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I feel that most people here is Slashdot didn't get Opera Unite:

• It's not meant to replace traditional webservers. It's meant for average joes to be able to quickly and easily run some ephemeral services from their own computer, specially file sharing. If I want to send some file to a friend, I need to upload it to some place (via e-mail. FTP, whatever). With Unite, I just turn on the file sharing service and give the URL to my friend. No uploading needed.
• Bandwidth issues are mostly moot, as Unite services are not meant to replace traditional Web servers (unless you share loads of files with doeload-hungry friends, of course :))
• Regarding security: people talk about this issue as if Unite was a full-blown Web server. It's is not Apache nor IIS (God forbid), it's just an environment where simple applications written in HTML, CSS and Javascript are run. So Unite is as secure as Opera's Javascript security, and Opera has a very good security record to date.
• The whole environment is sandboxed. All file access is only allowed in folders chosen by the user, and only when it runs some service that needs file access. Unite provides a file storage for services date, but the service doesn't know where its data is located.
• Opera does not run Unite by default. No services are run by default, just the ones started by the user.
• The FAQ

• address most issues people discusss here and elsewhere.

• Unite supports UPnP, so the Opera proxy servers are only used when UPnP is disabled.
• You can use your own domain server.

i wonder if those stats take into account the install base of opera on Wiis. http://my.opera.com/community/wii/features/ a lot of people got the browser for free, i think it's about $5 now (or however many wii points that is).

The article's ending and the summary put an emphasis on traffic having to go through Opera and this being a way to compete with Facebook and the likes. Sounds a lot like another blog I read yesterday. What Unite does, is use Opera's servers as a fallback solution. It works the same way on the eDonkey network.

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/06/17/responding-to-unite-misconceptions

"Read the faq( http://unite.opera.com/support/ ) before irresponsible reporting."

You must be new here. Welcome.

Opera is not in trouble, their marketshare has only growth aswell when people have got off IE. And even so, it varies A LOT by region. In CIS regions (Russia, Ukraine etc) Opera has 25-50% marketshare, so in many of the countries it is actually the #1 browser, kicking both IE and FF far behind. And that is a huge amount of people using Opera.

Once a client has found and connected to a Unite user, does Opera still continue to act as an intermediary, in the same way a cloud service would?

No. Opera Unite supports UPnP (enabled by default) so that users can bypass Opera's proxy service. More details here

The Opera proxy server will only be used when Opera isn't able to open up your router's ports via UPnP or if you haven't manually forwarded it. Otherwise it is always a direct connection and Opera's servers never come into play. Read the faq( http://unite.opera.com/support/ ) before irresponsible reporting.

I'm sure all seven Opera users will be thrilled.

I know this is an old joke, but stop it. In some countries, Opera has more market share than Firefox, it's well above 30%.

http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/2009/03/16/a-look-at-desktop-market-share-cis-edition

Alienate Opera users on your website, and you alienate over a third of internet users from the former USSR... In other words, one hundred million people.

Let's see, three things:

1. It looks like the latest version of Emacs is more than 3 times the size of this latest Opera snapshot, web server and everything! So, you know, Emacs is still worth complaining about. (I know, source code vs. compiled binary isn't fair, but I was just making a joke, and Emacs is still fat.)

2. Opera has always been a web suite, for longer than Firefox has even existed, and it's always come with an insane number of features out of the box, and yet it's also always been fast and nimble and light on memory. I think if anyone can keep these new features from acting as a ball and chain on your computer, Opera can.

3. Um... I forget number three. But you're supposed to do things in threes, so here you go.

Hey, here's a seemingly simple answer. Check out Opera Unite:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/an-introduction-to-opera-unite/

From what I understand, it basically runs a web server when you run Opera. One of the applications is a chat app. So anyone in Iran that's trying to organize could potentially use this. It is alpha quality so maybe save the chat pages locally from time to time. I have yet to try it, but it might just work. Good luck!

... I don't know how they manage doing this, but they do.

