Still Making a Difference

Yeh! Reinvent it! Yeh!

Glad to see someone is still trying to do something different for the masses. Well done Opera. You may moan a lot but you make a difference (and have done so for years). And even if Unite does not work oyu get marks for trying,

Queue haters...

Excellent

Just happy for Opera doing more. Best is getting better :).

Opera Unite

How does that re-invent the web? It's certainly not ground-breaking.

So users can share using their web browser. I've been doing that with Firefox and add-ins.

Opera - re-inventing something, and making it ground-breaking means to do something that hasn't been done before, or improving something to eliminate a fundamental flaw.

Add a feature to file-share - maybe, but that's certainly not unique. Even then, everyone I know would rather keep their existing browser and use online services to share, or use P2P.

Does it work yet?

Because so far I've not managed to get it to act as an FTP or a webserver, in fact all that's worked on it is the chat part, which I have to tell people about on MSN, which rather defeats the point.

Needs a killer app

Opera has consistently been first to do a lot of things in the browser world that have been mimicked by other browser later: http://www.geektechnica.com/2009/06/8-browser-innovations-started-by-opera/

Could Unite be another one of these features? Hard to tell. I think it has potential, but so far I'm not impressed. The one thing people fail to mention is that this isn't JUST a webserver running on your box. It does handle a couple of things that would be difficult for some people to do themselves such as the problem sitting behind a router and obviously the difficulty setting it up themselves. And lets not forget, most people aren't going to be writing their own Unite app, and this provides a much simpler mechanism for installing than setting up a php app or something.

I think what is really needed is a killer app. The examples they have right now aren't exactly groundbreaking. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but kudos for trying.

@Dave 129

Yeh...Jon needs to go to eloquency (sp?) lessons. Gibing his boys a bad name.

I dunno if Unite will change the web...happy to give it a go. One thing though, I have had virtually no incompatibilities with sites for over a year now. Opera 9-10 have been pretty good little browsers.

@Dave 129

"...they could get Jon what's-his-name to stop those diatribes against MS."

What diatribes?

"even I can't stomach some of the crap that gets published about how unfair life is with IE and MS and blah blah blah blah"

That's a silly thing to say. It's got nothing to do with "unfair", and everything to do with THE FACT THAT MICROSOFT BROKE THE LAW.

@Bilgepipe

"Get your browser compatible first, then start of extras like this."

How is Opera going to force all those sites to stop using browser sniffing to block it?

That's the MAIN PROBLEM today with regards to compatibility.

Opera probably spends most of their resources on compatibility anyway. But the problem is so insanely complex that there's no easy or simple solution.

Smell the coffee

@Thomh - listen cocksnot, by sharing through "social" (read twadvertising) networks you usually lose most copyrights on the material. With Unite there are no strings attached.

Use cases - my brother can post snapshots of my nephew without Flickr disabling my account because I don't use it enough; I can share project documents without fear of Amazon's service going bang; I can stream selected articles of my Economist subscription (an excellent innovation) *even* easier than with ITunes and even the fridge is fun!

@ all - Opera does need to demonstrate that you can't break-out of Unite and pwn the server. Or at least that this is less trivial than with Fuckbook or Twats

Don't get it...

I just don't get it... who in their right mind would merge a web browser with a web server? And then try to put the lot in the hands of the same people who can't keep their computer patched/updated or otherwise safe from external attacks?

I must be missing something.

FFS, stop trying to make a program/browser/whatever that does everything. If I want a web server on my windows machine, I'll install one of the myriad Apache windows packages that exist already. but since I've already done that on a dedicated LAMP server, I guess I personally won't ever need to.

Looking at the acumen of the average web surfer, this is a security nightmare waiting to happen <shudder>.