I headed to the Opera Beta web browser I've been playing with (the one with the proxy-based "VPN") for my daily dose of online news items. But the app kept locking up the Mac. Other apps would become unresponsive. Tabbed articles would take "forever" to load, if they loaded at all.
Not caring at this point about the VPN part, just wanting the News, I downloaded Opera's latest Alpha version & it behaved perfectly fine. No issues at all. Best of all, the VPN has made its way to the mainstream Opera version.
No longer needing the Beta version, I uninstalled it, just as I had uninstalled the pre-Beta Developer version when it was no longer the only way to access the browser-environment VPN.