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Opera has finally lift the veil and introduced the “thing” that would reinvent the Internet. It goes by the name Opera Unit and will be a part of the upcoming Opera 10 web browser. Opera Unite basically offers web server capabilities right in the web browser which allows users to share data and files on the Internet but also to host chat rooms, online applications and even complete web projects. The main difference between Opera’s approach and the standard approach is that Opera establishes direct client to client connections without data being hosted in the cloud on third party servers.

Opera Unite is modularized and comes with so called services that can be installed to extend the functionality. This may remind many users of Firefox add-ons but it is actually a completely different technology that requires more than just clicking on an install link. Currently seven services are offered, they are:

* Media Player – Accessing the music collection from anywhere on the Internet.
* File Sharing – A way of sharing files directly between users.
* Fridge – A note leaving application that other people can use to leave notes on a computer system.
* Web Server – Hosting a web server from the local computer system.
* Photo Sharing – Share photos without uploading them first.
* The Lounge – A chat interface hosted on a computer system.

The Opera team has created a user guide to get users started with Opera Unite. Opera Unite is available as a separate preview release which can be downloaded for all supported operating systems from the Opera Labs website. The download will actually replace the current version of Opera 10 if the user decides to install it in the same installation directory.

Opera Unite is then available in the left panel after installation. Starting the actual home server requires an Opera account. A homeaddress is assigned to every user signing up for Opera Unite in the from “http://computername.username.operaunite.com/” with the user selecting the computer name. The username will be the Opera username.

Once that has been setup the service that has been selected by the user gets setup. Setup of the file sharing module for example requires the selection of a directory on the local computer that will be used for that purpose. Each service that has been activated can then be accessed from the created homepage if the user accessing it has sufficient rights to do so.

opera file sharing

The file sharing page on the server is for example protected by a password by default which can be changed in the root home directory. It offers three different access rights which make it possible to allow public access (everyone can access them), private access (only the root user can access the files) or password protected access.

Verdict:

Opera Unite offers something that web browsers do not offer out of the box. The usefulness of the service on the other hand depends largely on the user’s system configuration. If the user runs an home server then it might not be needed to run Opera Unite as well. Users who prefer to access everything from one program might find Opera Unite helpful especially if the developers and users begin to add new modules to the service. Not really a reinvention of the Internet but a nice service nevertheless.

The developers of the Opera web browser have just released the first beta of the upcoming Opera 10 Internet browser. The beta was available on Opera’s ftp site for a day and got finally announced by the Opera team officially in a blog post. One of the main improvements is the addition of the Presto 2.2 rendering engine which scores a 100/100 score in the Acid 3 test and adds support for several new web standards to the web browser including web fonts, transparency through opacity and SVG improvements.

The changelog lists many improvements and additions that have been implemented into Opera 10 including a new auto update mechanism that allows Opera to automatically update itself. This feature has to be enabled in the opera configuration. Easiest way to do is to enter opera:config#snapshots into the browser’s address bar and hit enter. The parameter needs to be enabled for the automatic update mechanism to kick in.

Opera 10 comes with a new user interface and several enhancements and customizability options. This includes Speed Dial customizations including the addition of background images, different speed dial layouts or hiding speed dial completely.

Other additions include:

* HTML 5 Support
* Opera Tab Bar thumbnails (displays website thumbnails when hovering over the site’s tab)
* Opera inline spelling checker
* Opera crashlogging tool

It is probably best to check the changelog mentioned above to get a full overview with descriptions of the changes.

There was not a way for Internet Explorer 7 users to log into two different Gmail (or Hotmail, Yahoo Mail…) accounts at the same time. Gmail can be replaced with any other cookie based web service that asks the user to login. The problem here is that the cookie storing the information about the login will be overwritten when the second login attempt is made. Internet Explorer 8 changes this behavior by introducing so called session cookies. A user wanting to log into an account a second time (or third, fourth..) could therefor start a new session in Internet Explorer 8 to do so. The new session would write a new cookie that would not interfere with the old cookies that have been written in other sessions.

A new Internet Explorer 8 session can be created from the Internet Explorer menu toolbar which might be hidden on your computer system. The fastest way to create a new session if the menu bar is not shown is to press the keyboard combination [Alt f] [i] [enter]. This will open a new Internet Explorer 8 window in a new session. Opening a new tab or window in contrast would share the cookies in Internet Explorer 8. It is furthermore possible to start a new session from the command line by launching iexplore.exe with the -nomerge parameter.

