Would like to hear people's opinions of Opera. How does it stack up in your opinion to FF and Chrome.

Nice features, but slow from my experiences.

Opera is the opposite of Chrome: it's an all-in-one browser for power users that has more features that you can imagine (RSS reader, mail client, IRC, BitTorrent client, widgets, mouse gestures, forms autocomplete, notes, voice-controlled browsing). Unfortunately, the user interface is not very intuitive and there are way too many options (for example, Opera has 8 optional toolbars, while Firefox has only 3).

It's very fast (much faster than Firefox 3), but there are compatibility problems with sites that aren't tested in Opera.

Opera doesn't have many users because it wasn't free or it was ad-supported until 2005, Opera didn't promote its browser too seriously and it didn't focus on essential features, like add-ons, auto-update and native UI.

The two key things that turned me off in the past were the complicated options dialogs, as well as the slight focus on tabs over single windows (which I'm sure you can all configure to turn off, but that brings me back to the first problem...). One thing I always liked about Opera was how it allowed you to really zoom into a page, and not just increase the font size. But these days, Firefox has that too... and Chrome even remembers which font setting you applied to which site.

Very nice review Mr. Chitu

earlier opera was my default browser. i use it for its speed , security and fully keyboard controlled environment . Opera Invent (may be not sure – or 1st to enable) the Tab Browsing and speed dial . then ff and chrome copied them .

but i stop using it coz few site does not work correctly (such as Orkut, Picasa Web and banking sites) and now i use Chrome as my default browser. its equally fast as opera .

The amount of reported vulnerabilities is quite big in these days:
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/10615/?task=advisories_2008