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Should maybe have been 2 and a half browsers. There are some slight differences, e.g. the way options pages are opened from the extension page, but basically Opera is just Chrome. What is the point of Opera, I don't really know why anyone would use it, but it was basically free to make the extension work for it, so I decided to include it.

> What is the point of Opera

Opera up to version 12 was a great standalone browser with UI and performance characteristics still surpassing all competitors even at this point in time. (As long as you exclude JS-heavy things.)

However at some point MBAs managed to take over, decided to continue making most of the company income with their mobile ad network.

Developing Opera 12 further was expensive, so they figured out a way to keep most of the users (for the ad revenue), while radically slashing the dev expenditure on the browser: Fork and rebrand chrome, while adding a few token features, pretend Opera 12 doesn't exist, and push people heavily to "upgrade".

Extensions in Opera based on the chromium model, but have a few unique APIs too, like the ones for speed dial and the sidebar, which are not there in chrome.

Do you mean Chromium instead of Chrome?