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.
(more…)