Different strokes for different folks, but this is precisely what turns me off about Opera. I don't want a kitchen sink. I want an uncomplicated web browser.
That web browser used to be Firefox, but it got too heavyweight for me and Chrome's more minimalist approach became my preferred experience.
The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)
In fairness, any stuff you don't wish to use doesn't get in the way. I'm a longtime Opera user (I bought a license back when it wasn't free yet!) and I don't use the built in Mail and RSS clients. They don't get in the way and it's still extremely fast. I did switch to Chrome for a while as the Mac and Linux versions were rather unstable in the early 10.x series, but 10.6 is solid again.
Opera is just flexible and customizable. Mine doesn't even have a toolbar, because I use gestures for everything (edit: I mean I don't see/feel any of the "kitchen sink" — I haven't enabled it, and I could even disable things that clutter other browsers)
Opera with the kitchen sink weighs less (14MB download Mac UB) than barebones Firefox (19MB) or Chrome (30MB).
That web browser used to be Firefox, but it got too heavyweight for me and Chrome's more minimalist approach became my preferred experience.
The Opera vs. The Rest argument feels a lot like the endless emacs vs. vi war :)