They do site patching

Slahdot uses charset=iso-8859-1. The page he copied from (probably this one using charset=utf-8) uses smartquotes, emdashes and so on which are mangled when you copy/paste them from a UTF-8 page.

You're like those people who can hear quite well but they just don't listen. THE QUESTION WAS: did he bother to use "Preview"? Because that would have neatly negated the very well-known (bleedin' obvious, easily looked up) issue you raise.

Slahdot uses charset=iso-8859-1. The page he copied from (probably this one using charset=utf-8) uses smartquotes, emdashes and so on which are mangled when you copy/paste them from a UTF-8 page.

The latest stable release of Opera is 9.6.

This is an Opera Labs release with a new (and btw. great) functionality. That's why it is listed on the Desktopteam Blog.

Its version number also says it's 10.00 Beta.

The latest stable release of Opera is 9.6.

This is an Opera Labs release with a new (and btw. great) functionality. That's why it is listed on the Desktopteam Blog.

Its version number also says it's 10.00 Beta.

10.0 has auto updates, but as other commenters have pointed out- 10.0 is in beta and seperate from the "Opera Unite" stuff of the article. You can learn more about auto update and try it out on the beta page

According to Opera's press releases, 27 June 2001 was the launch date for the service.

http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2001/06/27_3/

Out of curiosity, when chronologically was this?

Actually, it was back in Opera 5 days. The URL http://composer.opera.com/ seems to date back to June 30, 2001:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://composer.opera.com

Checking the main Opera site as of that date shows Opera 5.12 was released for Windows.

I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.

The latestOpera still works fine on 10.3. It doesn't "look" very Mac-like but I'd call it effective.

You can also try iCab which has interesting features of its own. It uses the system WebKit engine, though, which in 10.3 is outdated.

Yeah, from one of their pages it is basically a proxy server with added compression (not just GZip since a lot of servers can deflate content anyway).

Since it isn't part of the Opera browser but is actually an Opera-run server, I wonder how long it'll take for someone to write a Firefox extension that piggy-backs on to those servers and gets the speed increase itself? :D

I guess I spoke too soon on the GreaseMonkey bit:
How To : Greasemonkey in Opera

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

Eh, maybe.

It may be ACID3 compliant, but it still can't correctly render two nested DIVs:

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=250572

To see it fail, just go to this page in Opera 10: http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/operacss/ , and resize your browser vertically (but NOT horizontally). It's been reported in the bugtracker, forums, forum PMs to developers, etc..

So please, when you file that bug report today that "Opera 10 doesn't render things correctly" to whatever your AJAX framework of choice happens to be, don't make a big deal out of the fact that it's "Acid3 compliant" and thus the AJAX framework developers must be in the wrong.

ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/unix/solaris/1000b1/en/

God help us all if a post like yours is modded informative...

I'd probably use it more frequenty if it had some Ad blocking capabilities.

It does. Right-click on the page, "Block Content...".

By the way... http://www.opera.com/docs/history/

Integrated content blocking appeared in Opera 9.0, officially released on June 20th, 2006. Almost three years now.

And a little bit of history: http://www.schrode.net/opera/url_filtering/

Rudimentary ad blocking through urlfilter.ini appeared in Opera 6.02, released on May 15th, 2002. So, Opera has effectively had a form of ad-blocking capabilities for over seven years.

It's not as flexible as what you get through specialized Firefox extensions, but it's there, there are pre-made filters available for download, and like I said, it's been a part of the browser for seven years.

Unclogs your connection?

If I understand correctly, Opera Turbo only works in conjunction with specialized servers.

http://www.opera.com/business/solutions/turbo/

You use a proxy server while you surf. The proxy compresses the pages (partly by reducing image quality and blocking plugin content until you click on it) and delivers the compressed version to your browser.

