stacks

- built-in text-to-speech engine (extra 10MB download)

- Opera Unite, a set of file-sharing tools

- MDI mode

I think they abandoned Opera Unite. Some good ideas, but it was never likely to kick off unless other browsers joined in. Perhaps they should've made it more open and customizable.

> 8) Clone Tab:

It's not unique to Opera. IE8/9 and Chrome can do it.