Opera is a great browser, but I dumped it because there were too many pages that I had trouble reading.
They weren't on MSN, were they? :)
Microsoft's dominance in the browser market has seriously hurt the Web. Although they're not the first -- Netscape was doing the same thing in the beginning days. There are standards out there, and Mozilla and Opera meet those standards, but Internet Explorer is broken. Sometimes to do fancy stuff that works on IE designers forget the standards and write so that IE can understand the page, but that sometimes breaks those standards-compliant browsers.
Even Microsoft's IDE, Visual Studio.NET, is broken in its standards. The other day it told me that "min-width" in CSS was invalid. BS! It's perfectly valid, but VS.NET doesn't understand it, likely because it writes to IE and IE doesn't understand min-width and max-width.
Try the latest version. Much better than IE. Now that Microsoft has admitted breaking other browsers, the rendering issues should go down, one hopes. I suspect they also built it into the web creation tools so that other sites also did not conform to the international standards but worked with IE.
I dropped it in favor of Mozilla Firebird (now Firefox), which is an even better browser, in my opinion.
But there are still some sites that write in tags for proprietary Internet Explorer stuff. Mozilla is getting better at reading them, but not always. ESPN is one of the worst offenders.
I like to use it because it seems to control pop ups better in one window and it has the close all but active pages function. Netscape has started to use the ability to have more than one tab in a window.
Mozilla's Firefox is my primary browser.