worb writes "Opera Unite comes with a web server which is supposedly going to 'redefine the web.' But how well does it actually perform? Is it a threat to other server solutions? Someone put it to the test, and published the results. While nginx, one of the fastest web servers available, is 5 times faster, a PHP+Apache+MySQL server is only 2 times as fast. A compiled C++ server, the MadFish WebToolkit, is 6 times faster. He concludes that Opera Unite's server is impressive, and that the others come nowhere close to the ease of use."

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."

sherl0k writes "Opera 10.0, dubbed Opera Unite, has been released. Built into the Web browser is a full-fledged Web server, complete with nifty little gadgets such as a 'fridge' that people can post notes onto, a chat room, a widget to stream your music library anywhere, and a built-in file-sharing mechanism. It also scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test." Readers fudreporter and TLS point to The Register's report on the new release and a 5-minute video demo, respectively. Update: 06/16 15:18 GMT by T: Roar Lauritzsen of Opera Software writes to point out that "release" isn't quite the right word here; though you can download it, version 10.0 is still in beta, and the version with Unite is a labs (experimental) release.

snydeq writes "The European Commission will proceed with its antitrust case against Microsoft regardless of Microsoft's decision to strip IE from Windows 7 in Europe. Europe's top antitrust regulator said the EC would draw up a remedy that allows computer users 'genuine consumer choice,' noting that stripping out IE from Windows 'may potentially be positive,' but 'rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less.' Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera, whose complaint to the European Commission at the end of 2007 sparked the initial antitrust investigation, said Microsoft is 'trying to set the remedy itself by stripping out IE. ... Now that Microsoft has acknowledged it has been breaking the law by bundling IE into Windows, the Commission must push ahead with an effective remedy,' he said."

CNETNate writes "Dial-up connections and flaky Wi-Fi are made significantly more tolerable with Opera 10, it seems. After yesterdays news that Opera 10's first beta had landed, some testing was in order. One major new feature is Opera Turbo — server-side compression — which shrinks pages before sending them down your browser. With a 100Mbps connection throttled to a laughable 50Kbps, Opera 10 proved itself to outperform every other desktop browser on the planet, and there are graphs to prove it. Javascript benchmarks put the new browser in fourth place overall, after Chrome 2, Safari 4 and Firefox, but it indeed passes the Acid3 test with a perfect score. If you ever use a laptop on public Wi-Fi, to not have Opera 10 installed could be a big mistake"

Miladinoski writes "Opera Software ASA today released the first beta of their tenth version of the Opera browser. In addition to the browser's known features, like mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, voice navigation, mail and RSS support, speed dial and so forth, it now includes a Turbo mode which unclogs your connection to get faster browsing, a new interface, a tabbed browsing update and customizable speed dial. Opera 10 continues to follow the web standards by getting 100/100 and pixel-perfect scores on the Acid3 test. The beta is currently available for every modern OS platform."

caffeinejolt writes "Despite all the hype surrounding new browsers being released pushing the limits of what can be done on the Web, Firefox 3 has only this past month overtaken IE6. Furthermore, if you take the previous report and snap on the Corporate America filter, IE6 rules the roost and shows no signs of leaving anytime soon. Sorry web developers, for those of you who thought the ugly hacks would soon be over, it appears they will linger on for quite a bit — especially if you develop for business sites."

An anonymous reader writes with a link to Ars Technica's report that "the EU is considering forcing Windows users to choose a browser to download and install before they can first browse the Internet, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). While the latest Windows 7 builds let you uninstall IE8, 'third-party browser makers like Opera, Mozilla and Google are pushing for tough sanctions against Microsoft. The EU would rather have a "ballot screen" for users to choose which browsers to download and install as well as which one to set as default. The bundling requirement might end up becoming a responsibility for manufacturers.'"

bahstid writes "The NY Times reports that Microsoft and the European Commission have canceled the only hearing planned in an antitrust investigation into the company's tying of Internet Explorer into Windows because of a dispute over the attendance of European regulators serving as advisers. As a result, the commission will reach its decision and levy a fine based on written statements from Microsoft and its adversaries. Microsoft decided against the opportunity to give oral evidence in the case after it was unable to persuade the commission to move the meeting, scheduled for June 3rd through 5th, so that it did not conflict with a global antitrust conference in Zurich that draws European antitrust regulators."

superglaze writes "Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, has claimed that the open standards in HTML 5 will make it unnecessary to deliver rich media content using the proprietary Flash. '"You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash." Von Tetzchner added that his comments were not about "killing" Flash. "I like Adobe — they're a nice company," he said. "I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like [to deliver rich media content] through web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash."'"

Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."

We discussed Microsoft making IE8 a critical update a while back; but then the indication was that the update gave users a chance to choose whether or not to install it. Now I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes in with word that the update not only does not ask, but it makes IE the default browser. "Microsoft has a new tactic in the browser wars. They're having the 'critical' IE8 update make IE the default browser without asking. Yes, you can change it back, but it doesn't ask you if you want IE8 or if you want it as the default browser, it makes the decisions for you. Opera might have a few more complaints to make to the EU antitrust board after this, but Microsoft will probably be able to drag out the proceedings for years, only to end up paying a small fine. If you have anyone you've set up with a more secure alternative browser, you might want to help check their settings after this."

r3lody writes "Styling Web Pages with CSS: Visual QuickProject Guide, by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, helps the beginning web designer learn how to use CSS in a simple, easy-to-follow format. This being my first exposure to one of the Visual QuickProject Guides by Peachpit Press, I was both pleased and disappointed when I received this slim volume. I was pleased in the presentation and clear descriptions given to each aspect of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I was disappointed in the brevity of the text, and the lack of downloadable materials to use to follow the examples in the book." Read below for the rest of Ray's review.

MrKaos writes "Proving that science fiction can still be great entertainment, J.J. Abrams appears to have impressed Star Trek fans at the official world premiere of Star Trek, who gave the film a five-minute standing ovation at the Sydney Opera House in Australia today. Meanwhile, mere hours beforehand, flummoxed fans at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, TX, deceived into thinking they were seeing a special, extended version of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, were pleasantly surprised when a disguised Leonard Nimoy greeted them and announced they would be seeing the new film in its entirety. ILM's influence on the film is reported as visually stunning, and lucky Australian fans are scheduled to see the movie first, as it opens a day before the American release."

Kelson writes "The W3C Widget specification is running into a problem: Apple claims a patent on automatic updates and is unwilling to license it royalty-free in the event that it impacts the spec. The W3C is investigating to determine whether the spec includes anything covered by the patent, and decide what to do."

cstrep writes "Eight years ago, Opera introduced Mouse Gestures as a way to speed up your interaction with the browser, and focus on what's important: Content. In 2005, Voice Navigation was introduced, and more recently we've worked with Nintendo to create a browser that takes full advantage of the 'Wiimote' and later, the touchscreen in the DSi. Today Opera introduces Face Gestures, a revolutionary technology designed to make interacting with Opera easier on computers with cameras. Face Gestures lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures. By using an internal technology dubbed 'Face Observation Opera Language,' we are able to recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser."

notthatwillsmith writes "Counting public betas and release candidates, there are a whopping nine different web browsers out today with enough market share to be considered mainstream. Maximum PC explains the differences between the browsers, future and present, so that you can make a more informed decision about the primary tool you use to browse the web. From the rendering engines used to the features that set the different browsers apart, this is a comprehensive, blow-by-blow battle between Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6, Google Chrome, Firefox 3.1, IE 8, Safari 4, and Opera 10."

CNETNate writes "Apple has released the beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and PC, with claims that its Nitro rendering engine is '30 times faster than IE7,' and three times faster than Firefox 3. Other new features include 'Top Sites,' which shows users the most frequently visited Web pages, 'Full History Search' for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself — something Opera has been doing for a while."

eldavojohn writes "The Firefox executives say they don't want to be bundled with Windows. Firefox architect Mike Conner also said this of Opera, 'Opera's asserting something that's provably false. It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face. As people become aware there's an alternative, you don't end up in that [monopoly] situation. You have to be perceptibly better [than Internet Explorer].' He also told PCPro that they are worried about becoming the next monopoly just like Microsoft is now."

Barence writes "The European Commission could force Microsoft to bundle Firefox with future versions of Windows. The revelation came as part of Microsoft's quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission. Among the statements is a clause outlining the penalties being considered by the European watchdog, which recently ruled that Microsoft is harming competition by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs."