Opera Unite is a Hail Mary

snydeq writes "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."

Comments

Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[1sockchuck]

Data Center Knowledge has a roundup that looks at some of the problems with this approach, including security issues related to running a server on a desktop app and bandwidth consumption. If your browser-hosted site gets busy, you think your ISP won't notice?

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[improfane]

In the UK, they begin capping your connections.

When ISPs start capping to the level of poor performance, I presume that Opera will use its already implemented BitTorrent implementation to keeps files downloaded by your friends distributed amongst them.

It seems Opera is well designed for this sort of thing. Imagine chatting over IRC with your firends using a build-in IRC daemon - with each friend being a split in the server. It's ingenius.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[improfane]

Although not my spelling of the word ingenious.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[ShieldW0lf]

If this works, it will be pulling us out of a hole that was dug over many years. The ISPs who use IPV4 dynamic IPs were sabotaging the network. The DNS organizations who decided to make having an entry in the registry something that costs an unreasonable amount of money were sabotaging the network. Microsofts decision to cripple the web server on every consumer version of their OS ever released were sabotaging the network. The cloud computing initiatives are ALL about sabotaging the network. So are the social networking sites.

It's a cynical view to say that Opera are attempting to set themselves up as intermediaries so they can leverage that control. It might be true. But it is also true that the network was designed to work the way Opera Unite is pushing it to work, and it doesn't because the organizations who were originally entrusted with the task screwed everything up and are already leveraging that control. If everything wasn't already so screwed up in the first place, Opera's opportunity wouldn't exist.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention maybe I don't want to use Opera as a browser? Why not make this a separate product?

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[Repossessed]

Can you imagine how horrible the netsplits would be?

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[rs79]

"Data Center Knowledge has a roundup that looks at some of the problems with this approach, including security issues related to running a server on a desktop app and bandwidth consumption. If your browser-hosted site gets busy, you think your ISP won't notice? "

I don't think you understand what it's supposed to be used for. If you want to "host a web site" in the familiar sense, you rent some webspace on a server somewhere. This is for stuff other than that.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

oh my god, then install another browser and use that when you want to....

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[mindstrm]

" The DNS organizations who decided to make having an entry in the registry something that costs an unreasonable amount of money were sabotaging the network"

Nonsense.

$19/year is unreasonable?

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[PReDiToR]

Yes.

These guys do it on a semi-permanent or temporary basis for free, and I'm sure that is more computationally expensive than otherwise. Why should it cost so much money for a permanent one?

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[twidarkling]

It works with other browsers, you just need to have it running on the machine that's sharing. You don't need to have it on every computer you're using.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[hairyfeet]

I bet they won't feel ingenious when the *.A.As come knocking at their door demanding they load down all their servers with "filter" software to make sure that Joe home users isn't sharing anything "owned" by them. In fact I am shocked the RIAA hasn't already sent them a nasty letter, they must not know about it yet.

Any time you have a sharing ANYTHING that goes through a central server it is bad, because that gives the *.A.As a central target to sue. And with Opera in dead last they really can't afford a Limewire style lawsuit on their hands. I have to agree with the reviewers, this is just dumb. Opera made sure businesses won't load Opera thanks to built in BT and now this P2P software, and they just gave the *.A.As a new bullseye, right on their foreheads. Just dumb. No wonder Opera is getting their asses kicked if this is the best they can come up with.

Kinda sad, because during the days of IE5 Opera really had a chance to grab some market, but blew it with a pay browser and even worse ad supported. They never have been able how to make money with Opera. Oh well, maybe when they go under the next bunch that buys them will know how to make a profit.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[inightmare]

I totally agree. It's good for users, it's good for Opera Software. It's the way things happen in buissiness and I don't see anything wrong with that.It's certainly an application that will make my life easier, as it's everyday that I need to share a pic or two with friends.
And we're moving towards an Operating System that consists if one application - the Web Browser. And I wouldn't be surprised if other browser will follow similar path.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[xarak]

Your post does not reflect your sig, padawan.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[TooMuchToDo]

They subsidize it from the people who do pay for DNS services. People, servers, colo space, power, and network connectivity cost money. Just because it's the internet doesn't mean it's free.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[davidsyes]

ISP's DEFINITELY won't like this:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/congressman-has-a-bill-ready-to-combat-usage-caps.ars

"Massa's solution would be to force ISPs to justify usage-based fees to the FTC before they are implemented. The ISP would have to submit an economic case, based on the capital equipment cost and operational costs, for why they need to charge for usage, and then consider the impact of those fees on users. The FTC would get injunction power, and the ability to fine any ISP that either neglected to file a justification or implemented the plan regardless of the injunction. The bill uses language like "unjust, unreasonable, or unreasonably discriminatory" to describe plans that run afoul of the economic analysis, which Massa says reflects existing statutory language used giving the FTC regulatory power.

It's safe to assume Time Warner won't like this one bit, as a basic economic analysis shows that its plan imposes fees that are nowhere close to those of its fellow duopolists. More generally, the cost of supporting subscribers appears to be dropping in most cases, so it seems unlikely that anyone in the industry would be able to get their plan past the FTC."

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[jp10558]

As far as I know from postings of their public balance sheets (as they are on a stock exchange), they do make a profit. I can't figure out how they'd stay in business so long without making money...

And I'm not seeing any reason that would change, even if this Opera Unite is a huge flop (and it might well be).

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[jp10558]

I assume it's the same reason that AddBlock Plus isn't a separate project, it was easier to leverage the existing technology in Opera for them. You can already minimize Opera to the system tray. And I think they want to advertise their browser as well.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[jc42]

If this works, it will be pulling us out of a hole that was dug over many years. The ISPs who use IPV4 dynamic IPs ... The DNS organizations who decided to make having an entry in the registry something that costs an unreasonable amount of money ... Microsofts decision to cripple the web server on every consumer version of their OS ever released ... The cloud computing initiatives ... are sabotaging the network. So are the social networking sites.

Right. And they're mostly doing this in an attempt to take control of what was designed to be an open network that connects every networked device to every other, so that they can charge you money for every connection. The cell phone companies are especially culpable here. The cell-phone system could have been what finally gave total interconnection to everyone, but they restrict customers to a small set of machines that are locked down and controlled by the phone companies, so they can charge you separately for every new sort of communication. As a result, the cell-phone system is nearly unusable as part of the Internet.

For several years, my wife and I have had web servers running on our laptops. But they have been only usable as test systems for the web content, because no matter where we go, they are unreachable from the Internet. If we are traveling and putting our "content" online, it sits there unavailable to anyone but us until we can transfer it to a wired machine with a public address. This wasn't at all how the Internet was designed to work. If you dig up the early designs (which are online), you'll see lots of nice drawings of equipment moving around the landscape while communicating fully with each other.

This was mostly military equipment, of course, because that's who funded the original ARPAnet that led to the Internet. But it applies just as well to our current civilian portable electronics. An especially useful comparison was that the military design was wireless, fully distributed, and multiply interconnected because they were thinking of enemies that would shoot at any critical nodes to disable communication. So they wanted a system without critical nodes. Today in the civilian world, we have the same situation, except that the enemy is things like government and corporate censors that want to disable our communications. And the really effective enemy has been the comm companies, who have successfully restricted us to their locked-down devices with single-link communication systems, for the express purpose of limiting our communication. Their excuse has been a "need" to block copyrighted and pornographic content, but the real motive has been that they want to monetize every comm link.

If opera can break this chokehold and enable true communication for our growing population of mobile devices (such as this laptop that I'm typing on whose web server you can't reach), I'll be among the crowd that will cheer them on. I already have opera installed on all my gadgets that will support it, mostly for testing my web stuff, but I also use it frequently. I think this story is very interesting, and I intend to be one of the early testers.

I wonder if it'll work on the G1 or iPhone? I have a G1 and my wife has an iPhone. It'd be really handy to be able to give friends a URL for web files on our phones no matter where we happen to be. Just sending a URL and letting people download things as they like is a lot better than packing up everything into a giant email message and sending N copies to friends who may not actually want all of it.

Of course, with cell-phone costs what they are, we'll probably want to prevent access to all the search bots that are over 90% of the traffic to our wired web sites. ;-)

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[iiiears]

Now add TOR routing and adhoc Wi-Fi. Copyright holders and those that trade fear for votes are going to erase this before they even understand it's power to resolve differences and protect liberty without any need for the N.R.A. Those that wish to control it will drape themselves in the flag and spout scripture about the evils of this. . We will only have a fond memory of what might of been.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[nine-times]

Well certainly when you look at the service being provided, I'm not sure why either DNS registration or SSL certs are so expensive. They're really just hosting a relatively small database with relatively light usage. There's the facade of security, but it's not as though registrars and CAs actually investigate people to verify identity (at least in most cases).

The only upside to increased prices is it provides some kind of limit to domain squatting and such. If domain registration were free, then every single possible domain would probably be taken by now.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[iiiears]

You can easily avoid what i am about to say if the tag offends you. Respect other peoples property, privacy, and the laws that can be changed with the ballot box. To do anything else requires people deprived of those things to fight. D.R.M. is a symbol of unrestrained greed. Not that of Artists or content creators but your own. Purchase the entertainment you enjoy. Encourage innovation with your dollars. Discourage theft. Was anyone surprised by this?

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[bentcd]

If everything wasn't already so screwed up in the first place, Opera's opportunity wouldn't exist.

Perhaps Opera has seen into the crystal ball and noted that by 2011 or thereabouts, either the Internet is on IPv6 or else things are about to start seriously breaking down. In the case that IPv6 actually turns out to be the future, Opera is now positioning themselves to be the /one/ provider that has empowered its users to make full use of a newly re-opened peer-to-peer internet. While everyone else is stuck with hopelessly centralized systems, Opera users will experience the full power of an open internet from day one. Done correctly they could be huge ca 2012 and onwards while everyone else is playing catch-up.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[Narishma]

I'd guess they make money from the embeded Opera mini web browser or whatever it's called now. It's on things like the Nintendo DS and Wii and some PDAs and smart phones.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

How long did it take you to type all of that?

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[shutdown -p now]

Among other things, Opera is European (Norwegian, to be specific), so they don't have to worry about *AA specifically. Now there are some similar local organizations there, but, as I understand, due to more stringent privacy protections they can't just force such a deal. It would have to be an actual law in Norway before Opera will do this.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[sopssa]

Heh, I'm glad I dont live in the usa. Atleast cell-phone costs here in nordic europe (where opera is based aswell, btw) went down years ago already. When I moved I ran my server on 4.5mbit unlimited 3g mobile connection and it costs ~30 euros a month (latency was a bit bitch 300ms in online fps games, but otherwise it worked good). There was also just news by one of the operators that they're starting to give unlimited 24/3 connections by the end of year, via mobile phone and around that same price. However I still prefer my 100/100 homeline for that, but that kind of speed in phone is nice for streaming music or videos from your computer when you're in a bus or going somewhere.

This is probably also why me and opera see this as very, very viable option. Operators here are non-restrictive and consumer lines are fast. Theres a world outside us aswell :) However that being said, Opera's idea is *not* to have people running webservers via it. Its just a basic thingie for sharing your stuff and quickly give some url to friend instead of upping to imageshack, flickr or whatever. And besides the point, it has chatroom etc and probably soon lots of other stuff when API developers get their hands on it.

Its platform independent, so its highly possible they'll start supporting mobile opera in future aswell. It makes great sense aswell, because thats one of the major uses of it.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

As you say, charging for domains is a sort of filter on who gets which domain. Really it would be far better to have real people review the usage of domains and reject people like domain squatters. You could probably handle it by having a wiki or similar system where people could argue that a domain is being abused -- which would require having actual rules instead of ".com is for commercial stuff... yeah...". See Problems, Goals and a Fix for Domain Names for a structure in which that could actually work.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...in case you ain't noticed there slick, the ballot box don't do jack shit unless it comes along with a check with a whole bunch of zeroes on it. DMCA? Bought and paid for by outright bribery. When laws can be bought and sold without even a cursory glance, what exactly make you think your "ballot box' is gonna do shit? They just wait until whatever D or R is chosen and then make a little visit to his office with a nice briefcase and a pen, and your ballot box just got flushed down the toilet again.

Sorry hoss, but your are seriously naive or high if you think you can beat multinationals conglomerates with marking a piece of paper and sticking it into a box. Everyone has a price, and politicians even more so. And Mr. Lobbyist will ALWAYS find out what that price is and buy them, period. How do you think we ended up with 150+ year copyrights anyway? Do you think consumers went "Yes, Mr. Congressman, I think those corps aren't making them enough cash. lets make the length of copyrights so obscenely long that nobody will be alive when they expire. That's the ticket!" Please. To quote the late George Carlin: " You know why they call it the American Dream? because you have to be asleep to believe in it"

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[jp10558]

Well, they claim they make 1/5 of their revenue from the google search box tie in on the desktop browser...

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[pbhj]

Well there's writing the db entry, that costs money, then there's the later reading of the db entry. These things aren't free you know ... sheesh!

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[pbhj]

When I tried the media streaming it would only allow me to play the CC content that I had, not sure if there were headers it was reading or if it were matching filenames to a DB or if it was just a glitch (it's been pretty well slashdotted I think).

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[A Friendly Troll]

Kinda sad, because during the days of IE5 Opera really had a chance to grab some market, but blew it with a pay browser and even worse ad supported. They never have been able how to make money with Opera. Oh well, maybe when they go under the next bunch that buys them will know how to make a profit.

Opera is making tons of money. Their browser is on the Wii, their Mini browser is the most popular mobile browser, their browser is on airplanes, their browser (regular Mobile) is on millions of phones. They are not going under - they are making more money than ever.

Also, like I said here, Opera has above 30% and close to 40% market share in some countries.

Finally, they are a Norwegian company. *AA won't come knocking at their door.

Who the fuck modded you insightful for such trolling?!

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[hkmwbz]

Yes, as we all know, installing Opera destroys all your other browsers.

Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

In a handful of Eastern European countries Opera has 21 - 44 % market share, according to the statistics in the link you provide. I wasn't able to verify any of the Statcounter numbers, since their global stats site wasn't working for me. Maybe it only works in Opera. I'm not sure where you get the information that the Opera Mini browser is the most popular mobile browser. Maybe if you count total installs it is. In actual usage, Safari on the iPhone is by far the most popular mobile browser. Opera does seem to be doing well financially, as their 2008 net profit was $13.61 million, compared to less than $2 million in 2007. But they are a very small company, and while they are undoubtedly competitive in a few niche markets, out of those markets they are a minor player with little hope of gaining any significant market share.

Epic Fail

[TheMiddleRoad]

What the hell were they thinking? "We'll do something that people won't understand and won't like if they do understand."

Re:Epic Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Epic Fail

STFU!

Re:Epic Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hypercritical of the idea at first. My main problem is that browsers are WAY too bloated (read: firefox)

Then it occured to me that if the web server were in a separate process, with separate memory usage and the applications were also separate processes.

This might be an extremely effective way of reducing bloat.

If you could make the bookmark features, configuration, etc.. as web services that come in and go away, they wouldn't need to be loaded in the main binary. The web server could, in theory, be used as a way for back-end browser features to have an interface without introducing a lot of bloat.

Re:Epic Fail

[keefus_a]

Well I saw it a little differently. It looks to me like an attempt to duplicate some of the functions offered by Sharepoint and Messenger, but in a browser. Add in the API and you're steps from offering all of the functions. Everyone that doesn't use IE should be applauding this. One of the biggest hangups on adopting non-IE6 browsers is the massive corporate intranet establishment. At least this offers some functionality that a PHB might find attractive, and therefore at least a little motivation to move to a standards based intranet. Keep in mind that you can "direct connect" Unite without going through Opera servers. And I expect, if it catches on, there will be some sort of appliance offered that can privately act as the central server.

Re:Epic Fail

[jp10558]

And I expect, if it catches on, there will be some sort of appliance offered that can privately act as the central server.

I think that might well also be a great idea for Opera as they could turn that into a revenue stream a la Google's search appliances.

Collaboration is big in businesses, and there is definately space in that market if they can sell it. Now, whether Opera can make this a compelling alternative to Wikis etc I'm not sure. I can certainly see a potential to sell it to small business where there aren't IT people to set up a LAMP stack or an IRC server for instance. And if it was locally hosted, even the chat might have a value if they mention the monitoring that, say, AIM does on IMs for business secerets... This does assume that they're going to not proxy everything of course.

Re:Epic Fail

[hkmwbz]

So because you don't understand it, no one does? The author of the article was obviously completely clueless. Opera, a desktop software company? No dammit, Opera is a browser company. The less time you spend in your desktop apps and the more time you spend in their web browser, the more money they will be making. You are either extremely biased, and will reject anything Opera does out of hand, or you are extremely ignorant and possibly naive, and will believe anything some ill-informed "journalist" writes.

Re:Epic Fail

[hkmwbz]

You can already connect directly to your IP address and bypass both the server that gives you a hostname and the proxy. The logging in thing is just a convenience for noobs. I hope they will make it easier to just skip the whole logging in thing in the future.

Re:Epic Fail

[TheMiddleRoad]

No, I just think they're never going to be able to sell it. The Opera browser has always been C- to me due to the mediocre interace. I was happy with OmniWeb for a long time. Safari was OK. Now I'm a Firefox user. I don't care about the brand.

Re:Epic Fail

[hkmwbz]

Sell it? Opera is free. But why are you trying to change the subject? That you personally don't like the browser is irrelevant anyway. The point is that you said people won't understand it. To which I replied: "So because you don't understand it, no one does?"

I also pointed out the fallacious arguments used by the article author. And all you did was to change the subject and throw out lots of subjective opinions that are irrelevant to the discussion anyway.

Re:Epic Fail

[TheMiddleRoad]

Take a web browser. Add a web server with a few built in software bits to make building a social site possible. Ta da! A game changer! Nope, crap. Most people won't get it. Most people don't leave their computers on 24/7. Most people who do leave their computers on 24/7 and who would run services on their home machine would want something more powerful while avoiding the privacy issues. It's a lame. It's craptastic. Sorry.

Someday someone will design a true p2p social networking system. Till then, the central server will be king.

Re:Epic Fail

[hkmwbz]

Looks like you are the one who's not getting it. You don't need to leave your computer on 24/7 for Unite to be useful. Unite is amazingly simple and easy to use as an ad hoc communications channel. I used to upload files to various services just for someone else to have a quick look at it. Now i just drop it the relevant Unite service, and off it goes. And unlike your true P2P scenario, the other guy doesn't need special software. Just a browser.

Central servers will still be kind. Wouldn't live without them. But Unite offers an alternative.

Game changer? No idea. It's certainly revolutionary as far as my usage is concerned. Can't wait to see what kind of other services people will come up with.

You have evidently not even bothered to try learning what it's all about. I guess you are just another mindless Opera basher. If Unite had been released by Google, your keyboard would have been wet with saliva by now. Pathetic.

Bad summary

[csartanis]

The summary makes it sound like Opera is making a last ditch effort to stay relevant, which is clearly not the case. Opera has always been in a dominant position in mobile browser marketshare.

Source

Re:Bad summary

[hoarier]

No, we're supposed to hail Mary, who we learn is an operatic Trojan who between gigs is also "on the game" — [cough], the oldest profession, you know. It sounds like a remake of Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite. It might be good, but I'd guess The Brüno Movie will be much funnier and outstrip it at the box office.

Re:Bad summary

[prakslash]

Opera is is in trouble. .
Its desktop share is less than even Chrome.
As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.
See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results here

Re:Bad summary

[DerekLyons]

Opera has always been in a dominant position in mobile browser marketshare.

An interesting claim - got a citation?
 
The one you provide shows it roughly tied with the Iphone and Nokia not far behind. It certainly does not show Opera as anything resembling 'dominant'. The bar graph version makes that even more starkly clear.

Re:Bad summary

[Darkness404]

No its not. Opera has never been number 1 in browsers and Chrome has Google's advertising, Firefox has the community, and both IE and Safari are pre-installed. The iPhone is a one-browser, one-phone, phone, when eventually a new smartphone takes over, Opera's mobile market will rebound.

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

They won't rebound because most of the new smartphones will have Google's or Microsoft's mobile browser installed on them by default. Google, Microsoft and Apple will take Opera's mobile marketshare without much trouble.

Re:Bad summary

[Darkness404]

But you have to take that information with a grain of salt though. There is no Opera for iPhone, so all iPhone devices along with iPod touch devices are effectively excluded and I don't see Apple approving Opera for the iPhone anytime soon. Nokia has their browser pre-installed on their phones so it takes an active download to download Opera. So, yes, while Opera doesn't exactly dominate, they sure have a high marketshare considering the amount of work needed to install it and the amount of devices that don't have Opera.

Re:Bad summary

[jellomizer]

Traditional apps back in charge
That is my favorite part. Lets go back to tape and punch-cards. I think we have forgotten all the pain of the good old days of your PC full of crappy Apps. Sorry but these Web Applications independent on the web browser has made life so much easier for us. Windows users who's system isn't full of random crap. Linux/Unix/Mac users who have access to a slew of services that we wouldn't otherwise.

We need lighter Browsers that are more standard compliment then heavy ones adding new features that we don't need.

Re:Bad summary

[Karlt1]

No its not. Opera has never been number 1 in browsers and Chrome has Google's advertising, Firefox has the community, and both IE and Safari are pre-installed. The iPhone is a one-browser, one-phone, phone, when eventually a new smartphone takes over, Opera's mobile market will rebound.

Mobile Safari is one browser one phone but the underpinnings - WebKit -- is the basis of the browsers of both Android based phones and Palm based phones.

Re:Bad summary

[Korey Kaczor]

I hope not. Opera is the best desktop web browser and I'd hate to see it go.

Re:Bad summary

[mehtajr]

Opera's made a very good living on their Mobile version, but I think they're in major trouble there now, thanks to WebKit. WebKit is a very good browser core, and it's free and open source (plus, it doesn't hurt that it lets mobile phone makers imitate Safari on the iPhone, since they're all based on the same core).

Look at the players that have adopted WebKit-- Apple, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, and Google for Android. In two years, it's taken somewhere between 50%-60% of the mobile browser marketâ" about half of that appears to be iPhone/iPod Touch.

Opera's problem is that, even if a "new smartphone takes over," if it comes from Palm, Nokia, or runs Android, it's going to have a WebKit-based browser on it, not Opera.

Re:Bad summary

[mpapet]

1. That was a horrible summary. Maybe the point is to generate some flamebait?
2. Every case you give to justify Opera's weakness are free-ish. As in something else (not the browser) is generating the revenue. Opera has to generate revenue through their browser and they have managed to stay in business despite other companies giving away different browsers. That suggests Opera is delivering way more value than the other free browsers. Good for them.
3. This idea will be copied because it is useful. It is a very long time in coming. It's a great feature that neither Apple or Microsoft can implement easily because they want their marriage to the media distributors to be a happy one.
4. To borrow from another post, hopefully consumers will latch onto this one to see the one of the grander purposes built into the Internet. Many powerful parties (ex. media distributors) would like nothing more than to maintain a one-way sh!t pipe of the current, common Internet experience. Consumers deserve to have all of the features of the Internet available to them.

