Opera: Our New Browser Will Change the Web
Opera has long been a small player in the browser marketplace. Yesterday the company launched Opera Unite in an effort to cut itself a bigger slice of the browser pie.
Opera Unite is a somewhat mind boggling idea for a browser, which aims to eliminate the need for media sharing sites of Flickr or YouTube by turning your computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the web, without the need for third-party servers.
The idea of sending your friend a link to a file on your computer instead of a URL is interesting. That said, Opera’s claim that this new project will “reinvent the web” has a lot of people in a tizzy about how useful the product really is because unfortunately, if you claim your product is the best thing since sliced bread, people will fight tooth and nail to find ways to point out that it’s completely the opposite.
Cutting out the middle man isn’t something a lot of people are interesting in doing, and as Chris Messina points out in his detailed write up on the service, millions of people are more than happy to leave the storage, back up and security of their photographs and videos to the Facebooks, MySpaces, Flickrs and YouTubes of the world instead of letting it sit stagnant on their hard drive on the off chance that the files might be of interest to someone at some stage in the future.
Will you guys be installing Opera Unite and encouraging your friends to turn their computer into a server? Check out the video Opera released about Opera Unite and let us know your thoughts.
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It would be useful to have an easy way to 'share' a file, especially if its too large to email. I can't imagine using it very often though. Once Google Wave becomes established I think this'll just become another little used feature.
I'll be trying Opera Unite, but, I remain skeptical.
I just want the new Firefox to come out.
If it bothers you that much you can download an FTP server and share stuff with your friends that way, or send it over an IM client, or use Apache to do it with HTTP. Okay most of this isnt for average joe on the internet, but that kind of person almost invariably uses internet explorer.
This sounds interesting and I'll give Opera another try to see how it pans out.
Vampy makes some good points, but as I only use Skype for IM (which is horrenous @ file transfer), don't like FTPs insecurity and keep finding new uses for my server, thus losing it's file transfer capabilities, this sounds like a plan.
If nothing else, it will mean that FF/IE/Seamonkey will bring it in with their updates down the line and have another (hopefully) easy way to share information.
I just use DynDNS and Apache... makes things nice and simple.
I used to like opera some years ago, really innovative. They were the first using tabs and trying hard to be standard, it was nice but firefox 3 does the job for me now.
Now about this gadget, it's seams as useful as the twitter - something you would share for a limited time and it doesn't have to be stored permanently.
Just like someone says "I'm at school", you could share a picture or a video. Seams a great idea, just not that useful for me as I don't really like all that facebook, twitter and alike. But I understand they're purpose.
All they need now is a supercomputer to actively hunt down spammers and the web will become a media accessing utopia.
"Our New Browser Will Change the Web" - yes, just like all their other browsers have (its almost invisble next to FF, that is starting to give M$ BIG headaches..
).... the pages are still having problems, though the features were very much copied and improved by FF, and now IE8..... damn stupid not to challenge copyright !!!
I just want the new Firefox to come out.
Judging by your username, you're the type who "just wants" any type of instant gratification.