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

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.

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.