Opera just announced the release of Opera 10.10. This latest version of Opera’s desktop browser now includes Opera Unite, the company’s browser-based web server. With Unite, users can share photos, music, notes, websites, forums and calendars – but unlike standard web apps, these apps are hosted on the user’s computer. When Opera first talked about Unite, it claimed that this service would “reinvent the web.” This resulted in a lot of hype before the announcement and the inevitable backlash right afterward. When we tested the first alpha version of Opera with the built-in Unite feature, however, we came away quite impressed.
As usual, this latest version of Opera is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux.
Your Browser is Now Also a Server
Opera Unite allows you to easily turn your desktop into a web server and run a number of web services like photo-sharing, file-sharing, a web server, and an online media player right from your machine and access all of these services from anywhere. While this gives you control over your media, it also means that your data is only available online as long as your computer is running.
Starting a Unite server takes seconds (though you need an Opera account to make this work). Opera will assign an address to your computer based on your username. Users can choose if they want to protect their applications with passwords or if they want to make them available to anybody on the net.
Nothing New Besides Unite
Besides Opera Unite, this latest version doesn’t sport any major new features. With features like Opera Turbo, bookmark syncing, and the sleek new visual tabs design that Opera introduced in the last update, Opera 10 does have a lot of things going for it. In our tests this morning, the browser was stable and fast. Even though we didn’t run any benchmarks, Opera 10 felt just as fast as any other modern browser.
For more information about Opera Unite, also have a look at our more in-depth review of the service and the apps that Opera includes by default.
