I've got Opera M2 emails going back to 2000. Regardless of what benchmarks show, Opera has always seemed infinitely faster to me than IE or Firefox. I vowed never to try Chrome when I read that it couldn't be uninstalled w/o screwing up Windows.
If necessary I'll just stick with old-fashioned Opera until it no longer works on Windows, and then run it in a virtual machine.
I wonder if this move is the major philosophical difference that forced founder Jon von Tetzchner to leave.