I have lots of questions about this. Are there free servers available to the average consumer? Is this an open standard? Do the servers themselves represent a problematic bottleneck? Anyone understand this better?

http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/mac/1000b1/

"This new Opera feature increases your internet bandwidth speed on slow connections using data and image compression technologies. Opera Turbo uses Opera proxy servers to compress the traffic before it reaches the Opera browser on the clientâ(TM)s computer; see this Opera reference. Opera Turbo can easily be configured to suit your browsing needs:"

So it basically does what their mobile browser already does for your desktop. Cue tinfoil hatters in 3,2,1...

Actually their list of support for HTML5 doesn't include the video object only the audio object/element. And that includes up to the latest 9.64 version that has been released.

Considering web access and webmail are going to be the most used features when borrowing a laptop, why not use a browser with a kiosk mode? Opera has one, and then you have the added benefit that the same settings will work on Windows, Linux and OS X.

Had no problem viewing that site without the rollovers on my browser.

This is really easy to fix. Always the first thing I install when I get a new Mac...

And right now. IE is still the dominant browser, and is still holding everyone else back

And Again is Bleeding Market Share. As for holding people back, If your talking about Web Devs, IE8 makes great strides in compliency as well as allowing Legacy designs to run. It's still behind standards wise but it's light years ahead it's predecessors.

In fact, antitrust authorities in various countries have actually looked at whether iTunes could be infringing competition law. But Mac OS X is not a dominant platform, unlike Windows. I can't believe people are still making these silly comparisons

But they are not doing anything, and this is not a "silly" Comparasion as you like to call it. ITunes has already taken out multiple competitive services. Hell, Microsoft alone has already lost two fronts (playsforsure and URGE) and are most likely going to lose with Zune as well. It's done more damage to competitive products than even IE did to browsers.

Maybe, maybe not. Browser statistics do lie. Net Applications in particular have been caught manipulating their own stats numerous times. But IE is still dominant. On that, all browser stats agree. But part of the reason IE might be losing users in the first place is that the courts have been used to force Microsoft to open up to competition

What Open Competition? Everything is Free and the only competitive edge anymore is features and performance. I don't see a Firefox icon on a Default Vista or XP install. I also haven't seen an OEM package an alternative browser in their builds. (although they can if they wanted to) But Yet, Firefox share is still rising. The only thing MS did to XP and Vista was make it easier to set a default application for web, media, email, ETC.

If you offer a better product then people will choose it. At the Time when IE was 90%, There was Netscape or IE. Netscape Sucked, so IE became dominant. Now that there are alternatives that offer more features and better performance, and IE sucking, you see IE share dropping.

Opera didn't sue anyone. Opera reported Microsoft's crimes to the EC.

but didn't in the US antitrust trial, when the browser WAS the focus of that trial, and if they did, I never heard about it. I guess they were too busy making Swedish Chef Translators instead of suing.

Google, Mozilla, and a large number of other software manufacturers joined.

Because when you see a competitor down, you kick it. Did you See how fast Nvidia jumped on the Intel antitrust bandwangon with their ION platform as soon as the antitrust ruling came down? Thats what Corporations do.

As for the claim that Chrome has more market share than Opera, even Google doesn't agree there. A while ago, Opera reported having 30 million desktop users. At the same time, Google reported 10 million users for Chrome. And somehow, Net Applications's (yes, the ones you are basing your flawed claim on) stats showed Chrome with a higher market share than Opera. Yes, that's how reliable Net Applications is. And that's just one of many examples of their useless statistics.

Onestat.com if you don't like Net Applications
3 of the 6 stat groups mentions on wikipedia are not counting Chome in their list. AT Internet Institute is reporting Opera higher than Chrome. It also is putting Opera higher than any other stat group at 4% Only 2 of the 6 stat groups put Opera above 1%. only 1 above 2%

If you want to go for a larger sample, 5 of the 6 stat groups put Safari higher than Opera. although Apple has been in the game awile longer and forced download through Itunes updates, (No antitrust there. Nope.) Opera has been around for almost a decade, is available on two of the most popular game consoles today, and still has barely any share.

