ReadWriteWeb

Opera just announced the release of Opera 10.10. This latest version of Opera's desktop browser now includes Opera Unite, the company's browser-based web server. With Unite, users can share photos, music, notes, websites, forums and calendars - but unlike standard web apps, these apps are hosted on the user's computer. When Opera first talked about Unite, it claimed that this service would "reinvent the web." This resulted in a lot of hype before the announcement and the inevitable backlash right afterward. When we tested the first alpha version of Opera with the built-in Unite feature, however, we came away quite impressed.

Today, just a few days after the release of version 10 of its desktop browser, Opera has already released a new beta alpha version of the next iteration of its flagship product. This version includes a few bug fixes, but most importantly, it also enables Opera Unite, the hyped and then quickly forgotten browser-based web server that Opera announced in June. Given that Unite will soon be part of the default install of Opera, we thought that now would be a good time to have another look at Unite and see if it lives up to its promise to "reinvent the web."

In a recent interview with Network World, Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, defends the company's upcoming web browser (Opera 10)'s  "Unite" feature - the new technology that turns your browser into a web server. He said that Unite's decentralized nature makes it more difficult for hackers to break into computer systems - not easier.

That claim is probably meant to fight back against some people's initial concerns that hosting files on their own PC will leave them open to attack. However, simply addressing security issues is somewhat missing the point about the real trouble with Unite: it's not solving a problem we actually have.

Opera has been buzzing up our inboxes lately with rather vague press releases on how it planned to "reinvent the web."

Well, we've just received concrete confirmation of exactly what that means. Their new product, Opera Unite, "turns any 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."