No, I don't use Opera. I never particularly cared for it.

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

That'd be a relevant response because this Unite thing is part of their mobile browser, right?

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so Opera's market share is relatively small compared to other browsers.

Why do you believe that means they're in trouble? The browser market is huge; even a tiny percentage is still a lot. Do you think they're not making enough money off of what they do have?

Re:Bad summary

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Bad summary

[Carewolf]

As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.

Maybe in Apple branded phones, but on all other brands they are way ahead ;)

Btw, non-Apple branded phones is more than 95% of the market even in the US, more than 99% of the market outside the US.

Re:Bad summary

[Mystra_x64]

w3schools stats represent only their own site. What are you talking about?

Re:Bad summary

[demachina]

"As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone."

Opera is being challenged by WebKit, not exactly the iPhone. WebKit is the browser in iPhone, Android and a number of other embedded platforms. WebKit was spun off Konquerer and is also the engined under Apple's Safari browser.

WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space. Opera browsers are free on the desktop but Opera in embedded applications is relatively expensive to license and closed source so its days are probably numbered in the one place it makes money. Maybe Opera can compete against it by offering better value in some areas to justify the price tag and the head aches of dealing with a proprietary closed source browser.... but in the long run.... I doubt it. Dealing with Opera in the embedded space has all the negatives you would expect from dealing with a closed source, proprietary, software company.

Re:Bad summary

[Graymalkin]

With Nokia, Google, Palm, and Apple all backing WebKit based browsers it is highly unlikely that Opera is going to magically "rebound" in popularity if the iPhone's popularity wanes. WebKit is open source so it can live past the interests of any of its corporate backers and performs really well even in the mobile space. Opera's mobile browsers require all sorts of tricks to give the appearance of good performance. Opera is better than older versions of mobile IE and RIM's horrible browser but that's not saying much.

Re:Bad summary

[larry bagina]

Safari, Chrome, iPhone, Android, QT, and Nokia all use WebKit. WebKit is free (as in GPL). WebKit is arguably the best handheld browser. How is Opera's mobile market going to rebound?

Re:Bad summary

[mrdoogee]

I find that RIM's newer browser beats opera mini, and is comparable with opera mobile.

Re:Bad summary

[Octorian]

Except even RIM's browser is improving. Sure, Opera was more functional (albeit slower, more cumbersome, and poorly integrated) on older BlackBerry devices, but that's changed.

As of BlackBerry OS 4.6 and newer, the built-in browser is actually usable and capable, and Opera Mini no longer has a purpose on the phone.

Of course most people's phones are running BB OS 4.2 (or 4.3). Many of them could upgrade to 4.5, which is improved a little. But you need the latest models to run 4.6 or newer.

Re:Bad summary

[atezun]

No, No, No. We're supposed to hail Mary because she's full of grace. Also because she's with some aristocratic lord whatshisname. She's blessed among some group of feminists, and has something to with some Mexican guy name Jesus' fruit.

Re:Bad summary

[ClosedSource]

"WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space."

I agree about the "free" part, but no so much the open source part. Opera has managed to be the most standards-compliant browser despite being proprietary. It's the intent and skill of the developers that matter, not how many there are.

Re:Bad summary

[CarpetShark]

As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.

More generally, it's being surpassed by the KHTML-based Webkit, not just on Safari/iPhone, but soon on Nokia's Qt as well.

I'm kind of disappointed with where KDE has gone with v4, but even if it dies out, Webkit, DBUS, and LGPL Qt are all pretty amazing legacies.

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I sincerely hope all of the staff are able to get good jobs with the competition. We win if they take their talent to their competition.

Re:Bad summary

[frission]

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).

Re:Bad summary

[ClosedSource]

Yes, Linux/Unix/Mac users now have access to a slew of services (i.e. crappy Web Apps) that in the old days were only available as crappy desktop apps on Windows.

Seriously, crappy apps will always be available regardless of technology.

Re:Bad summary

[BasilBrush]

You need to talk a closer look at your source. Mobile Safari runs on both the iPhone AND the iPod Touch (which they've labelled as iTouch). Add those two together and you'll see Mobile Safari is comfortably ahead of Opera Mini.

There does seem to be something interesting happening around the 7th of May on that graph though where there's rapid switch of a lot of users from the iPhone line to the Opera line. Given the ineptness of the categorising of that graph though, it seems it's most likely another goof on the part of statcounter.com.

Re:Bad summary

[edalytical]

Opera is is in trouble. .

No it is not. Ever heard of the Wii or the Nintendo DSi or the Nintendo DS Browser or Opera Mini? How about some little companies like: Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung or T-Mobile?

Re:Bad summary

[BasilBrush]

Mobile Safari is one browser one phone but the underpinnings - WebKit -- is the basis of the browsers of both Android based phones and Palm based phones.

And many Symbian phones too, notably ones from Nokia.

Re:Bad summary

[onefriedrice]

It may be time to put this old lie to rest: There are more browsers available on the iPhone than just Safari. There are several browsers in the app store, none of which happen to be Opera. Yes, Safari is bundled, but there are probably more browsers available for the iPhone than any other mobile device.

Re:Bad summary

[onefriedrice]

But you have to take that information with a grain of salt though. There is no Opera for iPhone, so all iPhone devices along with iPod touch devices are effectively excluded and I don't see Apple approving Opera for the iPhone anytime soon.

Why not? There are a lot of other browsers in the app store.

Re:Bad summary

[Ash Vince]

The summary makes it sound like Opera is making a last ditch effort to stay relevant, which is clearly not the case. Opera has always been in a dominant position in mobile browser marketshare.

I am really surprised by that link, so thanks.

Does anyone know why the Windows Mobile version of IE does not seem to appear on the list though? I find it very difficult to believe it lags behind Sony in the Other section. Although after discussing this in our office we did just find that both of us with Windows Mobile phones have installed Opera so maybe it is not that surprising.

Re:Bad summary

[rs79]

"Opera is is in trouble."

Keep telling yourself that enough and eventually you'll believe it.

This doesn't have to be a zero sum game. Opera doesn't have to lose for your favorite browser to win, and we all benefit from a rich array of alternative browsers. I don't want any browser, not even my favorite, be the "one true browser".

Opera contines to grow just fine and innovate so that firefox has something to get good ideas from and is a nice companion to google.

If only one of these browsers attains ubiquity, well, we had that before, it was called "Windows". Let's not do that again.

I also notice those who are most critical of Opera know the least about it and don't actually use it.

Re:Bad summary

[drolli]

Well, webkit browsers and mobile opera browsers are pretty different. I have both on my Nokia (webkit based browser was preinstalled). Both are ok to use. I usually prefer opera mini for the lower amount of data and the 'image quality' setting, and webkit when it comes to more dynamic things (like forms etc).

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Nintendo DS and Wii both use Opera. I'm sure there are more of those out there than iPhones.

Re:Bad summary

[Darkness404]

Because they all use WebKit for rendering, so effectively they are Safari with a different UI. Opera does not use WebKit.

Re:Bad summary

[TooMuchToDo]

I agree about the "free" part, but no so much the open source part. Opera has managed to be the most standards-compliant browser despite being proprietary. It's the intent and skill of the developers that matter, not how many there are.

Standards compliant and open source are two different things. Opera could make the best damn web browser for the mobile platform ever, but if a manufacturer who is making 1 million+ devices has to decide between Opera ($$$) or Webkit (free), which would they go with if both are standards complaint enough?

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Get used to the idea. Opera are trying to sell a product in a commodity market already crowded out with zero-cost solutions. It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung or T-Mobile

All of these companies are moving to browsers that are based on Webkit. Palm, Google and Apple are also pushing Webkit based browsers, and Microsoft has mobile IE. Opera is in serious trouble and they know it.

Re:Bad summary

[LordLimecat]

I would disagree with opera being better than blackberry browser. No shortcut keys, terrible menus, no easy view of connectivity, not to mention the lack of tie-in to the BES.... Blackberry browser may not be able to handle every fancy page you throw at it, but excellent shortcuts combined with the google page mobilizer makes it my favorite over the other browsers ive tried. It also helps that it runs much faster than any of the others you mentioned.

Re:Bad summary

[rivercity]

"This idea will be copied because it is useful. It is a very long time in coming. It's a great feature that neither Apple or Microsoft can implement easily because they want their marriage to the media distributors to be a happy one." - Tonido did the same thing 3 months back. It sucks to be a small company :).

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

Opera happens to be one of the most standards compliant browsers, and the "traditional apps back in charge" thing is pure and utter nonsense. Opera wants you to use the web as much as possible, because when you do, you will likely search the web a lot, and when you do, they make money. So the whole article is based on a total misunderstanding. Opera wants people to browse the web, not use traditional apps. Which is why Unite can replace many traditional apps like chat clients, MSN/Skype for sending files, etc.

Re:Bad summary

[rs79]

"WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space. "

Newsflash: not all open srouce stuff is any good, and while open source may be a good religion, to follow it blindly in defiance to facts doesn't do anybody any good.

Case in point from last week: I had to back up a sysetm image from a scsi raid XP system. I tried 14 programs, 6 of which were open source. Only Norton Ghost worked. Do I care it's not open source? No. I needed a tool to get the job done and paid for it and it worked.

While there are some commensursate professionals dong open source code (djbdns comes to mind, and to a lesser extent, postfix) there's still a lot of poeple contributing to open source projects that really have some dumb ideas implemented poorly.

I've been programming unix in C since 1976 and have put my share of stuff out there. But the quality of open source code is plummeted badly in the last decade imo.

Open source as a primary criteria for selecting a tool is a really bad idea. We need to be objective. At the end of the day stuff has to actually *work*.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

They are not all moving to WebKit at all. The vast majority of phones run on proprietary operating systems, and that will continue. It's usually cheaper to just license Opera than to create your own browser team and spend massive resources on your own browser. And on Windows Mobile, Opera Mobile is used instead of IE.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

Opera browsers are free on the desktop but Opera in embedded applications is relatively expensive to license and closed source so its days are probably numbered in the one place it makes money. Maybe Opera can compete against it by offering better value in some areas to justify the price tag and the head aches of dealing with a proprietary closed source browser.... but in the long run.... I doubt it.

It's probably cheaper to just license Opera than to assemble your own browser team and make your own browser. It's extremely time-consuming and expensive to make a browser. Just look at Chrome. More than two years to make a basic browser like that, despite not having to build a rendering engine. Browsers are massively complex, and as long as it's this difficult to make your own Opera will have business. And their business is thriving.

Dealing with Opera in the embedded space has all the negatives you would expect from dealing with a closed source, proprietary, software company.

How do you know?

Re:Bad summary

[ClosedSource]

Nothing I said suggested that I thought standards complaint and open source were the same.

My point was that WebKit would be adopted because it is available cost-free, not because it is open source.

The other point is that alleged advantage of open source having more individuals available for development than closed source hasn't been validated in the browser space.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

That's because RIM won't let Opera improve it.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

if a manufacturer who is making 1 million+ devices has to decide between Opera ($$$) or Webkit (free), which would they go with if both are standards complaint enough?

Your fallacy is that you are assuming that WebKit is free. Yes, it's free to download, but it's not free to make a browser from. You need paid developers to work on it, and it's extremely time-consuming. In other words, expensive. It's probably cheaper for most to just license Opera. You get a great browser straight away.

And do you really think every single device manufacturer out there wants to become a browser company? No, they want to focus on their core business.