As for desktop numbers, How does Opera Know? How does Google Know? I suppose they both could b

The problem with Firefox is that the Gecko codebase is messy and prone to a lot of security problems. It is, if you will, the BIND 8 or Sendmail of the 2000s. In 2009 alone there have been eight critical security holes reported. Yes, Firefox patches these quickly, but having to update a program more than once a month to keep it secure is a real pain in the butt.

Firefox has a very short update lifecycle for a given update of Firefox; if you want to use an older release of Firefox (think enterprise desktops where any software update has to be approved; think live CD or embedded distributsions), you have no choice but to place yourself at risk.

Modern HTML + CSS + ECMAscript is so complicated that we can't have someone come forward and write a browser that is security-aware. Safari isn't much better, since it needed two updates already this year, and Opera has had an update this year with a couple of security problems fixed.

So, yeah, to keep a modern browser secure requires running on the update treadmill. I hope HTML + CSS + ECMA stop being constantly updated, new web Acid tests are no longer made every couple of years, and the standards calm down so that browser developers don't have to rush to add new features to their browsers all the time, allowing browser developers to take the time to write secure code.

$ apt-get install opera
fail

Opera is one of those few vanishingly rare cases where a commercial closed-source application vendor provides packages for a very large variety of distributives, in format preferred on those distributives. For Debian, they have a full-fledged repository covering all Debian releases starting from 2.2 ("potato").

They also have x86, amd64, and ppc varieties of most package formats. You can see the full set for yourself.

$ apt-get install opera
fail

Opera is one of those few vanishingly rare cases where a commercial closed-source application vendor provides packages for a very large variety of distributives, in format preferred on those distributives. For Debian, they have a full-fledged repository covering all Debian releases starting from 2.2 ("potato").

They also have x86, amd64, and ppc varieties of most package formats. You can see the full set for yourself.

nVidia does it by having to put a lot of bloat in to their driver. For example, here are just a few precompiled kernel interfaces one file, NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.51-pkg1.run:

Red Hat Linux 7.2 kernel 2.4.7-10 i386 Red Hat Linux 7.2 kernel 2.4.7-10 i686 Red Hat Linux 7.2 kernel 2.4.7-10 Athlon Red Hat Linux 7.2 kernel 2.4.7-10smp i686 Red Hat Linux 7.2 kernel 2.4.7-10smp Athlon Red Hat Linux 7.2 kernel 2.4.7-10enterprise i686 Red Hat Linux 7.3 kernel 2.4.18-3 i386 Red Hat Linux 7.3 kernel 2.4.18-3 i686 Red Hat Linux 7.3 kernel 2.4.18-3 Athlon Red Hat Linux 7.3 kernel 2.4.18-3smp i586 Red Hat Linux 7.3 kernel 2.4.18-3smp i686 Red Hat Linux 7.3 kernel 2.4.18-3smp Athlon Red Hat Linux 7.3 kernel 2.4.18-3bigmem i686 Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7 i386 Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7 i586 Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7 i686 Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7 Athlon Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7smp i586 Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7smp i686 Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7smp Athlon Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7bigmem i686 Red Hat Linux 7.3 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.7BOOT i386 Red Hat Linux 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14 i586 Red Hat Linux 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14 i686 Red Hat Linux 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14 Athlon Red Hat Linux 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14smp i686 Red Hat Linux 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14smp Athlon Red Hat Linux 8.0 kernel 2.4.18-14bigmem i686 Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8 i386 Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8 i586 Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8 i686 Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8 Athlon Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8smp i586 Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8smp i686 Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8smp Athlon Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8bigmem i686 Red Hat Linux 8.0 updated to kernel 2.4.20-19.8BOOT i386 Red Hat Linux 9 kernel 2.4.20-6 i586 Red Hat Linux 9 kernel 2.4.20-6 i686 Red Hat Linux 9 kernel 2.4.20-6 Athlon Red Hat Linux 9 kernel 2.4.20-6smp i686 Red Hat Linux 9 kernel 2.4.20-6smp Athlon Red Hat Linux 9 kernel 2.4.20-6bigmem i686 Red Hat Linux 9 updated to kernel 2.4.20-8 i586 I think you get the idea

This makes the driver needlessly bloated, and gives Nvidia less time to make the Nvidia driver as good as their Windows driver. Other Linux packages, such as Opera, just have a huge list of which Linux distro/version you want to download for.

