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Opera 10.0 Released, With Integrated Web Server Functionality
sherl0k writes "Opera 10.0, dubbed Opera Unite, has been released. Built into the Web browser is a full-fledged Web server, complete with nifty little gadgets such as a 'fridge' that people can post notes onto, a chat room, a widget to stream your music library anywhere, and a built-in file-sharing mechanism. It also scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test."
Readers fudreporter and TLS point to The Register's report on the new release and a
5-minute video demo, respectively. Update: 06/16 15:18 GMT by T: Roar Lauritzsen of Opera Software writes to point out that "release" isn't quite the right word here; though you can download it, version 10.0 is still in beta, and the version with Unite is a labs (experimental) release.
Pretend for a second that I don't know anything about Acid 3. Pretend I'm just a regular Joe-sixpack web user.
Why should I care that my browser scored 100/100 on the Acid 3 test?
I would pitch Acid 3 compliance in this manner: This web browser is 100% compliant with the proper web rendering standards. The more compliant your web browser is, the less likely your web browser will break. You can take that to the bank. You spend less time with a broken browser, and more time enjoying a cold one.
It's a botnet writer's wet dream; a victim that will host your exploit once you've pwned it.
We can only hope that it's secure, or else the two dozen people who actually use Opera will be very unpopular indeed, at least until the RIAA has then rounded up for sharing their tunes with (world + dog).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
something sitting in the back of my head telling me that i would trust Opera to do it FAR more better than Netscape - if not for the reason that when Netscape did it.. no one thought people would be evil with it.. second Opera is by far one of the most secure browsers out there, let alone the fastest (although chrome is giving it a run for it's money on that front).
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
The more compliant your web browser is, the less likely your web browser will break.
I love webstandards, and wish greatly that all browsers supported them well. But I just don't think that quote is factually true. If your browser adheres to webstandards that IE doesn't then it's quite possible/plausible that your browser will fail to deliver websites that look and function like you and the designer expected it to.
People "should" code to standards, but I just don't think that it's (yet) true that they DO.
I don't think it's a good idea to run a web server on the average user's PC for security reasons. If there is a web server running on an un-patched (or not patched up to date, rather) and improperly firewalled it could be compromised in a small amount of time. Seeing as many have personal data on their PC as well this makes it worse. Plus, isn't it common practice to separate web servers from the rest of a network also for security reasons?
Building a firewall-piercing file server into a browser, a program which typically has full network and file system access, is going to cause many incidents of accidental file sharing.
Why does a web browser have full access to the file system, other than read-only access to its own "program" and "files to upload" folders and read-write access to "user profile", "cache", and "downloaded files" folders?
While it is an interesting idea, in the US at least it would run afoul of the TOS most people agreed to when they signed up for their broadband connection. That and bandwidth constraints on the upload side of their connection.
i can just see it now... your mom calls from her vacation abroad: "Hey! How you doing? Can you turn your laptop on i want to show uncle henry your photos of the wedding", "mom, it's 3am... i wish i had put my photos on flckr!"
Anyone else seeing graphics appearing midcomment on about 1/4 of the comments?
You could say that, but you would be wrong. Getting 100/100 on Acid3 does not in any way prove that you follow the specs 100%. ACID 3 tests a certain portion of the standards that most browsers have trouble with. Personally, I've found that Safari which also has a history of scoring very high on these tests, has many rendering bugs that show up when rendering normal everyday webpages. Scoring 100% ACID 3 only means that you have created a browser than can render ACID 3 correctly, and not that your browser would render any other web page properly when it was trying to read it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The same way you didnt think your post through--a quick read through the comments (not even the article!) reveals that its NOT integrated into opera, its a widget aka addon. "I hear you can get virus extensions for firefox, so clearly mozilla is retarded". What?
Oh no! not opera too!
I for one am disappointed in firefox for massive memory consumption and feature bloat, whatever happend to the idea that you use an application for a specific task? wasn't firefox supposed to be a lean browser at one point? not having all the bloat of mozilla?
Firefox wouldn't be quite so bad if they used "libexec style" bloat (for example, the config, bookmark and RSS mgr as a separate process) so that you didn't have to load the whole thing into memory just to look at websites.
I hope opera at least has a separate process for the web server so we don't have to drag it along every time we visit slashdot.
Heh, and we used to complain about emacs..
Can't I just get a simple web browser that looks good and doesn't come with the latest FOTM Twitter bullshit?
Why would a want a "Fridge" in my Browser instead of features that help me, you know, browse the internet?
Opera PPC OS X is just 12 MB, the actual executable is way below it.
In fact, if you dig deeper, you figure the amazing fact. Core renderer is below 1 MB. Yes, 1 MB of ultra portable pure C is the "Opera". Rest is done via the functionality it already has. E.g. lsof when you use the "bulky" IRC function of Opera, you will see the thing you see as "IRC" is actually a web page along with CSS!
Same with the "Web server". It must be amazingly tiny, even less than the rendering engine since it is clear that they are heading to mobile with this.
Opera and Firefox has different development models, concepts and even targets. Ask Firefox developers if they will remove 80% of code just because they want the exact same binary to run on my horribly outdated, OS dead UIQ3 Sony Ericsson P1i. That is what Opera does.
With Google, Google Backed Mozilla, MS Backed IE, Apple backed Webkit, I really don't think Opera dreams about "World Domination!". Look at these silly people, they want to boycott Opera because MS backed blogs called for it. Why? EU judicial system investigates MS (did you see IE icon's size on Win 7?) and MS pulled one of "I am taking my toys and going home" tricks again by not including IE in EU Windows. So, it is all Opera's fault now (as they can't mess with Google/Firefox) and they want to boycott Opera (as if they ever used!).
I mean, as ordinary user, I can see the stupidity but they can't? I bet they do and they never dreamed of being some 20-30% market share browser because of these facts which aren't really too technical.
The big speed difference I notice between Opera and some other browsers isn't so much in the HTML/JS performance but in overall responsiveness. Opening a tab is nearly instantaneous, even on older systems. The browser just gets out of the way and lets me work. That speed difference won't be shown in most benchmarks.
I don't want my pictures, banking, email (thanks Gmail!), etc to rely on a P2P network of home computers. I want servers doing what they do best, serving data from a facility with backup power, redundant connectivity, and some sort of physical security. And I want my laptop/desktop doing what they do best, fetching info from the rest of the world.
How many ordinary non techie end users actually know what opera is?
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.
That's a very fancy and colourful benchmark, but what exactly does it measure? I tried it on hald a dozen different Linux browsers, and it came out with Firefox 3.0.11 on bottom, well below Iceweasel 3.0.11 (same codebase), with Opera 10 Beta and Konqueror 4.2.4 almost indistinguishable from each other and quite a bit faster, with some WebKit based browsers much faster than those. Problem is, Konqueror is slower than Firefox in all other benchmarks (WebKit's Sunspider, for instance) and in user experience as well. That benchmark doesn't reflect reality.
So the phrase "Opera Unite: a Web server on the Web browser" in big text on the page doesn't really mean it's a web server. Gotcha.
I mean seriously did we lean nothing with Windows 200o default install of IIS.
Yes, the server and all services are disabled by default.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.