Opera rolled out a weird always-on VPN and acceleration service built in to the browser so every page was partially rendered on Opera servers. This gave them access to the plain text of pages as sites were rapidly moving to HTTPS. Effectively moving in on the ad targeting business where ISPs used to live.

Building a rendering engine didn't really fit in to that business model.

Fortunately the China sale spooked a ton of longtime Opera users who all jumped ship. Now apparently the husk of the company has been used to grow a lending company.