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."
Data Center Knowledge [datacenterknowledge.com] 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?
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.
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.
These [dyndns.com] guys [no-ip.com] 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?
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.
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.
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
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 [slashdot.org], 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?!
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.
Opera is is in trouble. .
Its desktop share is less [w3schools.com] than even Chrome.
As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone. See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results here [arstechnica.com]
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.
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.
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 h
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
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.
"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.
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.
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 [statcounter.com] version makes that even more starkly clear.
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
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 n
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.
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?
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.
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?
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday June 18, @10:38AM (#28374763)
I released an open source web browser called SupraBrowser [sourceforge.net] 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
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Although not my spelling of the word ingenious.
Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:4, Informative)
These [dyndns.com] guys [no-ip.com] 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?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: True, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org], 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?!
Parent
Bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
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 [statcounter.com]
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Its desktop share is less [w3schools.com] than even Chrome.
As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.
See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results here [arstechnica.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 h
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Bad summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"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,
Re: (Score:2)
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 [statcounter.com] version makes that even more starkly clear.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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 n
Web Developers (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Web Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
To what extent will Opera really intermediate? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave (Score:5, Interesting)
I released an open source web browser called SupraBrowser [sourceforge.net] 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: (Score:3, Informative)
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 [catb.org].
Pffft... trojan horse (Score:2, Insightful)
The little things matter more (Score:2, Insightful)
There are all kinds of uses (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Opera Unite is a Hail Mary (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You know you haven't had enough coffee when... (Score:2)
...it takes you a full 30 seconds to realize a story on Slashdot isn't talking about "Opera" as in a theater production.
Cloud = silver lining (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Rumours of their death are continually exaggerated (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought we were against cloud computing? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Slashdotters not getting the point (Score:5, Informative)
I feel that most people here is Slashdot didn't get Opera Unite:
address most issues people discusss here and elsewhere.
Apple? (Score:2)
Citation please?
Re:Brown orifice security hole will be back (Score:4, Informative)
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 [securityfocus.com]
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?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
(PBUH)
Re: (Score:2)
The road of technology is littered with excellent idea, technology, and devices that didn't make it.
sad but true (Score:2)
Re:sad but true (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Forgive my ignorance but.. (Score:2)
A "Hail Mary" is something Catholics do, right? What's the meaning of it when used in a metaphorical sense?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.. (Score:5, Funny)
I have to say, the only thing less likely to be understood on /. than a religion metaphor is a sports metaphor.
Parent