Opera Unite takes web browsing into the cloud

Opera today took a stab at taking on Google, IE and Firefox in the browser wars by releasing Opera Unite, billed as a “Web server on the Web browser”. Basically, it’s a evolution of the cloud computing concept, where your web browser becomes a doorway into services hosted on your PC. Starting off, you can share files/photos, access your music remotely, host a chat room, host websites and let people put post-it notes on your “fridge” – a twitter-like bulletin board.

Taking a quick tour this morning, I was quite impressed. Despite being in beta with a couple of niggles, it looks like a genuine step forward in browser (reading tweets, many people compared it to Google Wave). Within minutes, I’d managed to set up an account, create a chat room and invite a few people to check it out via Twitter.

I had a couple of comments via Twitter from people who were worried from a security point of view, which seems like a valid concern. Opera Unite allows you to set security parameters, such as passwords for your chat room or decide which files you want to make available (in a way not dissimilar to Limewire and other P2P software), but it will, no doubt, become the attention of hackers and people will also let their guard down.

That said, Unite got the thumbs up from Robin Wauters at TechCrunch:

We’ll take a deeper dive in Opera Unite real soon, but I’m impressed with what it looks like on the surface. This is a really good idea at its core, and I encourage you to read Opera product analyst Lawrence Eng’s blog post on the subject for more background and an idea of where Opera is heading with the concept.

On Twitter, geniusboywonder made a good point: “Wonder how #Opera #Unite will change the #torrent #file-share & #peer-to-peer world?”

What struck me about the release was its timing: the day that the much-anticipated Digital Britain report is published. Putting aside the security factor for one moment, this has a massive impact on file sharing, piracy, net neutrality and child safety. I’m not expecting much from the report when it’s published in a couple of hours, just some platitudes and maybe a bit of guff about 2Mb connections, but it would be nice if the likes of the people at Opera were consulted (maybe they were, for all I know) to collaborate on what is possible and how it’s likely to change the way we use the web.

Thanks to Suraj Kika for pointing Opera Unite out to me this morning.

Tagged as: Opera, opera unite, Robin Wauters, TechCrunch, twitter