Re:Bad summary

[jc42]

Opera is the best desktop web browser and I'd hate to see it go.

But in the computer business, being the best has rarely if ever led to being a
commercial success. For that to happen, you need both a relatively free market,
and you need a population that is mostly able to judge quality. With computer
software, neither of these is true. Each vendor does their best to create a
"walled garden", so that their customers buy only through them. Part of the game
is to make it as difficult as possible to switch to the competition, typically
because you lose most or all of your data when you do so. And, of course, there's
Microsoft's approach of making exclusive contracts with retailers so that startups
can't even sell their stuff in retail outlets without MS's permission. Plus the
simple fact that it's hard for a small company to compete against others that can
run billion-dollar ad campaigns. Combine all this with a customer population that
is mostly utterly ignorant and just buys whatever is most advertised, and you have
a good idea of what the computer "market" is really like.

OTOH, it's not always necessary to be the market leader. Reports are that Opera
is financially a success, and this is also true for many other small companies that
make a good product and can sell it to people who understand and pay for quality.
If they don't do anything totally stupid, chances are that they can survive and
keep paying their people for a long time.

After all, our mammalian ancestors survived for a hundred million years in the
shadows of the big dinosaurs. Being the biggest isn't always a long-term survival
strategy. Hereabouts, there are several "farm stand" stores that are doing quite
well against the big supermarket chains, by selling quality produce to people who
want it and will pay for it (typically less than what the supermarkets charge for
inferior produce). Examples abound of the little guys prospering while the big
guys fight their dominance battles. Maybe Opera can continue to do the same.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

Opera doesn't need to be dominant to be successful.

And regarding performance, Opera is actually better than anyone else there on mobile phones.

Re:Bad summary

[nine-times]

WebKit is open source and free which is a key reason its a serious challenge to Opera in the embedded space.

Yeah, whereas IE seems to be a good example of how vendor lock-in can overcome superior products, Opera seems to be a case study on how difficult it can be even for a very good product to compete in an area that has become commoditized by open source projects. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all very good browsers on the desktop, and Webkit generally seems to be taking over the mobile market, due to being free and having a small footprint.

Opera has to try to offer something more than these open source projects can, given the backing of companies like Apple and Google, I'd imagine that it won't be long before the open source competition catches up.

Re:Bad summary

[PalmKiller]

Well actually that is already happening, the palm pre and the like...except for the opera rebound part...seems palm just made their own browser built around webkit.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

Opera for PC is free, numbnuts.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

Opera is not in trouble at all. WebKit has been around for a long time, as have the companies using it, and yet Opera is setting profit records all the time. Most phones don't run any of the OSes you mention. And it's unreasonable to expect all device manufacturers in the world to become browser vendors. It's extremely time-consuming and expensive to make a browser, even with a finished engine available.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

The vast majority of phones run on proprietary operating systems, and that will continue. It's usually cheaper to just license Opera than to create your own browser team and spend massive resources on your own browser.

Re:Bad summary

[jc42]

. 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.

Ah, but most of the denizens of /. live in the US or western Europe. So most of the people here, the rest of the world is utterly irrelevant. Here in the US, if you're not the top seller in the US, you're a failure.

We even have a handy auto metaphor. There's a lot of news now about the impending total failure of the US auto industry. To most of the American media, this is a total disaster. But on a world-wide basis, it's just a footnote.

Similarly, if Opera doesn't do well in the US but has significant sales elsewhere, they can continue to be successful. Even if Americans can't understand how they're doing it.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

There is only one browser for the iPhone: Safari. The other ones are just shells/skins around Safari's engine.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

W3schools stats are just for that site. Opera actually has more than Chrome. In Europe it's even bigger. Which is surprising considering Google's massive advertising muscles.

Also, even if your claims were correct, why would Opera be in trouble? They are setting profit records all the time even during these economic downtimes. The user base is growing quickly as well. They probably have something like 100 million users for all their products.

Re:Bad summary

[jc42]

Opera could make the best damn web browser for the mobile platform ever, but if a manufacturer who is making 1 million+ devices has to decide between Opera ($$$) or Webkit (free), which would they go with if both are standards complaint enough?

There's a big chunk of the business world that believes the mantra "You get what you pay for". This is part of the explanation for all the companies that continue to use Microsoft and IBM stuff, and don't even look at cheaper products. There is a large fraction of the population who believe that high-priced goods are better than cheap goods. You can be very successful selling to this sort of people.

One of the curiosities is that price-comparisons studies keep shooting down the popular conception that Apple's products are overpriced. It seems that they are priced about the same as similar products from other companies, and the main reason you don't find many cheap Apple products is that they don't much sell the really shoddy stuff. But Apple seems to quietly encourage the idea that their stuff is "top of the line", i.e., costly. This has the effect of attracting customers who can't judge quality and just buy on price. Yeah, they're stupid customers, but their money is as good any anyone else's.

It wouldn't be surprising if Opera's sales staff are good at finding managers who believe "You get what you pay for". This is just as good a way of making sales as finding managers who know how to judge quality. The sensible approach would be to look for either kind, and sell to all of them.

 

Re:Bad summary

[jeffbax]

They all wrap WebKit, there are SDK terms against writing apps that incorporate new language interpreters (I think)... which is why there is no Flash, Java, or Javascript.

Re:Bad summary

[demachina]

"It's probably cheaper to just license Opera than to assemble your own browser team and make your own browser. It's extremely time-consuming and expensive to make a browser."

WebKit is already a fully functional browser. "Making" it is only slightly more involved than typing "make". You only need to integrate it with your graphics API if you are using one it doesn't already support. Its not trivial to integrate WebKit but its something most companies with the resources to develop a mobile phone can easily handle.

I'm pretty sure mobile phone makers like Nokia, Apple and now Google would almost certainly rather develop their own WebKit browsers at this point than get locked in to one from a third party like Opera. Any company adopting Android gets an integrated WebKit browser for free, with source, thanks to Google. Not saying some companies wont still opt for Opera but with WebKit in Android for free it certainly creates a head wind against Opera continuing to make money in this area.

Re:Bad summary

[hkmwbz]

WebKit is already a fully functional browser. "Making" it is only slightly more involved than typing "make". You only need to integrate it with your graphics API if you are using one it doesn't already support. Its not trivial to integrate WebKit but its something most companies with the resources to develop a mobile phone can easily handle.

On the contrary. It's a huge undertaking, and requires committment. You can't just throw random developers at it. You need people who know browsers.

It took Google more than two years to get a basic desktop browser out there. Mobile phones are even worse because of the constraints, especially memory. And it shows. Nokia's WebKit browser is awful. As are attempts by others. Only Apple seems to have gotten it right.

I'm pretty sure mobile phone makers like Nokia, Apple and now Google would almost certainly rather develop their own WebKit browsers at this point than get locked in to one from a third party like Opera.

Sure. But not everyone is in their position. And I remember Nokia's attempts at making a browser. Using WebKit was their 4th or 5th attempt at it. They have wasted huge amounts of money just to create a sub-par browser for S60. And it's only available for S60, and only certain versions too. It's too much for them to port it to, e.g., S40.

Any company adopting Android gets an integrated WebKit browser for free, with source, thanks to Google. Not saying some companies wont still opt for Opera but with WebKit in Android for free it certainly creates a head wind against Opera continuing to make money in this area.

Opera will be on Android. Vodafone said that they would base their whole mobile strategy on Opera or something like that. You see, Opera is available for all platforms and gives a consistent experience. Vodafone has lots of different phones from different vendors, remember. Also, Opera has Opera Mini and Opera Turbo. And widgets. And now Unite, which they are also making for mobile phones.

Re:Bad summary

[demachina]

"Newsflash: not all open srouce stuff is any good, and while open source may be a good religion, to follow it blindly in defiance to facts doesn't do anybody any good."

Newsflash: WebKit is the basis for the browser in the iPhone and for Safari among others, the iPhone and its browser are quite successful so all indications are it is a first rate, competitive application. It just happens to be free and open source too which serves to make it even more compelling versus competing closed source, proprietary solutions. Opera seems to be doing fine with its browser in the smart phone with a 25% share and iPhone with 22%, but those stats don't count iTouch, and if you addin in the other new smart phones using WebKit now I'm guessing it is the #1 mobile browser now. I think Nokia, Apple, Palm and Google are opting for WebKit and that is a big chunk of the leading edge smart phone market. Blackberry seems to be one of the few laggards switching to WebKit though I see a few hits in Google suggesting they are adopting it in at least some instances too? Apple, Google and Nokia also contribute pretty substantial resources, and presumably professional engineers, to developing WebKit.

Re:Bad summary

[pbhj]

Opera has often appeared to be the most innovative of the top browsers, it would be a shame, especially given this new offering (which I think is a real paradigm changer and will change the internet over the next couple of years), it would be a shame if it were to fade away.

They have the DS as well, though not sure how significant that is. Is iPhone really selling more than Opera's install base on mobile, people have even more money than me than I thought.

Re:Bad summary

[CatBegemot]

I'm sure you won't find it hard to produce a solid evidence for that, would you?

Re:Bad summary

[jp10558]

I would argue that in some cases, you *do* get what you pay for. Microsoft has Active Directory - if you want to integrate a bunch of devices like Windows PCs, Linux systems and Macs, I can't think of another central auth and control service that has plugins for them, for less money and of equal ease of use or ease of finding expertise. Much of MS is crap, but they do make some things that are worth paying for.

IBM? I can't speak to the mid to high end necessarily, but their low end servers do have value adds over a supermicro home built. For one thing, they come ready to go in a box. They offer on site 9x5x4 support for an additional 10%. Great build quality IME. Linux and Windows support and drivers.

On the desktop/laptop Lenovo is basically carrying on for IBM. And you just see touches of "hey, somebody thought about using this product, and engineered it". Like the SFF A57 has fold out case so you're not looking for where do I put the top when you have to work on it. Or the D20 Workstation - it's big and heavy, so there are handles to help move it around. Heck, even the desktops have handles - just makes it easier to carry in one hand if you're deploying or moving it. This matters to IT people who are moving them around all the time.

Their tech support is easy to reach (one # per country, you can find it on the web). IME, they speak decent english and the first person can ship out replacement parts... Compare that to Dell support for Precision Workstations. I spent 45 minutes being transferred through what sounded like 7 countries to get to the person who could send me a video card. I've called for all sorts of part replacements or help from Lenovo/IBM and it just doesn't happen. At work, my time is worth money to my employer. Afterwards my boss said it'll be cheaper to write off the Dell warranties and just buy new parts from newegg than to wait on the phone for 45 minutes...

Re:Bad summary

[mdwh2]

Opera don't make money from their desktop browser (at least not directly), so it's not too much of a problem.

As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.

Heh.

The Iphone is a niche player. A good phone sure, but there a 2 billion Java phones out there. It's not dominating the market, or even anywhere near close, no matter what some people seem to think. All the while that the Iphone is only a minority of the market, Opera have nothing to worry about. Even if it were to suddenly be true that their usage of the Opera Mobile and Mini browsers fell less to that of Safari on the Iphone, since they each run on different phones, this wouldn't be a result of competition from the Iphone, rather just that Opera aren't doing well in general.

(Of course, perhaps I misread you, and you mean in the sense of "It's doing so bad now that it is even being surpassed by iPhone", in which case fair enough, though I would still be curious to see hard evidence.)

See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results here

Wait - you plead that the stats are invalid, yet claim Opera's share is low based on some other stats? Right. There are many reasons why the stats for desktops are unreliable too, and in particular Opera is worse off: firstly it reuses cached content without resending requests to server, secondly, up until version 9, it defaulted to identifying as IE. Furthermore, I sometimes have to identify as IE even now, because of dumbass websites that block anything identifying as Opera.

