I used Opera desktop for something like 10 years too. When I moved to Chrome (maybe 3 years ago?) I was like, "ah, this is what these websites are supposed to be like". I was actually quite sad to say goodbye and I still miss a lot of the features (sidebar!), but it always struck me that Opera was living in a bit of a dreamland where they just hoped the web was 100% standards compliant. Admirable, but unfortunately (in the short term at least) users suffered because so many sites just didn't quite work. This may have improved since I jumped ship.
If a major company could give Opera the resources to catch up to Chrome in that area, then I'd be excited for the potential to create a comprehensively market leading browser.
The only site with any problems is my Outlook Web Access and that only works full in IE.
In terms of performance though, Opera has some weird issues. Try to go to theverge.com and scroll.. it's not pretty.
They wouldn’t buy it just to open source it. Facebook will buy Opera for its own strategic reasons, and they will open source it only because it’s the optimal model for them to develop this kind of project.
They already open source bunch of stuff. They have the culture and the know-how.
Why would that be? Opera already has a very optimal closed source development model.