opera 7.5

It's been a while since I spent any time in Opera so today I downloaded the latest release, version 7.5. It's pretty much the same as I remember -- small download, fast rendering, and awful UI. I know I'm partisan so feel free to chock up my complaining to just the lunatic ramblings of a Mozilla party hack -- but man, this UI is just horrible. What I consider most horrible about it is that the very UI which should help me adjust the app's primary interface to make it better (things like the "view" menu and the preferences window) are completely unusable to someone who isn't familiar with them.

For example, when I first launched Opera, it had this funky vertical toolbar on the left side and I, naturaly, wanted to get rid of it, so I go to the view menu figuring I'd be able to easily turn it off. There's a sub-menu labeled "toolbars" and after unchecking and rechecking every item on that submenu, the vertical toolbar is still there. I guess it's not really a toolbar. Then I see above the toolbar menuitem is an item called "panels" which I guess is the name they've given this vertical toolbar. Great! I'll just uncheck the Panel item and that'll turn it off. Not so fast! It's not a menuitem, it's a sub-menu. Well, maybe the sub-menu will have a simple checkbox for showing or hiding the panel. Ha! Did I forget that this is Opera? The submenu has checkboxes representing each and every one of the buttons on this vertical panel toolbar thing but no apparent item to disable it completely. After unchecking all of them, I'm still stuck with an empty, somewhat collapsed, toolbar. I go back to the panels menu and therer are a couple of other sub-menus that look like they control panel placement so I decide that if I can't get rid of the thing then maybe I can at least put it at the top or the bottom of the window where it can blend in with all that other wasted space. Expanding the panel placement sub-menu, I finally stumble across the "Off" menu item. View -> Panels -> Panel Placement -> Off!?

WTF?!

I'm not even going to get into my fun with the horizontal toolbars except to ask who thought it was a great idea to have two navigation toolbars?

I'm no internet newbie. I'd even go so far as to call myself an "advanced" user but this is clearly just overboard. My reaction to the Opera UI can be summed up like this: Opera makes SeaMonkey look lean.

I'm sure there are some Opera fans reading this and I want to like Opera, or at least some of it's features, so maybe you can enlighten me. What's to like about this application's interface. Where does it really excell at helping me accomplish my web tasks better, faster, more convenient? Also, is there an easy way to hack that banner ad out of the chrome -- something like a userChrome.css file?

Also, are there other browsers with more elegant interfaces that use the Opera rendering engine. It's actually quite zippy and displays pretty much all the sites I visit regularly without problems. If there was a Firefox equivalent for Opera, a cleaned up interface with sane defaults, and something significantly less than Opera's 10 toplevel menus with 300+ menuitems, I think I'd use it -- maybe even as much as I use my other secondary browsers, Safari and IE.

Oh, and kudos to the Opera marketing folks for putting together that great startpage deal with Lycos that gives me three pop-ups every time I start. Good work.