And third, let's remember that the modern web browsing wouldn't have been the same thanks to Opera, remember they made some obscure, unknown features like tabs, speed dials, proxy (in a web browser), sync, and more recently, they've been the first to add in a major browser things like native adblocking, personalized newsfeed with RSS/ATOM support, battery saver, native browser VPN (free, unlimited, without logs, and the Chinese consortium hasn't been able to buy SurfEasy, the company behind this feature), and on.
I agree with you on this. It's actually a shame that such a company is now sold for the money. Innovation was always the keyword at Opera. Most people don't know this but all the 'simple features' that are now in every browser are mostly born at Opera back in the days. You summed up only a few of them to begin with.
But if you hear Jon Von Tetzchner (One of the Opera founders and now CEO of Vivaldi) talking about the situation when he left the company in 2011, it was then already clear that the main idea for Opera was changed. He wanted to keep the innovation part and wanted to make this awesome browser even better, but the others wanted to sell it for the money, so he stepped aside after multiple conficts. Now it's the Chinese who bought it, but there was even interest from Facebook some years ago, but the deal didn't get of the ground.
Since the first Chromium Opera (version 15) in 2013 it was already clear that Opera would never be the same again. Then they decided to throw away the work that has begun in 1992 and stopped in 2013, which is a shame considering how powerful the Presto Opera was.
But even before the Chinese bought Opera, they already fired much people, and made some internal changes. The desktop team moved from Norway to Poland for example, which led to people that lost their job. Some of them started to work at Vivaldi.
As an all-time Opera fan, it's really frustrating seeing slowly collapsing a company with such a big reputation and history. The only thing we can hope is that the Chinese will continue to improve the current Opera browser and build a strong coherent company again, but I doubt that. The big man behind the consortium declared already he impressively want to shrink the amount of employees at Opera. And if you see which companies are in that consortium (Qihoo for example), some of them don't have a really good reputation in terms of privacy.
Those people won't leave their favorite company for nothing, some of them like Bruce worked almost 10 years for Opera and went to conferences all around the globe to promote Opera. Andreas is also on of the main people behind Opera for mobile and the others also were important developers and employees.
Much people and users already were complaining about the route Opera was going with the Chromium switch, so some months later Jon began with Vivaldi to give them a new home, but now this.... Again lot's of people that are unhappy. We don't know exactly why they decided to leave Opera, but it doesn't give me much hope. Now there are no changes yet, because of the deal which is still very fresh, but I doubt it will stay like that. Only the future will tell us. I hope the best for the future of Opera, but I'm almost completely sure this is the start of the slowly extinction of such a great company. In a few years it will probably be completely converted into a Chinese product and company and the name Opera will certainly slowly disappear and the main userbase will be in Asia.
Goodbye Opera
