[Mithaldu]

It's a good question, and deserves a good answer:

The new Opera, i.e. every Opera after Version 15, is a Chromium fork.

That means it carries with it all the small and large behaviors like: Auto-updating. It also has literally no upside over using Opera v12, which still works fine for most things nowadays; and mostly no upsides over using just Chrome, or any other flavor of Chromium.

As such, getting rid of it after this acquisition gives only upside for the safety-conscious user.

[JohnTHaller]

One upside is that it is still actively developed. Opera 12.x is not and should not be used other than for testing at this point.

[Mithaldu]

5000 steps back and 3 forward as a token to convert the headlines from "Opera ASA throws away browser" to "Opera ASA releases new browser" is not an upside, it's still a dirty lie. And Opera 12 is fine, has even recently received an SSL upgrade.