I really liked Opera. I've used it for as long as I can remember to pretty much the exclusion of all else. Best mouse gestures, integrated mail and RSS client, notes that were easily searchable and right there alongside all my web stuff, nice speed dial for regular sites, first people with tabbed browsing (though they managed to screw that up to an extent by stopping the tabs overflowing so they shrunk into unclickable icons instead.)

But, honestly, you strip out mail, you strip out notes - that's a lot of the advantages that it had going over other browsers gone. It's no-longer something you can really use to manage information. You're almost in a position of saying, "Well, I mean - why not use Firefox? It's stolen most of the other features anyway." Pretty much the only thing Opera has going for it at this point is the nice mouse gestures. Everything else it is basically the exact same thing as Firefox. They've even stripped the easy access bookmarks out so they can't claim they've an advantage there anymore either >_>

At the moment I'm still using Opera 12 - but there's only so long you can stick around on a browser that's not being updated anymore.

I think, in retrospect, the point when Opera went wrong was when they stopped charging for it - at that point it was grow or die, and it never did grow that much.