Internet Explorer 8 sessions are a very effective way of accessing multiple accounts at the same web service at once. Microsoft should think about placing that option more dominantly in Internet Explorer 8 as its current position will most likely not be noticed by many Internet Explorer users.

There is not any comparable option in the other Internet browsers yet. Firefox users can use the Gmail Account Manager to manage multiple Gmail accounts but there does not seem to be a feature available that would allow users to log into multiple accounts at all web services.

Google seems to be dead serious to close the “version-gap” to Mozilla Firefox and probably even other popular Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera in a hurry. The web browser known as the Google Browser was released less than a year ago and is already reaching version 3 which would close the version gap to the Firefox web browser.

Google Chrome 3 has been published on the dev channel from where it can be downloaded and installed on a computer system running a Microsoft windows operating system. The web browser will update existing Google Chrome installations on the system to the latest beta 3 version of it.

There are not many exciting new features in the release despite the jump from version 2 to 3. The release notes list 16 changes to Google Chrome 2.0.180.0 which has been released about two weeks ago. The most notable changes are multiple crash fixes, support for the video tag and fixes to user interface elements drawing improperly on the screen.

Users who are thinking about installing the latest Google Chrome dev release should be extra careful as this release is not intended to be run in work environments. The list of changes do not really make it a necessity to install Google Chrome 3 yet either.

The Opera team has released the final version of Opera 9.64 web browser. The new version is already available on the Opera website and through the Check For Update option in the web browser itself. The new release of Opera is a security and stability upgrade and therefor recommended for all Opera users who run previous versions of the Internet browser. The changelog lists 14 fixes, implementations, additions and improvements in Opera 9.64 for the Windows operating system plus an additional five miscellaneous changes.

Interested users can take a look at the changelogs for all supported operating system or download the newest version of the Opera web browser right from the Opera website.

Below is the list of security changes:

* Fixed an issue where specially crafted JPEG images could be used to execute arbitrary code, as reported by Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team; see our advisory
* Fixed an issue where plug-ins could be used to allow cross domain scripting, as reported by Adam Barth; details will be disclosed at a later date.
* Fixed a moderately severe issue; details will be disclosed at a later date.
* Added support for the following platform-specific features:
o DEP (Data Execution Prevention) in Microsoft WindowsXP® with Service Pack 2 and higher and Microsoft Windows Server 2003® with Service Pack 1
o ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) in Microsoft Windows Vista®
* Added Untrusted Rootstore Capability:
o Opera downloads only the detailed information about untrusted (blacklisted) certificates when they are encountered
o If download fails for certificate information in the list, Opera considers any certificate matching the ID as untrusted
* Added version conditional fetching of certificate dependencies from an online repository
* Fixed a problem downloading the CRL (Certificate Revocation List)
* Fixed a problem that could cause SSL to deadlock in one state, hanging the connection
* Fixed a problem that could cause the incorrect calculation of Certificate IDs
* Implemented Extended Validation (EV) for cross-signed EV Root Certificates not shipped by default
* Implemented preshipping of the Entrust 2048 CA (Certificate Authority)
* Implemented Root Certificate fetching from an online repository when an intermediate matches a certificate in the repository
* Improved support for weak encryption when importing .p12 private certificates
* Prevented security information documents from being written to disk

Version 2.0 of Google Chrome, known as the Google browser, has been released yesterday by the Chrome development team. The web browser is now officially out of beta. The speed of development is a little surprising for a company that seems to love the beta tag on many of their products. Some think that Google tries to match the latest version of the Firefox web browser as soon as possible to avoid looking inferior to inexperienced users.

The latest version of the Google browser can be downloaded directly from the official Google Chrome website at Google. Users who prefer to use the offline installer to install the Google browser can download the executable here. The web browser comes with several improvements that are not spectacular but useful nevertheless.

The three additions that are highlighted in the announcement are full screen support (with F11), an option to automatically fill out forms on websites and the ability to delete thumbnails in the new tab page which displays the most visited websites.

Speed and stability of the Google browser have also been increased according to the Google Chrome blog. It does seem though that extension support has not been added to the final release of Google Chrome which would mean that it is still only available in dev builds.