I'm a little bit worried about getting arrested for sharing files.

sarcasm

I thought it was a bad idea until I saw the video. Me likey.

No. I won't. Can't stand Opera or that whiny douche of a CEO.

Ironic that to see the video you have to go to Youtube, one of the nasty middle men they seek to replace.

The web just reinvented? everyone can already get a copy of Apache and build a web server. Same for a FTP. There are dozens of file sharing possibility already existing.

If I understand correctly, Opera wants to make it easy for people to share files directly. Which is fine, but they'll have to do something about firewall/routers/nat configuration hell.

I think they make their idea bigger than it is. I think they just want to make easier and more convenient a bunch of things that already exist, which is good!

But it's nowhere near CHANGING THE WORLD!!!

I hate when they say things like this.

It's a good idea but the nice thing about the file sharing sites is that they're almost always up and running. How many people will know to leave their computers on all the time and make sure to have battery backups? The advantage of the sites is that the information is always available from anywhere in the world.

also... can someone say security risk?

How about download/upload caps?????
Still Opera is my favorite browser....! too fast...!

Can someone explain to me where web browsers make their money? It seems as of late that many browsers are expending vast amounts of resources to gain market share. But for what purpose? Isn't ad revenue given to the sites you browse and not the browser software company. In addition FF blocks adds... I'm just confused as to how FF, Opera, Chrome, IE, etc. is benefiting from my use of their browser.

Lol, the video is a little misleading. "Strangers on the web owning servers" but er, don't you have a better chance of downloading a virus from some dude's hard drive than say ImageShack?

With that said, I like Opera. It is my backup browser to FireFox and some of the features of their new 10 beta are very unique and deserve recognition. 100% on Acid Test, saves your tabs upon closing the browser to name a couple.

Pros to Opera Unite:
Saves bandwidth and space on servers
Instead of uploading something to a server to share it, and have it sit there for years when nobody is actually looking up the file

Cons:
Uses your hard drive space (but I keep backups of stuff I upload anyway?)
Seems like a security breach to say the least, I'm sure these connections have to be authorized but there is always the possibility of hackers and how much trust to you have for the person connecting to your computer?

This is a neat idea in theory, but overall I see it as a huge step back. The big cons here that really kill this browser concept are:
1. Home computers are not always on, nor are their connections optimal or secure. Everything that occurs here is at the behest of an individuals PC and all of their personal and local settings, and at the mercy of everyone they connect to.
2. If your home machine crashes, if a hard drive dies, etc...then potentially everything is lost. Gmail will always have your email...Youtube will always have your movie...but your home machine may not if a hard drive fails.
3. Security will be a huge mess. You're allowing tons of access to your personal computer while accessing many others in a similar way.

Opera has always been a fringe browser used by geeks and computer science people with a desire for an alternative, and faster browser. It's never been mainstream and these changes are not going to change that. If nothing else, average users that try it may very well open their computers up to even more security issues.

If you want your computer to be a first class citizen on the web, then you're going to need some first class bandwidth. You might as well just run Apache.

can someone explain to me why companies compete to have the best browser? what do they get out of it?

So, basically this will be a front-end or GUI for what already exists... FTP servers.

I don't want people directly snooping around my computer, sounds like a huge security risk.

there's one MAJOR problem with this... upload speed. Most ISP's give you insufficient upload speed. servers are servers for a reason. because they're set up to serve content. I personally don't want a constant p2p like program running. Some ISP's offer such little upload speed that you can't request more than one or two pages at a time without every other subsequent page timing out or just flat out taking forever to load. If i wanted to serve content to friends I would make one of my computer's a server and pay for the extra upload speed so i could serve my own web pages and files. EG: when i had a 16m download my isp only allowed a 1m upload. Throwing out the fact that both speeds are relatively pathetic on an international scale, it's considered a relatively good offering in most regions of the US. Thumbs up for innovation, thumbs down for not taking into consideration the overall infrastructure in the US. Having said that, this might be very successful in countries such as Japan and Korea where the average connection has the gonads to serve a bit of real data.

+1 nachowarrior, and let's not forget there are still people with 2Gb combined quota

What happens if your content goes viral and all of a sudden you get 100's of hits per minute?

We are still gonna need servers..... thats how most people find things , I mean how am I supposed to find something if the person doesnt have they're computer on or only allows people to ask for URL's? I dunno about you , but I like keeping my stuff on my computer to myself. If I want to upload it I upload it to a server. If we had no servers what would happen to websites?

Apple tried it with Safari 4 and it sucked so much balls that I switched to Firefox on my Mac after 5 years of Safari. Burn me one, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. I WILL NOT BE USING SAFARI EVER AGAIn

The level of stupidity here is AMAZING!!!

I just downloaded and tried it. It's okay. Most of the concerns raised prove that not only did you not try it out (something that takes all of 5 minutes), but you didn't really bother to read anything about it either.

Opera hosts the HTTP server. You simply have files/images/etc that you choose to share, and when the Opera server receives a request, your browser sends the data to wherever. You get a url like http://..operaunite.com/

If you really paid attention to their video, you'd understand that they're not saying youtube is going away. They're saying that you don't NEED site like youtube, you can share content with people you want to share content with, without doing anything more that saying "share".

Did you notice in the video that it shows ONE person sharing something with ONE other person on a bench?

It's not meant for large scale hosting. You should not be getting 100 hits per minute.

The comment that it is ironic that they are hosting it on you tube is VALID. Opera Unite has a mechanism for sharing video with NON Unite users. The reply to that comment was UNINFORMED and misleading. I repeat, you can share whatever you want with whomever you want as long as YOU have Unite turned on. Nobody else has to have it to see your stuff.

Come on people. Try to be a community that has at least a tiny amount of intelligence and make comments AFTER read about/try the product.

Most of the comments that precede this one are completely irrelevant to what Unite does. Pathetic.

crap, the pseudo url i typed got scrubbed. let's try that again, the url you get is something like:

http://yourcomputer.youraccount.op [...] verservice

@ericgunnerson

I didn'T even know it was out already. Most if not all stuff that make news here is a project to be released.

The results of your research should have been in the news itself

Thanks for the information, and yeah, I'm lazy... I already feel I'm wasting a bit of time here I would want to waste any more trying this.