Personally I always considered it the best browser ever, although with great grief I had to hand over that title to Chrome, which has everything really worth taking from Opera, plus several improvements that were hard to ignore. It was the first browser able to claim being nearly as fast as the Norwegian big O, plus sandboxing, well-achieved extensions framework, uncluttered interface and a great attention to detail from its designers.

But I didn’t throw away Opera for this. Today I took a glimpse of what’s expected for their upcoming 11th edition, and I have to say I was impressed but not surprised at all: I expected no less from the best browser vendor in the world.

Opera 11 beta brings up several improvements over past versions. Keeping up with the competition is the least they could, and they seem to be doing really well in terms of features: better HTML5 support, smaller installer, better performance, safer browsing, secure and informative address field, private navigation mode, and a great new overdue addition which I haven’t yet explored in its entirety: extensions.

Something really new

But all these only puts it on par with competitors, feature-wise. What’s really hard these days is to come up with new stuff; unprecedented functionality on an era where everything seems to be already invented. That’s what’s truly amazing of a new version of any software, particularly web browsers. And Opera has always been one of the bests at this.

This 11th version takes tabs to a next level: tab groups or stacks. Users can manually group tasks on stacks that can be expanded or collapsed at will, cleaning up space and clutter on the tab bar. For heavy-weight Internet users like me this is a great idea. Watch the video at youtube to see how it works, or download the browser and try it yourself.

Managing stacks from thumbnails preview

This feature gets even better when combined with floating thumbnail previews. When you hover the mouse pointer over a collapsed stack, a large floating view appears with a grid of small thumbnail views of each tab in the stack. You can click on the thumbnails in the floating view to switch tabs without having to expand the stack. Watch it working in the following video.

What I really miss and I hope it’ll be included in the final non-beta version, is the ability to specify in the preferences that when middle-clicking links to open in new tabs, these new tabs get automatically stacked with the tab that spawned them. This should of course be optional and not enabled by default, or even made available only with some modifier key while middle-clicking.

The verdict

This is still a beta release with some rough edges, specially a little prone to instability and crashing. But it’s good to know Opera is still heading in a good direction. They lost too much time with stuff like BitTorrent support and Opera Unite, instead of focusing in the browsing experience. Hopefully this browser will someday get the attention it deserves.

What do you think about Opera 11 and tab stacks? Do you think this feature will make its way to other browsers in the future?

Opera Unite Homepage

After having started this blog just a few days ago, one of my favorite browsers has been released in a new beta version with a cool new feature called Opera Unite.

They call it “reinventing the web”, or “the Internet’s unfulfilled promise”. It’s a platform for providing services to the web from your web browser, rather than just being a mere user of web services. People can share files, pictures, streaming media and web pages, without the technical skills needed to setup a web server or having a domain to host their services.

The number of applications hosted on this new platform is potentially limitless. Third-party vendors can provide their own to take advantage of this technology, and give users new ways to interact between them directly. Currently there are only a handful of services, all created by Opera as the more trivial and straightforward examples of what can be done.

One important feature of this technology, is that users need to use the Opera browser only if they want to host or provide some service. Friends and relatives that you inform or invite to use your services can be using any modern web browser. They’re not bound to use Opera to access services hosted by other people. I have to say that I initially thought this to be a peer to peer platform a-la bittorrent, where both ends (server and client) had to be operating with applications aware of the sharing platform.

To be able to host services you need to have a user account at opera.com. You can have your account active from several computers (home, office, notebook) at the same time, each of which should be given a unique name. So one of the primary uses could be for our own consumption: to have services hosted in the office computer (e.g. file sharing) and be able to download files from home at night.

Opera Unite hosting the fridge service

However, I have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, the idea of decentralizing the web, of allowing people to interact without having to depend on a third party, of allowing our own personal computers to be first-class citizens of the web, sounds like a good one. Centralization is almost always a bad thing, and the web today is fundamentally centralized.

But on the other hand I don’t like the Opera browser to be bloated with this or other applications. I like it to be a web browser, and a web browser only. The only other thing they baked into it until now is the email client, and I (and many other people) have always thought they should give the option of downloading the browser without it bundled. But now they’re including yet another application in the package, effectively bloating it even more.

I think Opera Unite should be a separate application, a separate product. Otherwise, I believe it will affect corporate adoption of the browser, in spite of being the most innovative one out there. And what Opera needs right now is to expand the user base of its browser. I doubt that Opera Unite can bring that.

And there are the understandable security and privacy concerns too…

In terms of security, we could ask how insecure my computer turns when I enable these services? How much depends on the platform, and how much depends on the developer of a particular service? What does the platform do to protect users who are not security gurus, but want to take advantage of what it offers in a secure way?

And from the privacy point of view, what role do Opera servers play in this peer-to-peer connections? Do files pass through Opera servers while being downloaded by me from my buddy’s file sharing service? These are questions I have not devoted yet the time to answer. Let’s remember that they claim that client users can browse other user’s unite-hosted services with any modern web browser. I do not know how could they achieve that without using their own servers as a bridge for content to pass on. If both ends of the P2P connection are Unite-enabled Opera browsers, I understand, but otherwise, I don’t. Is this really P2P?

Also, if this actually depends on a central server after all (as I suspect), then the following question comes to my mind: is this predestined to depend solely on Opera’s infrastructure, or can it become an open standard, so that other providers can host their own Unite services platforms? Can third-party browser vendors enable their browsers to host services too? It would nice to be able to host a Unite service provider on our own servers, or to create independent applications to provide services. But this conflicts with the supposed intention of using Unite as a hook to gain more users for the Opera browser.

I am sure these and many other questions, particularly security-related questions, are probably being made by many people out there. And I haven’t even mentioned concerns about file and media sharing and the consequences it has in relation to intellectual property rights violations.

Anyway, it is undoubtedly a very controversial and bold move. Only the future will tell if it was a good one.