Personally I don't care how many people use it - if that was what we should care about, then we'd all be using IE, right? Opera has served me fine long before it became trendy to switch from IE (it infuriates me when some Firefox-fan tries to get me to switch to his browser, as if it matters, when I was using "tabs" long before, when he was still struggling in IE), and has continued to offer me great features first. And it Just Works great out of the box. If they die, it'll be a shame as innovation will be gone, but that won't mean my Opera installation stops working.

Re:Bad summary

[mdwh2]

What? There are other iPhone-like devices besides the iPhone? Surely this can't be true, I thought the iPhone was the only such device. Where can I read about these iPhone-like devices...</iPhone-fan>

(But yes, I entirely agree with you. It's a shame that a supposed tech site like Slashdot doesn't reflect the actual market share when it comes to its coverage of mobile phones.)

Re:Bad summary

[mdwh2]

We need lighter Browsers that are more standard compliment then heavy ones adding new features that we don't need.

In that case, I damn well hope you use Opera, and haven't "gone back to" Firefox. You should check out their filesizes if you're going to talk about bloat.

Re:Bad summary

[Swampash]

When IE4 was first bundled with Windows, it WAS the superior product.

Re:Bad summary

[jc42]

And, of course, the two ideas aren't opposites. After all, the opposite of "You get what you pay for" really isn't "You never get what you pay for." It's more like "You sometimes get what you pay for, and you sometimes get much less." Of course, sometimes you get more than what you paid for, but that's pretty rare in the business world.

The real problem is that the old cliche is really implying is "Sellers always sell you what you thought you were paying for." But neither party can read the other's mind, so this can't be true. And sellers have an incentive to sell their goods at the highest price the buyer will pay, so they often try to deceive the buyer into buying something that is much less than what the buyer thought the seller was selling. Once the seller has the sucker's money, it's rarely worth the buyer's effort to fight the bad deal, unless it was so over-the-top bad that the buyer feels honor-bound to Do Something About It. And when this happens, the buyer typically finds that the law is on the side of the seller.

There's also the observation that in the computer software business, there is often an inverse relationship between price and value. But that's another problem that might be OT here.

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Well dominant in Asia and that spells it well out!

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-as-daily-20081201-20090618

Re:Bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

In Russia the all 7 iPhone users do not have a chance against Opera.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-RU-daily-20081201-20090618-bar

Re:Bad summary

[jellomizer]

Not all applications need to be nicely polished. They need to be useful. I think you are missing what all those apps were in the past. You would need a program to Access Slashdot content. Then an other to access Dig Content. Then you would need an other program to check your bank accounts. All these would probable be made for one OS.

Re:Bad summary

[nine-times]

But it's not now, yet it still has the majority of the market because of bundling and legacy apps.

Yes...

[AnonGCB]

Because a very good browser needs a hail mary to stay in the game. Seriously, Opera is good enough on it's own, this is actually a very useful tool. I personally don't use it, but my friends use the music sharing capabilities and file/photo sharing. The only reason I don't use it is because I already have an FTP server to do this for me.

Re:Yes...

[geekoid]

The road of technology is littered with excellent idea, technology, and devices that didn't make it.

Re:Yes...

[hkmwbz]

In case you think Opera "didn't make it", it has been around for 15 years, is growing like crazy, is making money, and has a huge pile of cash. It's setting new revenue and profit records all the time, even in the middle of the economic crisis. It basically dominates the mobile browser market. You can bet they already have deals with OEMs or operators based Unite coming up. They already said they are working on a mobile version.

Web Developers

[CosmicRabbit]

This will be a blast of a tool for web developers. Imagine developing your work anywhere on your laptop, regardless of availability of internet connection.

Re:Web Developers

[Jellybob]

Yes, just imagine.

It would be just like we had a copy of Apache installed on our laptop, but without having to lug a server around with us.

Oh... wait... hang on a minute.

Re:Web Developers

[DragonWriter]

This will be a blast of a tool for web developers. Imagine developing your work anywhere on your laptop, regardless of availability of internet connection.

Chances are, you aren't going to use the app you are working on in production with Opera's built in server, so why develop or test it using it, when you can just install whatever server you actually need to develop against on the laptop, instead?

Re:Web Developers

[CosmicRabbit]

NOTE TO SELF: Maybe I should have made the sarcasm in the post a little more obvious?

Re:Web Developers

[linguizic]

Does anyone even know if the opera server will support server side scripting of any sort? Without some sort of server side script support it would pretty much be useless for me to even build a proof of concept on. Especially not when I can easily install apache, mysql and php on my macbook.

Re:Web Developers

[fbjon]

Interesting advances in technology come when it's easy, not merely possible to do.

Re:Web Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

So... Apache is the interesting advance in technology like GP says.

Re:Web Developers

[molo]

apt-get install apache2

Done. Unix on the desktop is nothing new.

-molo

Re:Web Developers

[BrentH]

Easy isn't defined by what an expert can do in 10 seconds, it's defined by what yo momma can do in 10 seconds. She probably can find the big 'Share Files' button in Opera, but not figure out how to make apache punch holes through here router firewall and actually pointing apache's index to a different location.

To what extent will Opera really intermediate?

[damburger]

The main purpose to the servers that Unite can provide, is that they the most common type of computer connected to the Internet (one that does not have its own static IP, and cannot accept connections due to either a home router or a firewall) can act as servers. I've yet to find out much about the technical workings of Unite, but from what I can tell the main role Opera's servers perform is to allow the location of and the connection to a computer which would normally permit neither. 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?

Re:To what extent will Opera really intermediate?

[ThiagoHP]

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

Re:To what extent will Opera really intermediate?

[nine-times]

I hadn't read anything about Opera Unite until today, but I'm wondering if it's something like how Apple's "Back to my Mac" service works. I believe "Back to my Mac" establishes some kind of tunnel via HTTPS to Apple's MobileMe servers, which then allows each computer to advertise services (AFP, VNC) through Bonjour. I can't claim to know the technical details of how that service works either.

Re:To what extent will Opera really intermediate?

[sjvn]

"I've yet to find out much about the technical workings of Unite,"

There's no mystery. Opera's Unite servers are proxy servers.

Steven

Using "Trojan Horse" around geeks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera hopes to use social networking as a Trojan horse to put traditional apps back in charge

He know's what he's doing with his double meaning. But it's a double fail.

Computing version of trojan horse

A Trojan horse, or trojan for short, is a term used to describe malware that appears, to the user, to perform a desirable function but, in fact, facilitates unauthorized access to the user's computer system

Greek version of trojan horse

The Trojan Horse, from Greek mythology, was a giant hollow horse containing Greek soldiers, used to overtake the city of Troy during the Trojan War.

It has since become a metaphor for any person or thing that appears innocent and/or harmless, but actually presents danger or harmful intent.

So he's implying that "traditional apps" are either "malware" or a payload that has "danger or harmful intent". Wow. This styling reminds me of that one troll Roland Piquepaille...

Re:Using "Trojan Horse" around geeks...

[Futile Rhetoric]

(PBUH)

Re:Brown orifice security hole will be back

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest plus point of MacOS is that, it is safe and it does not have vulnerabilities.

Giggle.

Re:free car?!!

[Antidamage]

I'm pretty sure Oprah is some kind of tiny-fat-person Voltron, so it's understandable that you were confused upon seeing the word Unite.

OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[Element119]

in my opinion opera is already the best browser, they dont need a hail mary. opera unite is optional, and my guess is the majority wont use it. i left mine disabled because i have no friends to share with :(

Re:OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[Anonymous Coward]

in my opinion opera is already the best browser

...but it's not. So yeah, they need a hail mary.

Re:OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[smittyoneeach]

What about us Baptists? If the Roman Catholics can have a browser...
Oh, I forgot: "The GUI is a factory for idols, and that's why we have lynx."

Re:OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[mrisaacs]

Sounds like someone can't find their un-kosher salt...

Re:OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[Smivs]

in my opinion opera is already the best browser

...but it's not.

Not in your opinion, A/C but there are a lot of us out here who think it is, and with good cause. It's been my browser of choice for some years now. Nothing's perfect, and if you like a legion of add-ons you'll go for Firefox, if you like 'shiny-new' you'll go Chrome and if you like a load of $hit you'll use I.E. Howevr, if you just want a fast, safe, fully customisable, reliable browser packed with useful features (like I do) Opera is the clear winner.

Re:OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[rs79]

"The GUI is a factory for idols, and that's why we have lynx." "

The guy that wrote lynx also invented cookies and the blink tag.

I'm just sayin...

Re:OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[Metshrine]

Fully customizable? Didn't you say that if you wanted a browser with addons you would choose firefox? Does opera support addons?

Re:OPERA DOESN'T NEED A HAIL MARY

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera supports widgets, which are like Firefox add-ons only better because they act like real programs.

Firefox may have thousands of extensions, but at the end of the day, only about five of them are worth anything and the rest are garbage. With Opera, you already get the functionality of the actual useful Firefox extensions built in, so it's stable, no memory leaks and no compatibility issues.

Ad blocking, mail client, IRC client, newsgroup client, contact manager, notes, download manager, torrent client, true page zooming, tab previews, mouse gestures, voice recognition... These are just some of the things that Opera has built in that you either would need an add-on or simply cannot get in Firefox. On top of it all, Opera is still smaller, faster and more standards compliant than Firefox, even without any add-ons installed.

SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[Anonymous Coward]

I released an open source web browser called SupraBrowser a while back. It has very similar characteristics to Opera Unite, in that it's designed to act as both a client and server at the same time (we called it a "servant") :).

This was more of a research project, as in fact, it was designed as a research and collaboration system for financial services companies and is currently used heavily by several very large financial services companies. It's almost like a combination of Google Wave and Opera Unite, in that it's based on a secure real-time messaging layer (xmpp/jabber wasn't stable or mature enough when we started....if we were doing it over today we might use jabber, but we also had the need for a lot of queuing and persistence that jabber wouldn't have provided), where all communication is completely encrypted using 3DES and a zero knowledge authentication. It supports email, mailing lists, group posting boards, link sharing, workflow, and a bunch of other really innovative features.

That said, I don't know how to manage an open source project and generate a community around our efforts other than posting to various blogs every once in a while when I see something related. Even still, its' frustrating because we actually went far down the road of trying to do kind of what Opera is doing, but without a middle man/trusted third party (hence the requirement for SRP Zero Knowledge auth). We want to build a personal cloud collaboration environment where data becomes user-centric and controlled, where other services federate from that single point of truth owned and controlled by the user.

Given that it's a research project, there are also some very innovative ideas, and I have yet to see anyone implement tagging better or provide a better way to manage personal information. I have over 25,000 bookmarks and files that are all full-text indexed (on Lucene), and tagged so that I can easily get back to stuff and correlate it within my existing cloud of data.

This I think is one of the real weak points of the open source model. If there is something very innovative, it generally requires sales and marketing to shove it down users' throats given their natural tendency to resist change. When the users are the developers are the users, the self selection process tends to restrict certain things. I can think of no other explanation for why releasing 4+ years of effort has been almost completely ignored. If someone can point out why the open source community has ignored SupraBrowser I would be all ears!

If anyone has any ideas or feedback, please reach out to me! suprasphere ____ @ ___ gmail.com

David

Re:SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the first way to get users for a web-related tool is probably to have a frickin website, and no, the sourceforge project page does not count. You need a shiny website with explanation of what it is, screenshots, FAQ, tutorials, and so on.

