From a web developer's perspective, IE is a headache. Especially IE6, which is still widely used. As long as IE's market share falls and people use better and more standards-compliant browsers, all is good. :)

browsers cannot steal market share. People may switch from using 1 browser as a primary way to surf to another but nothing was stolen. Market share shifted.

I've done a test myself in a school excercise. I tried on 3 different computers, and found that Opera loaded the full site at roughly 40% the time of FF3, but at faster PCs the difference was far smaller.

So if you have a really high end, stationary PC, then I believe that you may be right, but I have no idea about that. 

It could also depend on the OS though. Do you have XP, Vista or something else?

Did you use 9.52 of Opera?