Opera to reinvent the web?
Opera promises to reinvent the web tomorrow. I mean, really, reinvent the web? Invent TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, HTML/CSS/JS, CGI, all other stuff that web consists of? I doubt.
Different sources speculate that it’s going to be something cloud-related. Maybe it will be a p2p-based traffic sharing with some clever algorithm to determine where to download the data from? But then I wouldn’t like anybody to be able to sniff my data. Maybe they will install a CDN to make useless Opera Turbo giving at least some performance benefit to users. Don’t know, we’ll see very soon.
But because of the last unfair actions that were taken by Opera against IE, I (from moral prospective) really hope that all the expenses they took for Opera 10 PR won’t significantly increase their market share. Competition should be fair, Firefox was able to get the same market share as IE in Germany without making users life harder. I really hope that lobbying expenses were higher than the income.
All good points! I think Opera will have an uphill battle getting a lot of traction with this. The idea does sound like some people would like it. One of Opera’s challenges will be that the people that will like the idea are not the type of people that feel comfortable enough with technology to switch browsers. And the users that are tech-savvy enough to make the browser switch, are going to be suspect of opening their computer and data up.
It may have some legs behind a firewall for Intranet applications. But to do that you need to convince an IT staff that this would be a good thing. And I have not meet too many that are into P2P or cloud-related services.