I use Opera as my primary browser. It is *fast*, and has a couple of nice features which were not available in other browsers when I went away from IE (3 or 4 years ago). That was still on Windoze, and when I switched to Luvix, I continued to use Opera.
Opera has problems with maybe 2-3% of all existing Web pages. I have to switch to Mozilla in those cases. Still the features outnumber the disadvantages.
Opera is stable. In case it does crash, you start it again with all the pages open you had before the crash.On some machines I have a few web pages I should look into Real Soon Now open for months.
jlinkels