I was using Opera extensively for the past year - then recently it started nagging me to turn on Turbo (which allows Opera to track your traffic), so when I switched systems I didn't install it on the new one - just FireFox and IE9. Although there are features of Opera I miss, I like the various privacy plugins available on Firefox a hell of a lot more than what passes for an equivalent on Opera. Although there a lots of Opera features I like, it just seemed that suck was increasingly creeping into it. I kept feeling like Opera had begun presenting popups to get me to change my settings.

Nope, you just had it set to auto, which makes it warn you about slow connections. I set it to off when I saw the first popup and I've never seen it since. They're pretty good about being nonintrusive and nice.