Re:SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[Tikkun]

That said, I don't know how to manage an open source project and generate a community around our efforts other than posting to various blogs every once in a while when I see something related.

Some good pointers can be found in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Re:SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but I don't think SupraBrowser being ignored has anything to do with it being too innovative. Let me give you a first piece of evidence. I googled SupraBrowser and found only 703 hits. That's nearly nothing. For example, my own name (which is pretty unique) has 3600 hits, and I'm not trying to reinvent the web browser. If your project has only 700 Google hits, it doesn't matter whether it's the next Linux or a cure for cancer, nobody's going to know about it.

To me it looks like you just dumped SupraBrowser onto SourceForge and expected people to start using it and contributing to it. This is not how open source works. Most open source projects dumped this way die. Developers aren't sitting around refreshing SourceForge to try to figure out which projects to contribute to. Developers will only contribute to your project if a) they've heard of it from somewhere else (meaning you developed and marketed it to the point where they hear about it) or b) they know you and are intrigued by your project. Even then, 99% of developers will only try to use the project, not to contribute to it; not everyone has free time to contribute to open source projects.

If you want this idea to take off, you need to first have a presentable website (not a generic SourceForge download page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/suprabrowser) or a generic SourceForge hosted web page (http://suprabrowser.sourceforge.net/)). Spend the one day to describe what this thing is and to make sure Google can find it. Then mention the browser in forums where people care about web browsers (this Slashdot discussion is good, but try for some mailing lists / forums for web developers or browser developers (Mozilla/WebKit)). Really though, popularizing Yet Another Open Source Browser is an uphill battle and probably not a great goal. If I were you, I'd consider taking the cool technology you developed and making it available as Firefox extensions, which is a much better way to reach users.

Re:SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[Abcd1234]

I released an open source web browser called SupraBrowser a while back. It has very similar characteristics to Opera Unite, in that it's designed to act as both a client and server at the same time (we called it a "servant") :).

Actually, it's called a servent, and you hardly invented the term. :)

Re:SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[Anonymous Coward]

You've created a huge barrier. I actually downloaded the browser since it's impossible to tell what it is from your sites - as others mentioned. Now, I know how to start swt stuff from the command line, and I'm also familiar with mysql - but I'm much too lazy to do that right now - the struggle just keeps to go on and all I wanted to know is some more details :-)
I'd suggest making some screenshots available and some nice feature list - and then ship the "binary" with sqlite or http://db.apache.org/derby/ and make it a little more easy to start it up. I'm aware that it's early stage and so forth, but without anything visible we just have to rely on your word that it's "cool" and go through a lot of work just to get a closer look.

I'd also suggest changing the name to something else. SupraBrowser sounds way 80s. Give it a female name and slashdot will give it a try regardless of struggle :-)

Re:SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[rivercity]

Hi David, I totally agree with you. "I can think of no other explanation for why releasing 4+ years of effort has been almost completely ignored. If someone can point out why the open source community has ignored Supra Browser I would be all ears!" . My opinion is that the proponents of open source are a minority group of people. But they are loud. So, It feels like they are everywhere. Counting totally on open source community for traction is not a feasible idea. thats what i have learned so far. But one need to decide the business model beforehand. For few projects open source model will work. checkout Tonido ... it is very similar to Opera Unite. I will check out supra browser.

Re:SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave

[rs79]

I'm downloading it. This has potential.

Re:Brown orifice security hole will be back

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

One of the biggest plus point of MacOS is that, it is safe and it does not have vulnerabilities.

Giggle.

yeah, it does look funny. Anyway what I meant to say was the biggest "sales pitch" but messed up. oops.

I don't think the fellow has a point...

[santax]

It is true, I am a fanboy, Opera is my browser of choice for many years now. It had tabbed browsing before Firefox had it's potty training, it had a torrentclient (which i hate and disable) before Chuck Norris had a torrent client, it passed the acid test before it was known you could get high on that stuf... They had an actually mouse-gesture driven interface that worked before we knew how to grow on ears on mouses... And even today it's the only implementation of those gestures I know that actually enricht the experience... Sure, opera isn't that big on in numbers on the PC stats, but remember, there are quite some big sites that work perfect in opera once you set browserrecognition to IE of FF. But in the mobile world and on the pc Opera is where the new stuf has been happening and implemented the last 6 years. Truth to be told, I'm not to fund of that whole webserver in your browser idea, but I would not call it a 'last attempt'to survive...

Re:I don't think the fellow has a point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst we're listing Opera's various attributes, what's that one called where it drops every carriage return and various random alphanumeric characters from whatever you type?

Re:I don't think the fellow has a point...

[elrous0]

Chuck Norris doesn't need a torrent client. He knows all the songs in his head.

Re:I don't think the fellow has a point...

[Nekomusume]

It's actually sort of sad. Opera keeps coming out with new browser features, those features get adopted into other browsers months or years later, and then people act as though those browsers were the ones to implement it.

Thats off the mark.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Thats off the mark.

[rs79]

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

You must be new here. Welcome.

Pffft... trojan horse

[Stumbles]

Yeah right. If Microsoft had done this first it would have been hailed as revolutionary.

Re:Pffft... trojan horse

[Korey Kaczor]

I like how the knucklehead in the summary tries to make out what Opera is doing as somehow insidious. Opera is a free web browser, and the best one; why shouldn't they try to innovate in order to remain profitable?

Re:Pffft... trojan horse

[Freetardo Jones]

why shouldn't they try to innovate in order to remain profitable?

What is innovative about this? Netscape did this almost a decade ago.

Re:Pffft... trojan horse

[dwiget001]

>

No. If Microsoft had done it, Microsoft and hundreds of paid employees, consultants, analysts and the like would have hailed it as *innovative*.

Re:Pffft... trojan horse

[Anonymous Coward]

What is innovative about this? Netscape did this almost a decade ago.

Opera's one is really freakin' easy to use. Like "my grandmother can operate it" easy. Once the bugs are cleared out, this looks very promising.

The little things matter more

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera has always tried to inovate, they have an excellent product, with lots of good features and I couldn't believe how fast the pages loaded in comparrison to firefox. Its the little things though that destroy its market share and preventing it from gaining more. In opera on my hardware middle click doesn't map to scrolling or even as any default middle button action. It never has in all the years it has been in development. I am always impressed then disappointed . I know if I wanted to I could probably find the problem, but how many of your non-tech friends would try to fix it - I know my DAD would just say " This doesn't work, where is my old browser?"

Re:The little things matter more

[rs79]

I got it to work. Keep trying.

Re:The little things matter more

[jp10558]

Odd. Middle Click the first time usually asks you what you want it to map to... It certainly maps to scrolling on WinXP with O9.64 ... for me.

Re:The little things matter more

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice he didn't state his OS.
If anything, I'd venture that he either a) has some riced-out mouse and didn't install the drivers, or b) installed Linux because it sounded l33t, and hasn't figured out xorg.conf yet.

A little phobic, OP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Opera Unite and it's incredibly useful. It's a quick and easy way to pirate.

No, I'm serious. I can put whatever I want on my file server and give it to my friends. If I archive it and put a password on the archive, who will know it's an album or movie? Not Opera.

sad but true

[Presto Vivace]

has anyone tried Opera Unite, is it good? Is it useful?

Re:sad but true

[nkh]

I can't speak for everyone, but it's good enough for my family to share our photos for a few hours between other members of the family. No more need to setup a permanent account on Flickr, just point the folder where your photos are located and it works (there are still a few bugs to iron out but it's less than beta). It's easy for my relatives, we'll keep on using it as long as it's available, and I hope more "widgets" will be written to do more stuff with it.

Re:sad but true

[rs79]

"has anyone tried Opera Unite, is it good? Is it useful? "

Was slashdot useful when it was in alpha?

When we get a couple of years experience with Google Wave and Unite, we'll know. My feeling is the point of this is to say "yup, googles right, we're disintermediating the big server farms and we're like, so there".

If I had anything to do with firefox I'd be pushing for some consumer grade apache thing right now to stay on par. Mark my words: it's where we're going, and this has nothing to do with "hosting web sites" on your laptop.

Re:sad but true

[dzfoo]

I tried it. Me and my wife were very excited over it, and we're both of the "techie" kind.

We immediately saw the potential of our parents and other people without a technical background, to be able to share pictures and music with their immediate circle of friends and family, without having to upload their media assets to a third-party server.

And that's the key: It's not intended for the majority of the blog/mybook/facespace/tweetery crowd, who wants to show off pictures of drunken friends or cats to strangers, or write a rant for the whole world to read. It is geared more towards the individual who wants to share his personal assets--pictures, music, files, and even comments--with close friends and family, to whom perhaps the hassles of uploading data to a centralized server is overkill.

Keep in mind that it is still an early Beta release, so it is bound to evolve and get better; but what I've seen of it so far is pretty nice. It is very simple and easy to use--and more importantly, lots of fun!

        -dZ.

Re:sad but true

[rs79]

"And that's the key: It's not intended for the majority of the blog/mybook/facespace/tweetery crowd "

Hah. That's so cute. Keep your eyes on the wheel and just watch the next few years unfold.

Re:sad but true

[Presto Vivace]

sounds like something that would work well for tiny informal groups like a neighborhood association or doggie play group.

Re:sad but true

[dzfoo]

And I think that's part of the point. Opera is trying to make "social networking" a more personal affair, as opposed to just publishing anonymously to millions of strangers.

        -dZ.

Re:sad but true

[pbhj]

I'm on Kubuntu, one of the things that impressed me (you'll be underwhelmed I'm sure, but bear with me) is that when I went to share my Music it looked first in the default music folder, when I went to share pics it looked in the default Photos folder. It's the little things, the attention to detail that this implies impressed me. As an alpha(!) I think it's pretty awesome.

There are all kinds of uses

[Giant Electronic Bra]

The author may be right in the sense that Opera is attempting to find a way to distinguish their product from the competition, but I think he's missing a few points.

There are many reasons why you might want to run a personal web server on your local machine. It can act as a proxy for example. Since it is fairly easy to program it with scripting languages it can do a lot of interesting things. Granted all that functionality could be built into the browser itself, but if you can tap into a lot of existing code and also create a more organized stack for this kind of thing it could be useful. You could do most of the things people use things like Greasemonkey for now, except probably better.

It could be highly useful for web app developers. With some specialized tools designed to help with things like AJAX debugging it could represent a significant draw. This is maybe not a huge market for the bigger browsers, but if Opera can get a bit of penetration into the dev tools market this way it could provide them with a new revenue stream.

It could be highly useful for collaborative web based applications which feature interactivity. For example it makes more sense to send a copy of every event the UI needs to process to a queue on the client side than to force repetitive performance-destroying polling across the net. Now the app need merely check a local queue using a local HTTP request, probably using AJAX. It could also be used to allow processing resources at the clients to be harnessed to do a lot of the work, possibly in parallel.

This is not a new concept, but nobody has really rolled out a useful version of it before. There are going to be issues like NAT firewalls etc, but there are various ways to approach solving them. Afterall, people play online games all the time that require them to open ports, etc for bi-directional communications. All this is doing is extending that capability to the web.

Personally I don't think it will catch on simply because Opera has too small a market share to make it worth people writing a lot of software that depends on it, but the concept itself is not bad. Perhaps Mozilla will experiment with this too, then it might go somewhere, finally.

Re:There are all kinds of uses

[hkmwbz]

Personally I don't think it will catch on simply because Opera has too small a market share to make it worth people writing a lot of software that depends on it

You are forgetting Opera's buddies (customers), major OEMs and operators. Just recently, Vodafone offerered tens of thousands of dollars in a compo to write the best widget for them. And their widget solution is basically Opera.

