Opera Unite: a Web server on the Web browser
17 June 2009Stefan Constantinescu of IntoMobile has an interesting take on the new Opera Unite web browser that comes complete with a built-in web server:
Today Opera launched Opera Unite and with it came a lot of excitement, confusion and questions. Opera Unite is a web server running in an Alpha version of the Opera 10 web browser. This web server can be accessed by anyone on the internet and goes around firewalls thanks to Opera’s proxies. Services can be installed to run on Unite, and at launch Opera has made available a file sharing service, media player, chat service and a few others, to show what this technology is capable of. Opera Unite is, from my knowledge of internet history, the first web server to be bundled and tightly integrated inside a web browser.
The first question that comes to people’s minds is why? Why would I want to run a web server in my web browser?
Lawrence Eng, Product Analyst at Opera Software, talks about the internet’s “unfulfilled promise” of connecting people directly and letting them interact with each other without the need to play in someone else’s sandbox. Why should I have to sign up to Flickr to share photos with Jon, why should I have to install Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Talk to chat with Lisa, why is it that few corporations, who have vast monetary resources, build huge data centers and then expect us to play by their rules in their world?
The devices we use to access the internet today are merely dumb terminals that connect to servers that host the things we care about; but what exactly is wrong with that?
What’s wrong with that? Stefan will exlpain it to you.
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