In fairness, any stuff you don't wish to use doesn't get in the way. I'm a longtime Opera user (I bought a license back when it wasn't free yet!) and I don't use the built in Mail and RSS clients. They don't get in the way and it's still extremely fast. I did switch to Chrome for a while as the Mac and Linux versions were rather unstable in the early 10.x series, but 10.6 is solid again.

   The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)

I have thought this also.

  Opera - Vi

  Firefox - Emacs

  Chrome - Nano/Pico

  IE - Notepad/Wordpad

>Chrome's more minimalist approach

I find Opera to be far more minimalist than Chrome from a user interface perspective. Chrome doesn't even let you remove the tab bar.

[ Here is a screenshot of me switching "tabs" in Opera http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9053/operal.jpg ]

Opera is just flexible and customizable. Mine doesn't even have a toolbar, because I use gestures for everything (edit: I mean I don't see/feel any of the "kitchen sink" — I haven't enabled it, and I could even disable things that clutter other browsers)

Opera with the kitchen sink weighs less (14MB download Mac UB) than barebones Firefox (19MB) or Chrome (30MB).

Kitchen sink is something you feel (UI clutter, features most users don't want), not something you measure (megabytes).

Firefox used to have an actual kitchen sink as an easter egg:

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/kitchensin...