Also, people will definitely write Unite apps. There are hundreds if not thousands of user made widgets at widgets.opera.com.

Re:There are all kinds of uses

[Giant Electronic Bra]

When I say catch on I mean will it become mainstream? It isn't going to do so as long as only Opera users have access to this functionality. Very few larger scale applications are going to rely on something less than 5% of all web users have. Nor are they likely to support it even as an optional feature add when only 5% of their customers can take advantage of it.

This is a lot less true in the mobile space of course. It could be successful there, but even then I would say that in general Opera's lack of presence on the desktop holds it back. Most mobile apps are dumbed down versions of web apps designed for desktop use. Once again something that may change.

It is always interesting to watch and see what happens.

Re:There are all kinds of uses

[hkmwbz]

What is it with people today? You all seem to be ignoring my points and then throwin out some random opinionated nonsense. I just pointed out that this isn't just Opera, but that it has major business customers who will be pushing this thing as well.

Opera's lack of presence on the desktop? Opera has been free of charge for a little over 3 years. In that time, it has reached 3-4% market share globally, and nearly 10% in Europe. And that is desktop alone.

Opera Mobile is a full browser. It was around ages before newcomers like Safari started bragging about what Opera had been doing for years. There's a reason why just about every single major mobile OEM is an Opera customer. Including Nokia, which, despite their own browser, preinstalls Opera on high-volume phones that their browser is too bloated to fit onto.

Re:There are all kinds of uses

[TempeTerra]

Obviously only opera users will be able to run Unite, but any web user can benefit from it. Every time an opera user says "hold on, I'll upload those [photos|mp3s|our project|custom TF maps] to a server... ah, fuck it. Just get them from my Opera share." Opera gets free advertising and the downloader thinks about how handy it would be to run Opera themselves.

Re:There are all kinds of uses

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Nobody is putting down Opera. It is still a very small percentage of desktop users. The question is, is 4% market share, to use your number, significant enough to drive adoption?

No doubt the people using Opera can take advantage of Unite, but IMHO it isn't enough to just have some widgets and applications that people use in lieu of hosting stuff someplace. That isn't revolutionary. It would be revolutionary if a large enough percentage of people had a facility that would allow fairly easy and straightforward development of applications using HTTP, HTML, and Javascript that were capable of full duplex communications. THAT would enable a whole new generations of applications that cannot be built using web technologies now. It requires a lot more than 4% market share before that will be at all tempting to developers.

It COULD be tempting in the mobile market where Opera has a much bigger market share, but that also supposes people have a wireless service which is capable of supporting it, and phones that can support it, and that the phone vendors and service providers will bite. None of those things are at all assured.

Regardless of whether or not we were to think Opera is the best browser out there, the best software is clearly not enough to win in the market. If it was then things would look much different than they do now in the software world. Experience tells me that the quality of your technology is only one small factor.

Opera Unite is a Hail Mary

[MobyDisk]

Never again will opera, football, and computers come together so succinctly.

Re:Opera Unite is a Hail Mary

[Anonymous Coward]

Never again will opera, football, computers and Catholicism come together so succinctly.

You know you haven't had enough coffee when...

[smcn]

...it takes you a full 30 seconds to realize a story on Slashdot isn't talking about "Opera" as in a theater production.

Bad Source!

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary makes it sound like Opera is making a last ditch effort to stay relevant, which is clearly not the case. Opera has always been in a dominant position in mobile browser marketshare.

Source

Gee, that's odd, your source doesn't even put IEMobile up there. I guess no one's using it. Also, when I switch your source to United States only, Opera disappears. I am so sick and tired of people linking to that site and treating it like it's the authority on worldwide usage of everything when it's clearly got statistical data issues that don't make sense.

Apple?

[TheLink]

Is this really an idea from Apple? I skimmed through the article and saw no mention of "Opera as webserver" being Apple's idea.

Citation please?

Re:Apple?

[onefriedrice]

The OP seems to think that the Opera browser is developed by Apple. Moving on...

Forgive my ignorance but..

[Hatta]

A "Hail Mary" is something Catholics do, right? What's the meaning of it when used in a metaphorical sense?

Re:Forgive my ignorance but..

[Anonymous Coward]

There's these awesome sites I found out that may answer your questions! Google (that's google.com) and Wikipedia (that's wikipedia.org). Have a look, it's even more efficient that asking questions on Slashdot!

Re:Forgive my ignorance but..

[silent_artichoke]

Think American football. A desperate throw to try to make a touchdown from an area of the field where you should really be focused on gaining a first down.

For examples, see any football movie involving a slow-motion throw in the last second of the game from too far away that the main character catches against all odds to win the game for Sunnyville High (or whatever) with cheesy music playing in the background.

Re:Forgive my ignorance but..

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a balls out term referencing a play in American football.

Re:Forgive my ignorance but..

[Hatta]

I have to say, the only thing less likely to be understood on /. than a religion metaphor is a sports metaphor.

Re:Forgive my ignorance but..

[rs79]

"I have to say, the only thing less likely to be understood on /. than a religion metaphor is a sports metaphor. "

So... it's like a diesel mechanic being asked to tune a Ferarri?

Re:Forgive my ignorance but..

[sgage]

You know what they say...

A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.

Cloud = silver lining

[itsdapead]

ensuring all of their exchanges pass through Opera's servers first. 'That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls,

Well, ever since broadband came in people could run home servers if they want - OS X comes with a built in web server and the world hasn't ended. Lots of NAS boxes today include click-and-drool webservers and you can get dynamic DNS if you don't have a fixed addresss.

However - I've got a better idea: why don't they just store the stuff the users want to share on the central servers? I mean, hard disc space is about fsck all per megabyte these days, the servers can run 24/7, have a super-fast connection to teh interweb (not an ADSL line with lousy upload speed) and have the latest security patches applied daily by dusky, nubile virgins (well, 1 out of 3 ain't bad). Even if the server does get hacked then it doesn't affect the end user. Much better than leaving your PC on all the time, or having someone suddenly trying to download a video when you're in the middle of a networked deathmatch...

Then there would be loads of material on the servers, so people would actually want to visit them. Hey, they could even attach comments and stuff to people's photos, videos, news articles and things to say whether they liked them.

You could call it MyCRT, FlipR, ArseBook or ColonPling or something...

Should I patent this, perhaps?

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[fbjon]

I don't think that's the point. This ArseBook of yours would be controlled from a central place, just like every other site out there. That makes a star-shaped network between people that will crash and burn with the core, instead of a spontaneous and arbitrary one.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[Mystra_x64]

Because you don't really want to store something on some hell knows where server?

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[johnnysaucepn]

However - I've got a better idea: why don't they just store the stuff the users want to share on the central servers? I mean, hard disc space is about fsck all per megabyte these days, the servers can run 24/7, have a super-fast connection to teh interweb (not an ADSL line with lousy upload speed) and have the latest security patches applied daily by dusky, nubile virgins (well, 1 out of 3 ain't bad). Even if the server does get hacked then it doesn't affect the end user. Much better than leaving your PC on all the time, or having someone suddenly trying to download a video when you're in the middle of a networked deathmatch...

Joe Public shouldn't need to know about uploading, or hosting plans, or bandwidth caps, or service contracts or the like. Opera open, files open. Opera closed, files gone. Like opening and closing a window.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[Synn]

However - I've got a better idea: why don't they just store the stuff the users want to share on the central servers? I mean, hard disc space is about fsck all per megabyte these days,

It's not practical. Say I want to access my home PC files while at work, I'd have to upload everything all the time to that central server. Gigs and gigs of music, movies, whatever. It'd take days to upload and I'd have to resync it all the time.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Sir, my updates are always applied by a virgin! His name is Tony and he lives in his mother's basement. However is neither nubile nor dusky.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[mythandros]

Arsebook is my favorite but that's already a (surprise!!) porn site. ColongPling, however, seems to be free.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[Anonymous Coward]

Control. I have control over what is on my PC. Once you put something up on a server, you lose all control over it.

Want to send your friends a picture but don't want it spread across the entire net where it will remain for the rest of your life? Then Opera's solution will help there.

It's amazing how many morons sign up for these "social networking" sites where they post all manner of crap, not realising that these things will now be stuck with them forever.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[hoooocheymomma]

Are you really unable to grasp that there are both pros and cons to having content centrally stored, as well as pros and cons to hosting your own content?

Opera knows about facebook, youtube, etc. They are offering users the capability to host their OWN content easily. Did they say you'll want to do that in every scenario? Nope. They seem to have stated that there might be situations where you want to host your own content, rather than uploading it to some other location before somebody has the ability to download it.

They acknowledge that central servers for content are valid and necessary. They are simply providing users with an easy way to forgo that IF they want to.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[itsdapead]

I don't think that's the point. This ArseBook of yours would be controlled from a central place, just like every other site out there.

From the Opera website:

The interaction is all done via a central Opera Unite server â" Opera Unite uses a proxy between the server and its clients (found at operaunite.com) to avoid the need for any special firewall configuration.

So there's still a central point of failure.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[itsdapead]

Say I want to access my home PC files while at work

Then you'd probably want a VPN service, not a http-based service in which everything passed through Opera's proxies.

Now, produce a secure but click-and-drool easy VPN service that wasn't defeated by the slightest firewall and then we are talking.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[vidarh]

People send confidential documents via e-mail all the time - I very much doubt Opera's proxies (which in any case are only used if UPnP doesn't work for you and you don't have a direct, NAT-free connection) would bother most of them.

I also don't think Unite will be a big deal, but I don't think people will give a second thought about security.

Re:Cloud = silver lining

[itsdapead]

People send confidential documents via e-mail all the time

And that's a good thing?

I also don't think Unite will be a big deal, but I don't think people will give a second thought about security.

Which is what people on /. are worrying about. Actively putting stuff you want to share on central servers rather than exposing parts of your home PC limits the risks.

Rumours of their death are continually exaggerated

[johnnysaucepn]

Yep, I'll bet that a profitable browser company that continues to expand and make more money year after year is definitely in trouble. People have been predicting the death of Opera Software for over a decade now, and yet they're still making huge waves in the internet market. When will people start to realise that you don't need to be the most popular product on the market to be successful? The browser market is absolutely huge, remember. Even 1% of the entire market is millions of satisfied users. The only thing that matters is that open standards are implemented, then we all win.

Re:free car?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's over nine thousaaaaaaaaaaaaaand penises!

I would love this service

[bestadvocate]

I was eager to see if this would automatically work, but none of it seems to. It seemed like a nice risk-free way to share files with friends and family. I also could not fine any real help on their support pages. Great potential, zero functionality at least for me. When it gets patched or the support pages get a little more helpful I'll try it again, until then I'm sticking with good ol' 3.5

Re:I would love this service

[BrentH]

You've got to install the service youj want through the unite website. I think the fileserver was ~100kb.

Re:I would love this service

[hkmwbz]

I was having problems too. Turns out the launch was so successful their servers kept getting overloaded :D

opera is relevant and will stay relevant

[circletimessquare]

why?

because we are nowhere near an endgame on internet-related innovation

the whole field has a long way to go before the technology is mature, and opera could capitalize on all sorts of missteps by competitors, and has plenty of chance to change the game itself. of course this observation also applies to all other game players, and some that don't even exist yet

if the internet were railroads, the year is 1840, and we're still arguing about track gauge and still using steam engines

lots of history yet to be written folks. beware anyone in drama queen mode declaring the imminent end of anything. a few years ago, internet explorer looked like it was on an inevitable path to complete and permanent dominance. then what happened?

anyone who is certain of anything about what will happen in internet innovation is basically telling you they are ignorant. anyone truly wise on the subject matter knows enough to wait and see

Re:opera is relevant and will stay relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

To use your analogy...

