Didn't the Google team also make Chrome now usable/installable without Admin rights?

Yes, by default in Windows it installs to the user's "Application Data" folder instead of the system-wide "Program Files".

That was Chrome Frame, the Internet Explorer plugin that enables chrome rendering in IE.

Chrome itself can be installed without admin rights, I remember using that on a University pc to view a flash video with the embedded plugin.

We deal with a large enterprise that uses old versions of IE and whenever our support team encounters one we just upgrade them to Chrome. Sadly we can't recommend any other browser since they all require admin access for some reason.

You can get Firefox and Opera in portable versions that don't require admin rights.

Don't make things so complicated!

If you want to install Firefox, get the normal Firefox download, and install it on your desktop (i.e. choose a path which you have write access to)

You only need Admin rights to install system wide or overwrite system binaries.

This works if USB devices haven't been locked down by some kind of IT policy.

While portable apps are promoted for and usually installed on USB drives, they can also be installed on local disks as well, and they don't require admin privileges to do so (from my experience).

I was not aware of that. Thanks! I guess the portable aspect is not quite perfect for their description though?

My complaint exactly. I use Opera almost exclusively and it deserves a much larger market share than it has...

I was using Opera extensively for the past year - then recently it started nagging me to turn on Turbo (which allows Opera to track your traffic), so when I switched systems I didn't install it on the new one - just FireFox and IE9. Although there are features of Opera I miss, I like the various privacy plugins available on Firefox a hell of a lot more than what passes for an equivalent on Opera. Although there a lots of Opera features I like, it just seemed that suck was increasingly creeping into it. I kept feeling like Opera had begun presenting popups to get me to change my settings.

Nope, you just had it set to auto, which makes it warn you about slow connections. I set it to off when I saw the first popup and I've never seen it since. They're pretty good about being nonintrusive and nice.

I did notice they did not say they were dropping Opera support. I think it's reasonable for them to not spend a large amount of time fixing minor bugs for a browser with 2% market share.

Isn't this the point of web standards? Things should generally "just work" in Opera if they work in those other modern browsers.

Google do not so much forget about Opera as deliberately work against it.

They are well aware of its existence.

I can only assume they want people to migrate to Chrome.