First off, I love Opera. I’ve been using it as my main browser for about 5 years now and always come back to it after trying something new (Chrome/Firefox 4 beta). With the new version, 11, the Opera community has introduced extensions. I presume this is to more closely resemble some of the alternative browsers previously mentioned.
This in itself seems like a decent idea – let users further customize their browsing experience and allow third party developers to contribute. I am not altogether against the use of these add-ons, but for me, one of the main draws to Opera was the “out-of-the-box” functionality; everything just worked. Mouse gestures, ad-blocking, an adequate password and bookmark manager. And anyone familiar with Greasemonkey in Firefox knows how useful some of these scripts can be. All Greasemonkey scripts are compatible with Opera with slight tweaking. 
I chose Opera as an alternative because it isn’t bloated, it isn’t bogged down with extraneous toolbars, and it syncs all my information with other Opera installations on different computers. Even though I’m not totally against extensions, so far it just seems things like LastPass are clunky and superfluous. But if this is what it takes for Opera to take a bigger share from the browser market, then I can live with this necessary evil.
