I seem to use web browsers in a manner that other people just cannot fathom: In particular I never use bookmarks. I have created many book marks in my time; I've created huge unmanaged lists of pages I thought were worth saving; I've even tried to manage an categorise them... But I never remember that they are there, (or they point to an expired/dead page), so now I don't bother.
So instead I end up with masses of tabs open all the time. It's a common event for someone to look over my shoulder and exclaim, "Oh my God! How many tabs have you got open there?" - So I need excellent tab management and excellent session management in case my battery dies or the browser crashes...
Opera has always been fighting a battle over web standards - but even in their valiant attempt to be standards-compliant, they-too have made mistakes, and a great many web authors use browser-specific extensions, locking people into IE/FF/Chrome or whatever...
Most pages display and work well but then there are enough which it's native "Presto" engine can't handle. There was always an occasional need to use Firefox, Chrome, or as a last resort; Internet Explorer to view the odd page which didn't work in Opera, but that was okay because my day to day life with the browser was great.
Unfortunately a while back they decided to throw their towel in and ditched their "Presto" engine in favour of Google's "Blink" engine. In effect Opera is now little more than Chromium Browser with a pretty skin :-( It is blindingly fast, but also dull, minimalistic, featureless and really a bit pointless.
All the wondrous customisation and look-and-feel options are gone. My top menu bar is seemingly gone forever, replaced by a crappy single IE-style launcher that all the browsers are copying. The 'Themes' are little more then a choice of pointless background picture - It is a massive disappointment.
Of course I could continue to soldier on with Opera 12 with all its features, but it is now a dead browser - unmaintained and unloved and unfortunately also closed-source.
Tab Management
One of the best features of Opera was it's tab management - One could group tabs together, set it to open new tabs next to the current one rather than all the way at the end of the list and it also sported a nice searchable list of open windows/tabs. I always have anything between 20 and 150 tabs open at once - many stay open within my session for weeks or months until I have a cull to get back to a sane number. Even with reasonable good add-ons like TabMixPlus for Firefox, nothing begins to come close to how good Opera was at doing this.
This is almost all gone in Opera 25. At least there's still a single row of tabs which get narrower as you open more tabs, and not the really stupid Firefox/Chrome default of building a massive horizontally scrollable list of fixed-width tabs. Grouping is gone though - this was a really massively useful feature where dragging one tag to another started a group which could be expanded to show all its tabs or shrunk to occupy the space of just one tab. I used it a lot to group pages by subject matter.
Session management
I've tried a number of session managers and they're all crap (i.e. fail to correctly save my open tabs in the event of browser being closed, or killed) in my experience. In the distant past I've had a couple of let-downs with Opera's session manager too, but ultimately it just works. I'm having an on-going nightmare of conflicting and failing session managers in Firefox and I have high hopes that Opera's will still be better.
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