Steven Kovar - Interactive Designer

Opera Unite

June 17, 2009

Let me preface this post with this: I’ve never been a regular Opera user, although I’ve always had some respect for it. I’ve just never been inspired to use it over Safari. I’m pretty set in my ways when it comes to browsers. When Mac OS X came out, I was quick to adopt Safari and I’ve had a really hard time switching to anything else since then. Firefox is great, standards-compliant, and I even have my bookmarks synched with Safari, but for some reason I just don’t feel right unless I’m using Safari. I proof sites I’m working on in Firefox and the range of unpleasant and web-standards-breaking IE builds and, less often, Opera.

When I read a headline today that Opera 10 Beta was going to revolutionize the web, my curiosity was piqued. Opera has a rich history of creating standards-compliant browsers that cater to the user’s preferences. They create a great browser for people with visual impairments and other disabilities. According to the Opera website, the new browser would be “a Web server on the Web browser”. After reading a bit more, I took the plunge and downloaded it. You know what? I think they may just have something.

Opera Unite is a new platform that allows developers to create applications that enable people to share information directly between browsers, cutting out the middle man - the web server. The Opera browser effectively behaves like a web server, dishing out or sharing files on a variety of three levels; public, limited (by invite with a URL), and private, to anyone with a browser . Opera Unite behaves as a gateway between browsers (the visitor doesn’t need to be using Opera). You can share your media library with friends or with yourself on a different computer, or while you are away from home. You can select a file sharing folder on your computer and share files on the same three privacy levels, or serve a full website from your browser. The caveat is obviously that the serving computer must be running, with Opera Unite running. Opera Unite lives in the browser, but you must additionally turn that functionality on.

As a test, I put a 40 mb video in my file sharing folder, and then pasted the URL for file sharing into Safari, and downloaded the video. It took 13:22 to download it. Not bad, I suppose. It will definitely be a faster and more reliable way to transfer larger files directly to a remote user than through iChat. As a test, I visited the URL for my music library on my iPhone. Although the page loads and I can see the list of albums, the button functionality wasn’t quite right and I couldn’t play the songs. But it’s beta, and they could potentially work around that.

Aside from Opera Unite, the browser is standards compliant and it renders pages extremely fast. Side-by-side, I’d say it is as fast a Safari. Users can re-skin the browser to their liking. There are two stock skins installed with the Mac build; Opera Standard and Mac Native, but users can install more and switch between them at will. There are a range of other new features, including facial gesture recognition for navigation, Geolocation API support and “Speed Dial”. When you open a new tab, you get a “Speed Dial” layout of screen caps of sites that you visit frequently, much like the new Safari 4.0 release. The browser includes some nice developer tools, that allow the user to reduce to the page to the bare page heirarchy, with ID’s and Classes labeled.

I think Opera has a clever idea, at the very least, and a great implementation of it. A part of me really wishes it would have been an idea generated on an open source platform, like Mozilla or Webkit, where it would take off faster. I could be proven wrong, but I think the potential of Opera Unite is limited by the small user base (growing a bit, at 2.2% in May, according to w3cschools) and proprietary nature of the browser and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many of these features swept up and duplicated in the more popular Webkit and Mozilla browsers in the near future. The idea is nonetheless very progressive and it will be interesting to see what independent developers create for it. For me, Opera Unite provides a quick and very easy way to access files when I am away from home, or to quickly set up file sharing with other people. If they port out Unite to the iPhone, one could listen to their entire music library on the go. The downside is of course the fact that the serving computer must be running for all of these services to be available, and I generally prefer to shut down my computer to save electricity when I’m not at home. With that in mind, I can still envision myself using it to facilitate file transfers to remote project team members, sharing a great song with a friend, and to help with doing work on the road. 

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