After some time playing with the browser, the way I think about Opera is changing. While it feels like a loss, that the old customizable Opera I know and love is likely dead and waiting to be burried . . . I haven't used it much in years anyway.  Opera may very well be positioning itself to be a good alternative to Chrome--a brilliant move, given how trendy it is right now to divorce google and their data mining. A few more features in place, I might embrace it. I really think that Opera would have been better served to wait a while longer before releasing their first preview, though. What's there now is really just a shell, VERY basic stuff is missing... it doesn't even have proper bookmarks/bookmarklets  support. I tried using it primarily over the weekend and while the browsing is nice and the extensions that are there are superior, I felt largely crippled.

It would be smart to serve ads. Add a setting in a user's profile to opt out of them if they want. Some members will leave them on to support the site, others will turn them off--but all incoming new traffic will have no choice but to help support the site through ad views.

I've seen this done a few times. DuckDuckGo is one that comes to mind (and I've left ads on--I want to support the search engine and their ads are tasteful)