Pioneering web browser Opera has never much of a threat to the likes of IE, Google Chrome and Firefox, instead styling itself as a niche product that appeals to a certain kind of web user. Nevertheless, throughout its 19-year history Opera has accumulated and stubbornly clung onto its 2% market share in the browser wars, recently achieving a milestone of 300 million active users – a loyal following that’s even greater than the number of active Twitter users.

Why do so many people love the plucky Opera browser? The answer lies in the high level of customization it offers that appeals to a wide segment of so-called ‘power users’. Opera’s customization options include the ability to alter the UI to an unprecedented degree, moving tabs, stacking tabs, altering menu options, installing new themes etc. It boasts a powerful suite of features built into the browser, including an email client, RSS feed, password manager, mouse gestures, and an enhanced web address field viewer allows searchers to enter short URLs instead of long and complex web addresses. Perhaps what really sets Opera apart though, is its speedy Opera Turbo feature that’s designed to load up webpages faster on slower connections by compressing them to reduce loading times.

Opera’s community has been content for years, happy to dwell outside the mainstream and browse the net on their own terms. But this morning its in complete and utter turmoil.

Back in February Opera made the significant announcement that it was planning to do away with its proprietary Presto web rendering engine in favor of WebKit, the software used by Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome, among others. Yesterday, we saw the public release of this ‘new’ Opera browser, officially called version 15, and boy what a spectacular fail that was.

Pretty much every single feature that made Opera stand out for its loyal users has been gutted. Dozens of features taken for granted by Opera’s connoisseurs are now MIA: including virtually all customizations options, tab handling, bookmarks, Opera Link and notes. Opera’s jettisoned the popular Dragonfly developer tools, whilst the RSS reader and Opera Mail client are now standalone applications that need to be downloaded separately. There’s no more powerful search function, like the ability to type a letter or a word to search specific websites by typing “yt dancing monkey’ to bring up a YouTube search for dancing monkeys. No more password manager or tab thumbnails, no tab previews, no bookmarks, no Opera sync – no nothing that made Opera what it was.

What we have instead is essentially the Chromium browser, albeit with a few new features slapped onto it called Speed Dial, Discovery and Stash. Speed Dial is as far as I can tell, some kind of jazzed up replacement for bookmarks that functions a lot like the Top Sites feature offered in Safari, only it doesn’t allow bookmarks to be imported or synced from older versions of the browser. Stash is built into this new Speed Dial, and allows web pages to be ‘stashed’ by clicking on a small heart icon in the URL bar, available as a separate tab in Speed Dial. The advantage of Stash is it allows multiple pages to be compared simultaneously and resized using a slider on the right of the screen. Then there’s Discover, which is another tab in Speed Dial that offers curated news articles from a drop-down menu of various categories.

It’s not unkind to say that Opera is a shell of its former self, little more than a fancy wrapper around Chromium, with almost nothing that sets it apart from the latter. I’ve never been much of an Opera user expect for taking the odd look now and then out of curiosity, but it’s clear enough from reading the Beta/snapshot announcement threads from before that loyal users aren’t at all happy with the changes – have a read and you’ll find they’re littered with complaints.

I can only assume that Opera’s decision makers were no longer content with simply being a ‘niche’ product, and that this is all about going for a larger market share. Hence they’ve switched their product from a ‘do what you want’ browser to a ‘do what we want’ browser like Chrome that they hope will be more appealing to the average Joe.

But if that’s the case, it begs the question why on earth would anyone choose the new Opera over Chrome? Choice is never a bad thing, but there’s nothing that really differentiates the two products, which means that most people will stick with what they already know, and that’s Chrome. Perhaps Opera is thinking that by freeing itself from maintaining its own rendering engine it’ll be able to work harder on cooking up cool new features. If so that’s certainly commendable, but just how many of their loyal users are they going to alienate in the meantime – and how many new users does it think it can pick up?