I felt that way when Rockmelt came out, and the original Opera. I sometimes wonder if these alternative browser projects were too early, or were only able to exist due to the lack of Chrome's dominance on the space yet.
Chrome gets free marketing, and tons of google money. Opera could not have competed with that. Opera only went free after they did the same deal with Google that firefox had. Otherwise, it's quite an achievement that it was able to exist in a world where it was a paid browser for such a long time.
