I've been a fan since Opera fit on a floppy disk (3 or 4)? It has always been the fastest browser, except for the stinch in 9 and parts of 10. I've always had it installed and would use it along Chrome, FF, Flock. Eleven is just wonderful. Its fast as lighting, you can try this test, load up like 20 pages and close it. Now open it again, no 30 seconds of waiting for it to crunch it all up like in FF. Amazing! It also seems to respond more like it did from 6 and below where back mean truly instant redraw. Bravo Opera. Now we just need some extensions...
As flash is THE standard, i've been forced to use it for 3 versions, i still hate it and still have a hard time figuring out. When Expression Blend beta came out, it only took me 2 days to figure out. I can do animations in blend in about 2 hours what it would take days in flash. Silverlight also scales so much better than flash, i mean flash starts to die after you get past VGA pixel sizes. That's just sad. Silverlight scales literally to gigapixels. If you haven't been to photosynth, check out has friggin fast it is.
The cheap PC/notebook market is really strange. It gets hyped, but not many people buy it. Asus had a burst of success with the eee, but steam is starting to die and asus realize it doesn't make that much money, so they are massing much more expensive things under the eee name. Also the $400 notebooks we saw last year and early 08 are all but gone. Though for $600 you do get dual core and 3gb ram. Computers should have never dropped below $500. It makes charging $200 to get them fixed look really retarded.