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

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

[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: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: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?

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?

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.