Firefox loosing its touch.

You have a point their, opera loads pages much faster than any other browser and that is a fact.
Opera obviously has a lot of advantages, over any other browser and I think they should being out some patents.
I'm not all that bothered about open source to be honest, I believe their has to be some secrecy in programming, like web development you don't want your custom scripts to be open do you because this will leave you open to security risks.
Being closed source offeres a lot of advantages, but it leaves you out of this current bandwagon which is open source.
And obviously Microsoft have seen this and are trying to jump on it as usual.