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Originally Posted by Faterson
The trouble is, the new Opera version is supposed to share Chrome's rendering engine, and therefore lose many of its previous features. I hope that's not true. I'm sticking with classic Opera.
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They will be switching to Chrome's rendering engine, that is to say, together with Chrome they are moving from WebKit to a fork of WebKit called Blink. Before that, they both used WebKit, together with Safari and a whole lot of other programs that aren't browsers but still use html-based layout.
However, this will not remove any features whatsoever.
WebKit (as people call it) is made of three components: WebCore, which parses html, JavaScriptCore, which parses JavaScript, and the true WebKit, which is a wrapper that integrates both these engines into the browser, and which only Safari uses. Chromium, which is the parent of both Chrome and now Opera, only uses WebCore. For Javascript, they use Google's own renderer named V8. I'm not sure what they call their wrapper.
The purpose of all this is only to tell the browser what a webpage should look like. These components are only part of what a browser is. As you can see, even though Chrome, Safari, Amazon Silk, and others all use Webkit's WebCore html renderer, they remain very different products. The UI is where all the features live, and that remains in Opera's sole usage. If they were to use Chrome's feature-set then they would BE chrome and get downloaded from
www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/ and everything.
Now, I have heard people saying they believe Opera's Presto rendering engine was faster, but I've never used it and don't know. That would be the only difference I can think of. I would seriously advise against sticking with old versions of Opera either way, though. If you don't like new Opera, it might be time to switch browsers, rather than remain stuck on one that will no longer get security bugfixes. And before you make up your mind try out the new version. Opera 12.16 with the Presto renderer came out on July 4, and all later versions, 15-17, use Blink. If by latest version you mean 17, then you may already be using 16 which uses it also, and not even realize it since it as far as I am aware should work exactly the same on the surface.
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Unfortunately, Apple's WebKit is buggy as well, which has consequences for iOS e-readers relying on WebKit's rendering engine. As an illustration of a WebKit deficiency, take the inability to easily highlight (select) words on a webpage across paragraph boundaries... there is this "paragraph snapping" that selects the entire paragraph instead, even if that was not your intention. No such problems with selecting/highlighting text on Android... 
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It's not that WebKit is flawed, as I said when we say WebKit we really mean WebCore.
Any browser-using App in iOS is not using WebKit( -Core), it is using SAFARI as an embedded process. So whatever Safari does, Chrome/FireFox/Atomic/anything for iOS will do too, since the only thing Apple allows them to do is use custom software to deal with tabbing, bookmarks, saved prefs/prefs in general, Chrome sync, etc. then apply that to an embedded Safari process.
Still, that isn't really relevant, I guess.
the important thing is this -- despite that flaw, and whatever other flaws there are, (I am not an expert on the matter,) you cannot deny that it is a powerful engine capable of far more than Internet Explorer will ever be able to.
UNLESS they (Microsoft) someday get around to making their Trident engine compatible with current standards. Right now, however, they play a constant year-by-year game of catch-up-to the-state-of-the-internet-as-it-was-2-years-ago. And they do everything in a non-standard fashion ON TOP OF THAT which stops developers from being able to get stuff working on IE until they have the time to pretty much code a special version of the site for IE, using conditional comments.