Do you know what happens to rail lines that service ghost towns? They disapppear.

If people don't use Opera it will fade into obscurity and die.

Re:opera is relevant and will stay relevant

[hkmwbz]

Opera has more than 40 million desktop users, 20-30 million Opera Mini users, and millions of users on various devices and through customers. So there are probably more than 100 million Opera users in the world.

Way around net blocking?

[mdm-adph]

I saw someone talking about this recently and said it would be a good way to get around things like net filters and help with the spread of information (like with the current mess happening in Iran).

I mean, that is until they all start blocking Operaunite.com, right?

I thought we were against cloud computing?

[AmigaHeretic]

Is this Slashdot? Is this the Slashdot that use to have every user complaining about having their files and information being held in "The Cloud"? The place where people use to complain about the security and privacy of their pictures if they were on Flickr,their Email and their Docs if they were all located on Googles servers??

What happen to all the 'get of my lawn' types that said, "I'll never put my information in the 'Cloud'. They can take my physical hard drives when they pry them from my cold dead fingers!!"

Now you are provided with (one of many) alternatives to have your files on YOUR computer AND the advantages of them being in the cloud (like you can access your files no matter what location your at and be able to share files with other people)

This seems like a case of you can't please any of the people any of the time kinda thing.

Re:I thought we were against cloud computing?

[Anonymous Coward]

we are all here, hating on the cloud. I don't put important data in sketchy networks, and get off my damn lawn.

Re:I thought we were against cloud computing?

[quercus.aeternam]

Well, part of the problem is that the term 'cloud' is somewhat nebulous at best.

I'm pretty sure that the main issue with cloud computing is the loss of personal control of data, trusting in 'the man', etc.

Re:I thought we were against cloud computing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot isn't one guy.

Or... wait a minute!

eDonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:eDonkey

[krelian]

If I am not wrong, you have to log into Opera before you are allowed to start the Unite server. So even if you don't need their proxy service, in case opera.com is down or blocked, you won't be able to use Unite.

excellent news

[Presto Vivace]

I always like it when a company comes up with a winner.

No need to worry about security

[Demonantis]

I doubt a dsl line would support the traffic that would demand that security be implemented. That said Opera is not really a web browser anyways. Its a suit of tools like the article said that people tend to use online when they don't have to.

Re:Brown orifice security hole will be back

[ToasterMonkey]

Back in 2000 Netscape did a despo gamble like this and its implementation of some java classes was bad. It allowed websites to create classes derived from the server side of the browser and access all the info in the hard disk.
Google for Netscape and Brown Orifice for more details.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/70

These were Java bugs from 2000, not something Netscape intentionally allowed. A desperate gamble, WTF?

Such a security hole is waiting to happen. It is really a dumb idea from Apple. One of the biggest plus point of MacOS is that, it is safe and it does not have vulnerabilities. To put that reputation at risk by allowing the browser to dish out data to the outside world is really really a dumb idea.

Yes, there are security features. Yes there are things the user must enable for it to work. Despite all this, having server code loaded up in the memory of a browser is stupid.

From Apple? Who is Apple? Opera? Are you lost? It was Apple's idea? WTF?

Have /. mods gone completely fucking insane?

It depends on the location

[m_gol]

In my country (Poland) Opera has as much as 7% of the market; this IS something. Of course I agree they don't do as well worldwide.

Slashdotters not getting the point

[ThiagoHP]

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.

More like a Fail Mary

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera was once at the forefront of HTML5. Now--not even video. What has become of them?

Yo dawg.

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard you like the web. So I put a webserver in your webbrowser so you can serve while you surf.

Tonido VS Opera Unite

[rivercity]

Tonido is very similar to Opera Unite. Whose approach is better? Tonido allows you to write plug-ins in c++/lua. Opera Unite - Javascript.

Re:Tonido VS Opera Unite

[hkmwbz]

I guess it's easier to write them in HTML/JS/CSS. Maybe Tonido performs better?

Arstechnica: The home of the degreeless & cert

[Anonymous Coward]

"See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results" - by prakslash (681585) on Thursday June 18, @11:36AM (#28374733)

Why would anyone want to read that site, when it's got 'authors' (regurgitators of others' findings only really 9/10 times) like Jeremy Reimer?

Jeremy Reimer, who was laughed out of Windows it pro magazine forums for impersonating others and lying, as well as having law enforcement contacted for libelling others as well as making death threats vs. others lives on his forums at OSY, his personal playpen website.

Jeremy Reimer, Jarrett DeAngelis, and Jay Little were all caught email harassing and stalking others online also at the Windows it pro magazine forums and when their isp's began tracking them on email harassment such as Shaw of Canada (reimer's isp), they stopped it, promptly. Jay Little, Reimer's friend (who has also been kicked out of microsoft forums & others numerous times) had his websites removed in their entirety for death threats, libel, and more by CrystalTech.com & petitiononline.com no less!

Jeremy Reimer's hosting provider also forced Reimer to remove portions of his website for such stupidity no less.

Bottom line here, is that Jeremy Reimer has no degree or even a certification like an A+ (much less an MCSE & the like) in the science of computing. No thank you. Find better sources than the home of the 'fake-it-till-you-make-it' fool Jeremy Reimer. I don't go to 'sidewalk surgeon quacks' for advisement on medical topics, and hopefully, neither should any of you reading here.

If you don't get it, STFU.

[Hurricane78]

Apparently, the Neil McAllister (whoever that is, and why ever he thinks he is relevant) of that summary did not understand the main point.

The point of the difference in complexity, of setting up a Apache, and FTP server, and all that stuff, versus just using your browser.
That is the thing. Now everyone can be the other side of the net. In just a few seconds, and without learning how to do it professionally.

While I love my custom-built Gentoo root server, I can not expect my mom to do the same thing, just to send me a file. She can't even use Rapidshare and similar sites.

Well said Johnny

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said Johnny! Especially about the "idiot savants" that have predicted the death of Opera (the overall fastest web browsing program on the planet, for about a decade or more now, that has also been an innovator (tab browsing anyone?), and is also multiplatform). If I could mod you up, I would, but I cannot - sorry.

Re: True, but...

[colinnwn]

The fact they can provide basic DNS services free, subsidized by the few who use their relatively low priced premium services, shows even $19/yr is much higher than it needs to be. DNS probably costs the registrars less than $5 for most home user's requirements.

Re: Now do something useful with it

[colinnwn]

I love Apache and Linux, but coming from someone who is trying to serve additional content from my MythTV box (preinstalled with apache), I can tell you installing Apache is easy, configuring it for something worthwhile is NOT.

Re: True, but...

[TooMuchToDo]

Why don't you check DynDNS' premium offering. It's $100-300/month on the low end. Neustar? Several thousand dollars a month. You can't attribute one single value to a huge service offering like DNS. DNS hosted on one DNS server is not the same as DNS hosted on 8-12 servers all across the global using anycasting for redundancy and service checks for intelligent failover. That's like me saying "Your time is worth $10/hr, because you're a human." Of course, your per hour value is determined by your skillset, industry, and what that particular market will bear.

Re: Commerical grade doesn't count

[colinnwn]

I did. We were discussing in the context of Opera Unite and other options. That clearly limits the scope to residential non-commercial offerings. DynDNS pro offering is $15 per YEAR. Yes DynDNS has other commercial grade high availability services where they probably earn their profit. But I doubt their non-commercial offerings are losing money.

Re:Rumours of their death are continually exaggera

[pbhj]

They're giving it away free, but they make up for it in volume ... ;0)

Yes, I do know they sell to the embedded market.

Re:Arstechnica: The home of the degreeless & c

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeremy Reimer is an ars battlefront forum troll. He has nothing to do with the main news site, other than writing some nostalgia about the Amiga computer.

I wonder if he owned your ass in comp.sys.mac.advocacy back in 1996 or something and you're still butthurt about it

Forget it

[Snaller]

Dumb bloatware - I DON'T want a browser with webserver in it, I DONT want a browser with an email client in it, I DONT want a browser with torrents in it etc etc etc.

Re:Forget it

[Zoidbot]

It's clearly NOT bloatware, as even though Opera hass all that, it's still 1/3rd the size of Firefix, and it's memory footprint and resource handling in infinitely better.

Some programs just aren't worth anything

[AP31R0N]

Can we consider the possibility that some software just isn't worth any price? The guys at Mozilla have a great product that doesn't nag me to buy or even donate.

Value = Supply/Demand

For software, supply is as close to infinite as makes no odds.
Demand is still finite. Only X people want the product. Of that population there are striations of what people are willing to pay, if any thing.

Any infinite supply over a finite demand creates a value of all but zero.

If they want to make money, fine. Make something that has intrinsic value, something of finite supply. Something where your competitors are charging. Chrome, IE and FF are all free (to the user, as in beer).

Reimer has no cert/degree in CS/IS & write for

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use Macs at home so no, you're wrong. I am a subscriber at Windows it pro mag and saw Jeremy Reimer and his friends do what I stated earlier is all. Reimer had to admit the guy he impersonated was indeed impersonated, and evidence from his isp was shown with he on a tracking ticket by them (shaw cable of canada) and his hosting provider had him remove parts of his website. His friend Jay Little got the worst of it, when he said he was an expert on exchange and the guy he made a death threat to showed him that he was not by showing that the programs involved stopped exchange server from stalling in fact. Jay Little, another arstechnica member by the way, also got his entire website removed by his hosting provider crystaltech.com and later on petitiononline.com so it appears he and his friends are indeed as you say, trolls at best, and certainly not qualified to be writing articles for any website. What was the funniest part was that when Reimer could not say 1 thing on topic since he was off topic the entire time there, he brought on vb coder Jay Little who got his behind handed to him for bragging about himself as stated above. Later, Reimer brought in a doctoral candidate post grad student named Jarrett DeAngelis who somehow while posting as starkruzr, had been found out by the person they were email harassing, threatening with death threats, and libelling as well. He tried to lie about it and had to admit it he was indeed, Jarrett DeAngelis. At Jarrett DeAngelis last replies, the hilarious part is, he actually agreed with a good 9/10 of the points the poster that Reimer off topic trolled there had stated. That took the cake. If that is indicative of what kind of people populate arstechnica, then, I'd recommend steering clear of them, as well as Jeremy Reimer (who has written 'articles', using that term loosely, because they're all just 'histories' or regurgitation reports of others findings, see for yourself on that account) who had no degrees, nor certifications in computers themselves.

Re:Rumours of their death are continually exaggera

[Jack Action]

The only thing that matters is that open standards are implemented, then we all win.

Except for Bill Gates -- he loses.

More negative opinion of arstechnica, modded up

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is another added evidence, of the negative opinions of arstechnica from more people here, and Jeremy Reimer no less, on the same note as the parent poster you replied to (it was also modded up +2, to an AC poster even, and by people here at /., no less, & for being insightful):

****

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021733&cid=25675515

ARSTECH only spits back what others already have (Score:2, Insightful) - by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07 2008, @11:03AM (#25675515)

"They have people 'reporting' for them that have no degrees in the computer sciences, nor even certifications in the art & sciences of computing, let alone years to decades of hands on experience in computers in the trenches actually doing the job. Jeremy Reimer being a prime example thereof in fact. This makes them good? I know not. Anyone can re-report what has already been posted up from other sources after all. That does not take brains, nor is it indicative of quality original work either."

****

So much for Arstechnica, and Jeremy Reimer.