The most revolutionary new feature in Opera 10 is also among the oldest. In this case, while the teaser promising a reinvented Web may have been over the top, the hype is factual. Opera Unite is a revolution, among other wheels in motion.

My favourite headline has been El Reg’s Opera to take web back to the old days.

For decades Web intellectuals have railed against the client-server model, argued that it is too stale and authoritarian, had the server point of failure and couldn’t scale with the exponentially growing Web. Power to the distributed systems. Then Google came along and showed you can build a bigger server. The bigger the problem, the bigger the server park. Problem, any problem, solved. But way back in the CERN pioneering days the client was the server, the consumer was the producer. This grass root idealism didn’t survive the Web’s brush with success in the mid-90s, and when the revolutionaries no longer had scale on their side the revolution faltered, ending up with SETI searchers and UFO fanatics.

Unite is old within Opera as well, I couldn’t put a date on it but as a concept it would be Opera 7 to Opera 8 territory. Having a server on a phone generated some buzz on Friday nights, or maybe it was the beer. I have some very simple ideas for what I want from computing, among them I want to liberate data from the machines they are running on. Lars’ concept, which Opera Unite is based upon, takes the opposite approach, it gives the machines a human face. To me this is a little weird, Opera is after all in W3C parlance a user agent, not a machine agent, and a little wonderful as well. It hasn’t fully dawned on people yet, but Opera might unite not just them, but their machinery as well.

Concept is one thing, doing the work is something else. There were some very tricky problems to be solved for a browser-server solution to work in practice, and it was integrated with the widget framework, which has a number of advantages, ease of authoring and a common security model among them.

This leads us to now. What if we have a revolution and nobody comes? Even if beneficial for the Web, it is no guarantee that Opera Software will benefit from the revolution they have started, past revolutions and Opera’s past performance should give enough historical evidence of that. Worst case this might end up as Opera Hypercard, technologically interesting, even influential, but with little commercial benefits.

There are immediate advantages, obviously to run the servers Opera would have to be installed on the machines, and it can be an argument to switch browser. Longer term Opera’s benefit largely lies in letting us eat a bigger cake. As long as their slice of the cake is as small as today others will profit from the sweat of Opera’s labour, but browser vendors today are marked by coopetition, competitors with a strong incentive to cooperate, though some of the vendors have other agendas as well.

Seemingly going from the client to the server is a step backwards, after all some can recognize the Opera brand, many more the Firefox brand, but almost nobody can name the Apache brand, even though this is arguably the greatest success story of them all. But by turning a client into a client-server, and the server as well, you have peers. Opera Unite wouldn’t be an efficient way to distribute content, or even to represent me or mine, but it can be a flexible way to communicate.