I've been an avid Opera user since the browser was adware and I think Opera has every reason to be desperate. Increasingly often I used Chrome simply because Opera doesn't work with the web apps I need for my daily work. Right now I'm seriously thinking about ditching Opera altogether and use Chrome as my primary browser, a decision that would have been unthinkable just 2-3 years ago.
Opera may lose some market share at the desktop, but they are still a very strong contender in the embedded market with support for many different targets.
I know that Opera here in Linköping, Sweden, is currently trying to hire a lot of people and that seems to be the case globally too:
I find myself returning again and again to Opera - I like chrome and chromium, but I live and die by bookmarks and they don't work well in google's browsers.
It seems like Googles engineers have a very short attention span and can't be bothered to go back and fix fundamental problems which have existed for 2 years now.
This is a scandal. All the web developers that have been screaming about IE for years are now too lazy to add the moz-, ms-, o-, and the general version of CSS properties.
And I do not think it is an excuse that one browser does not support an property, put in the prefix or at the very least the general version, feature versions will probably support it.