The downfall of the Opera 'Status Bar'
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Originally, Opera had one status bar at the bottom of the window, that was always present.
During normal browser operation, when you hovered the cursor over a link in a web page,
the full URL would be shown in the status bar. This is an essential feature, which allows
users to personally check for suspect URLs before clicking on them.

When loading a new page, the status bar would show the operations being performed (each
separate file fetch's URL, and the download progress.) This too is essential, since it
lets you see where hangups are occuring, or any unexpected suspicious fetches. In general
it's very informative about the nature of the web page being loaded.

But then Opera decided to stick some unrelated junk in the status bar. Icons to new 'features'
in opera such as their turbo load. There got to be quite a few of these. Why they could not
have been put elsewhere (like in the menu bar itself, or in the menus, or even optional icons
on the address bar) I can't imagine.

The result: the status bar was now too cluttered to actually be used as a status bar.
They certainly couldn't fit the complex information fields of the 'progress' status on it.
So.... my god you people are brilliant... they added a new popup 'progress bar', which typically
appears above the old no-longer-actually-a-status-bar.

This reminds me of the tired meme "hey, I've added a status popup bar in your status bar, so
you can status while you status." Yeah, jokes that depend on stupidity are rarely funny.

In my case, since I prefer to vigorously apply Occam's Machettee, I remove all the never-used
clutter from the original status bar. So the status bar pretty much only shows mouse rollovers
of link URLs.
And during page loads, it's empty. With the popup Progress Bar' above it. Broken behaviour.
Thanks Opera, for one more screwup in a long line of creeping degradations of your browser's
original clean, fast, sensible operation.