Where are you going, Opera? A little more than a year ago, I applied for a job there because it seemed like such a cool company to work for, but now... I don't know.

I'm really curious what their strategy is. For a geek like me it feels incomprehensible.

I feel you, but this move is one in the right direction. A small, independent browser vendor, why does that need its own webmail, social network, blogging platform, etc? Much better to focus on core. I have good hopes they'll manage to bring the new Blink-based Opera to v12 feature levels, but better. They won't be able to do that if everybody is busy debugging needlessly fancy forum software.

Opera is not really an independent browser vendor any more. They used to be when they made their own browser. That's just not true any more. They're a Google Chrome distribution with slight service and UI modifications -- kind of like RockMelt or the Yandex browser.

I understand your analogy but I think comparing Opera to RockMelt is going a little too far.

Do we know if Opera is pushing much upstream into the Chromium Open Source Project?

I agree. The new Opera Browser is essentially a completely new browser. It doesn't appear that they are trying to bring in the features from the old browser. Instead, they are starting over and creating new features while ignoring why people were using the old version.

Originally my hope was that they were going to replace the rendering engine in the browser, but keep the browser UI the same. I supposed the two were too tightly coupled for that.

Opera Classic on mobile is a much better browser than the new Opera Mobile, especially on low end devices.

I understand their decision. They are taking the SteveJobs route: Concentrate on just a few major things and axe everything else.

Apple followed this route. Google followed this route and now Opera is going to follow this route. More companies will also follow.

My feelings are mixed. They had nice product offerings that differentiated them from the rest. I wanted to become an Opera user just for that reason. But Alas! It sort of confused me what I really wanted to do online and why I was using a browser to do it.

And in the process of closing down My Opera they broke the RSS links to their previous news and release feeds. It really feels like they've lost all people with common sense.

Arguably, if they had any common sense, they would have gotten out of the desktop market a decade ago and focused exclusively on mobile.