Opera 9.5??? Was it ever in for the browser wars?

Infinity shared this post on google reader, right after I posted the firefox post. So this post says Opera 9.5, the fastest and most powerful browser available, but I beg to differ. I downloaded Opera 9.5 and installed it. The address bar was below the tab toolbar, crap. So this was supposed to be the fastest browser. I used one of my posts as the test page, I loaded the page 5 times in my firefox 2.0.0.14 and Opera alternately. Opera took a consistent 35 seconds to load the page fully without any cache, while firefox loaded the page between 29 and 35 seconds each time. I know what some of you ppl might say, cmon man, this ain't how you measure browser speeds, there are a lot of parameters you check. In case you want to point me to this, let me point out that it is an outdated test on configurations which aren't meant for the new softwares. And this link here, it clearly states that Opera is faster in loading time, but what am I gonna do saving a 100 miliseconds loading a javascript if the browser can't retrieve the script fast enough? Let's just forget the whole speed thing. I used the browser a bit and the magic wand (a button for remembering login details, that fills n automatically logs you in) feature was one of the cool features in it. I opened up gmail n the first thing I noticed was that it loads up the old version of gmail, or atleast that's what I assume, since the new loading page that gmail has put up did not appear and there was no option for reverting to the older version of gmail. I checked it out in my IE6 and the same thing happened there too. I wonder why. And another thing I noticed was that the drop down thing that blogger has in its archive, it acts kinda funny. When you click on it, the page reloads sometimes and sometimes the page strangely scrolls up or down. Next I tried installing a widget on it, and it did not work. I donno, I am not impressed with the browser. For me, firefox rocks, and apparently even for my blog visitors. My stats shows me that the from the last 500 visitors (excluding me) 2% used opera, which us the same number as those who used konquerer, 3% used safari , 24% used Internet explorer n the rest 69% used firefox. Though this doesn't reflect the browser of choice accurately. Before I started blogging about my OS n all, the stats were pretty closely matched for IE n Firefox, with a close fight always going on between the two of them, and there was no Opera anywhere.