Point being, Linux's fragmentation make driver development a nightmare in Linux. This is why only a relatively few manufacturers develop drivers for Linux, and why drivers are more stable and more supported in Microsoft Windows.

I would guess Ubuntu has rather a large share of the Linux desktop (Net Applications claims to be measuring web usage - not that their numbers are the slightest bit trustworthy, and they admit to fiddling them) - if someone thinks "damn I'm sick of Windows being flaky garbage, think I'll try this 'Leengux' thing," I suspect rather a lot of those are going to try Ubuntu first as the one they'll have heard of as being an easy ride.

I'm not sure if Ubuntu's build of Firefox says it's Ubuntu in the user-agent. I'd check, but *cough* I'm posting this with my work laptop booted into XP ...

Well, Opera Mini reformats HTML pages for handheld devices on server side - it's basically what it's all about, really. It would be pretty interesting if it could do that to HTML in SSL-secured HTTP responses without decrypting and then re-encrypting the stream.

Their FAQ even has some nice pictures...

Opera is willing to support you guys left out in the cold with a modern browser, going all the way back to Windows 95.

Well, then have a look at the new Opera 10 which has Face Gestures!

Warpspeed and hyperspace aren't really used outside of science fiction though. Space elevator and grey goo I'll grant you. A portal is just an opening or a doorway.

That's just not true. Google has 974,000 hits on "warpspeed" including:

http://www.warpspeedperformance.com/ - Exhaust and chassis upgrades

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2009/02/hiv-evolving-at.html - Article about evolution of HIV

http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2009/04/02/ - Apparently Opera allows you to browse the web quickly. (Admittedly that's rather science-fictiony.)

And many others.

Granted, not used currently in *science* but it's certainly used outside science fiction!

It's great on Firefox. It has a few bugs on Safari. It will work on Chrome as soon as Google gets a Mac port out (Hint hint!). As for IE... well, you'll keep the old system for a few more weeks, but you're only like 14% of our users, and you keep shrinking.

Er...havn't you forgotten something. A lot of us are Sooo nerdy we use Opera

I thought the download page was nearly as funny as the facial expressions the guy was making.

Look here: http://my.opera.com/cstrep/blog/2009/03/19/ubiquity-for-opera-1-0-released

Its not clear to me from the press release how this differs from Opera's experimental "opera-3d" canvas context.

What is really needed is a high-level format for storing 3D models, with easy software for content creation and importing models from existing 3D modelers. There have been attempts to do this before, VRML and Adobe's acrobat reader both support 3D. Nobody really uses it outside of a few specialized fields.

If you're still using Firefox for something other than Web Developer and Firebug, I'd be willing to say you're doing it wrong.

I run Linux you insensitive clod.

So do I.

Then the user will look at the message at the top of the page, that the designer put there (that's me), saying:

Hello, you're using an outdated version of Internet Explorer: some elements of this Web site will not be displayed correctly.

We would be very appreciative if you switched to a more standards compliant browser, such as Opera or Firefox. Whilst we support any modern browser, we think you'll probably like one of those best.

If it's IT policy holding you back. Tough shit. The Internet is not beholden to your corporation and we need to move on, and away, from the awful rendering engine in IE6.

Interestingly, Opera's new ECMAscript engine has a register-based byte-code instruction set.

http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/02/04/carakan

From my web site footer: "Best viewed with a web browser."

"Can somebody tell me why programmers of open source browsers decide not to code to standards?"

The real question should be why do programmers write web apps that display differently on differing browsers. Assuming this isn't willful sabotage unlike the case of MS making Hotmail not work on Opera. This was achieved by moving text 30 pixels to the left so as to make the text look all jagged.

http://acid3.acidtests.org/
http://www.w3.org/