I honestly believe Opera switched to Chrome because the company could not turn a profit after spending years on R&D, and by having their rendering engine outsourced to google, they could have sustained viability after laying off half the staff. This appears the only rational explanation of forgoing the development of a full featured browser only to have embraced developed abortion, if the only other option was bankruptcy.
Honestly the main problem Opera tackled (and I'm no programmer so don't bother listening to me) is that they had trouble with their plugins. Flash in particular. It was nice in Chrome that if a plugin crashed, it didn't take down the whole browser. I'm not sure how fundamental that was for Presto to not have adopted a fix, since Firefox had that plugin protection implemented later on.
The reason it wasn't my main browser for the longest time was for getting websites to display properly. Might I add that this was for 5% of the websites I visited, but what a difference that makes for any ordinary consumer. Once they find a website snag, they feel they're using an inferior product and make a switch. I would have preferred Opera staying the course and fixing display issues one by one, or by removing the fixed to width (make it an extension or something) rather than starting from scratch. The core shouldn't have been abandoned.
I'll just continue writing because I know this isn't relevant to the OP post, and I'm getting downvoted anyways. Chrome sold itself on speed, compatibility, and stability. Firefox sold itself first as an alternative to IE, it's equivalence compatibility with most websites and flash (at the cost of computer resources), then as a more featured browser with it's extensions. The extensions was the killer app for Firefox, because it allowed the community to solve problems / add features without waiting for an official release. So immediate features the community wanted could be installed immediately. The problem with firefox was the resource usage. It's improved since Chrome, but that as the main reason why it's stagnated -- it wasn't particularly fast and it was a resource hog -- not sure because of the legacy code base or the fact that many of the extensions were poorly written with memory leaks. Chrome was a rewrite from scratch by talented developers focused on speed, compatibility, and stability. The whole operation was meant to be a lean, mean machine because Chrome's bookmarks are the worst developed feature I've seen on any browser. The three characteristics are a selling point because it's effective in delivering what the audience wanted.
The features of chrome are all poor knockoffs. Their speed dial is shot. The (already mentioned) have the worst bookmarks. Their omnibar lacks the usability of Opera and Firefox. They don't have an IRC protocol in them, they don't have as strong extensions like Firefox used to. It's a shame because Opera is full featured, and their stuff is still quality. I can't switch to Opera 15, because I don't know a better IRC client! The smoothscroll is slick (maybe only picasa has better), their note system of synching-backingup-save as you type is found comparably in Tomboy notes which requires a ~70mb GTK install. I still can't find a decent firefox extension that rivals in quality in comparison to Opera and I can go on....
The point is, I'm frustrated by their direction as a company. As for OP, I'm not sure how you can preserve your settings when the new version lacks the features for which the settings dial in to.
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