Rather than view it as a game-changer, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Opera Unite as a Hail Mary bid for Opera to stay in the game. After all, in an era when even vending machines have Web servers on them, a Web server on the Web browser isn't really that groundbreaking. What Opera is attempting is to 'reintermediate' the Internet — 'directly linking people's personal computers together' by making them sign up for an account on Opera's servers and ensuring all of their exchanges pass through Opera's servers first. 'That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls, but more important, it makes Opera the intermediary in your social interactions — not Facebook, not MySpace, but Opera,' McAllister writes. In other words, Opera hopes to use social networking as a Trojan horse to put traditional apps back in charge.
My name is Lawrence Eng, and, as a product analyst for Opera Software, my job is to understand our users and what they need, so we can serve them better. Today, I will share my thoughts on Opera Unite, a new Opera technology that I’m extremely excited about. I’ve been an avid Opera user since 2001 and have seen the numerous innovations Opera has introduced to dramatically improve the experience of Web browsing. Of all the new features we’ve introduced over the years, none of them have filled me with as much anticipation as Opera Unite. This technology is a radical first step towards addressing what I call “the Internet’s unfulfilled promise”, which is about our ability to connect with each other and participate meaningfully online—on our own terms, and without losing control of our data
Dial-up connections and flaky Wi-Fi are made significantly more tolerable with Opera 10, it seems. After yesterdays news that Opera 10's first beta had landed, some testing was in order. One major new feature is Opera Turbo — server-side compression — which shrinks pages before sending them down your browser. With a 100Mbps connection throttled to a laughable 50Kbps, Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it. Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score. If you ever use a laptop on public Wi-Fi, to not have Opera 10 installed could be a big mistake