Opera 10.10 (with Unite) final is out

[Particle]

I tried Opera in the past, far too bloated in comparison to Firefox and the lack of an extension frame work annoyed me too.

E.g. to adblock you have to manually download .ini and .css files etc. Also BB code integration into a right click context menu meant further editing of .ini files and it wasn't as powerful as the Firefox BB code extension.

Will give this a try though to see if anything has changed

Opera, Safari, Netscape, and FireFox all use the same (Netscape) plugin format. That's why the same version of flash works in all of them. If you're missing a plugin you like, just drop it into your Opera plugins folder. Opera ad blocking also works out of the box like I'll mention below.

Thats what i did and some ended up blocking even the bbc website banners and then others didnt even work at all hardly.

ABP is so much better and simpler, you simply click on the image you dont like and adblock it and its gone forever, the generic lists you import aswell do block 99% of ads you find on websites and the ones that slip through are very quickly and easily removed.

I used to love Opera but i think now Firefox has matured enough to overtake it with its ease of use and functionality.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. Your complaint that you can't just click on images you want to block is not true.

Right click on a page, select block content, and then click on what you don't want to see. Clicking on an image blocks that folder. Shift-clicking on an image blocks just that specific image. If you want to customize the scope to be more aggressive (such as block http://adplace.com/* instead of http://adplace.com/company/*), click on Details and do whatever you'd like. It displays only the stuff blocked on the current page so that it is easy to edit the stuff that matters for your desired blocking operation. It has the capability to do both click-to-block and customized blocking right in the GUI as you'd expect.

If you go to Tools > Prefs > Content > Blocked Content you can see the browser-wide list. If you pre-load a block list and it blocks something you don't want, you've got three ways to remove that block. You can do the same procedure as blocking, just in reverse. If you click on a blocked image in blocking mode, it un-blocks.

One of the biggest hurdles I frequently see with new (and sometimes older) Opera users is that they don't know how to use features in their browser. I don't mean that as a complaint against any one of you specifically, but there is a lot going on and it isn't all intuitively accessible. Once you know what's there and how to use it, it's quite nice. If you don't want to take the time to learn anything that is different, that's up to you. That just doesn't make it "bad" in and of itself, and I don't think it deserves the bad reviews because of it.

the 10.20 alpha is out... but after this story with China, I don't know what's gonna happen with Opera on my system, I feel like ditching it honestly.

Heaven forbid Opera comply with Chinese law for distribution inside China.