On the Edge!

This morning’s news paper took me to this article by Chris. Chris Shared his views elaborately on Unite services. There’s a good amount of conversation on his site, i would recommend you to head over to his post to get more on the discussions.

I am writing a post here in detail as i could not  share all my thoughts  on his site due to lack of time.

Opera Unite is a set of services that are integrated into the browser using which one can  share files, photos,  chat with people, and better make it your web server.

These are quite interesting features you can expect to run from a browser. I tried them yesterday, and i was really excited to see the review by Chris. I have to tell you Chris, opera deserves an appreciation for such an attempt given the fact unite is still in its alpha stages and has to go a long way. Its true that all the services are implemented pretty neatly. I felt all the services offered are really not necessary for the layman at least for majority of them. The following are reasons why i think.

1. Hosting a server on my laptop is good, but it has a long list of limitations and that is why we prefer web hosts.

2. As for as file sharing goes,  there are a variety of options which i use already, why would i need  to use this. 

3. With respect to other services,  If i am already using a lot of social sites (facebook, flickr, etc. where i am happy with what i am)  then why would i be interested to move everything into opera’s services. I am sure most of my friends are not on opera’s communities.

But there are a few things i really would like to appreciate. Opera is slowly getting that polish as browser which lacked in the previous versions. It really did not seem like an alpha experience, at least not to me trying out the browser and the service. The browser still rocks when you compare it with Chrome or Firefox or Safari or Flock, etc.

I have never found time till today to express my thoughts on the browser wars. I follow the browser wars very frequently. I not only follow the browser developments and i dare to take the risk of downloading the latest build of one and test it out. Just to tell you i have played around with Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE8, Chrome, K-meleon, Kninja, Deepnet, Flock, Amaya, Maxthon, Netscape for couple of months. I am always amused to see what browsers will be capable of in the future. I recently realized that somehow chrome has become my default browser instead of Firefox which was my default for almost 3 years prior losing out to chrome.

Rendering Engine:-

Webkit is the best (I mean it) ever rendering engine, that i have seen so far and used. Two companies(Google, apple) trust it, makes it worth looking into. Web kit is known for its speed and cold start. gecko is till on the heels of Webkit to be precise. Google was supporting Mozilla for a very long time and in spite of it they chose to go with webkit and Gecko, proves worthy.

Memory Management:-

The browser has been redesigned in such a fashion, that each tab is managed as a separate process makes it really simple to manage multiple tabs, i.e if a tab crashes due to a plug-in problem or memory problem or something, your browser will be still up and you will loose only the tab that crashed. There is not better browser than opera on memory management, i feel chrome will be there soon.

UI simplicity:-

The UI is designed to be minimal and uncluttered, which helps people view more of the web than the browser. Before Chrome, Safari had the simplest of UI, after chrome safari changed it to the chrome style, shows simple the UI really is.

Community:-

A browser gets really complete when it has an open community working on it to improve it in all possible directions, Google has created that environment for webkit, with the initiative of chromium. A lot of add-ons, new features etc will be available as the development progresses. Moving ahead chrome will have a major market share.

Chrome still is in its very early stages of development and has to travel a long way to be the best browser, but am confident its on the right track. It is rough, it crashes etc.. so it might not be your favorite for now, but you can’t stay away.

I have been and am still a fan of Firefox and i extensively try a variety of the stuff the Mozilla labs innovates. I will miss the Weave, Ubiquity and a long list of add-ons that i use, But considering  the general user on the web, what matters most is  speed, memory and the UI and chrome will win everyone in no time on these aspects. If you are really interested in what changes browsers will bring in tomorrow have a peek here… i seriously wish chrome also gets a similar community.