Earlier this month, Opera launched Opera 10 Beta, which brought email, RSS, and torrent tracking to the browser, and today they released Opera Unite, which brings the power of a web server to the Opera Browser. What does this mean? Well, if you download and install Opera Unite Alpha for Windows, Linux, or OS X from Opera Labs, you can host a chat room on your local computer, serve up a website from your computer, share photos, share media, and do basic file sharing all via the Opera browser. People connecting to all these services do so through a publicly available URL and they don't have to have Opera installed on their machines. The services work through any modern browser, although you can only host your own Opera Unite services via your own Opera Browser running on your machine.

Another interesting bit about this technology is that you can install other Opera Unite "applications" within your browser to expand the functionality of this server. I signed up for the service and started up a chatroom that I'm going to keep running today for anyone who wants to stop by and check it out. In order to get up and running, you have to sign up for a free Opera account. This seems to provide the handshake between remote users trying to access your Opera Unite applications and the applications themselves which are hosted in your browser on your local machine.

So far, I've been testing the file sharing and the chat. It's definitely cool and I can see the future power of this, but it is also clearly in Alpha stage with a few bugs. For some reason, I cannot get it to run on my iMac. It runs fine on my MacBook. One of the guests in my chatroom who was chatting from China (!) noted that one of his messages to the room dropped. Also, when accessing the shared files folder, clicking on the file names themselves works for opening or downloading the files, but clicking the actual download link consistently failed for me. It appears that the .png files that I was sharing from a folder on my computer were trying to download as .png.html files when using the download link, and therefore failed. 

Make sure you visit Opera's site dedicated to Opera Unite to see some instructional videos further explaining what it means to have a server in your browser. Here's one of those videos that is a sort of commercial for the philosophy behind Opera Unite:

And here's a more tutorial-minded video:

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