The thing I've never understood about Opera is - what were they missing? They pioneered a ton of features that are now ubiquitous, like tabs and "speed dial," but somehow never managed to gain much market share. Why not?
well it was commercial software.. first trialware, then it showed ads, and so on. i guess for a long time it couldnt be given away freely as it was developed by a small company.
not being open source also hampered true cross platform, for example on openbsd it could be run only under linux emulation.