Ruoho

We are living in a digital world. Achievements like email, chat, Google, Wikipedia or online television are part of our daily life. It hadn't always been like that. During the past twenty years we were facing a virtual revolution. A technical change amended everything: The Internet.


No one thought that ARPANET, a computer network build in 1969, would be the beginning of the most important network ever. Twenty years later CERN researchers developed the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, it was just a tool for researchers. Computers were expensive, the Internet was slow and nearly everything was text-based. In 1993 the first browser with a capability for graphic representation was announced. That was revolutionary. Now you could see pictures and buttons to click on.

The Internet spread out very wide. It is a continuous innovation to a digital universe. Nearly everything can be done online: shopping, banking, chatting, twittering, information research. There are no limits anymore. Even on our mobiles we handle emails, read news and check the weather. You'll never want to do without it again. To be means today to be online. A newer achievement of the web are social networks, the virtual world gets smaller and more personal.

We explore this virtual world through browsers. Every one has its own characteristics and the user may decide which one he chooses. In most cases the main functions are pretty the same, but some aspects differ vast, especially the security aspect. Browsers are spiked with additional stuff, for example Firefox's add-ons, or Opera's widgets. They are nice little gadgets to make your browser more comfortable, fun stuff and useful tools.

The release of Opera 10 opens the gate to a new step of innovation: Opera Unite. It combines web-browser and web-server, that offers the possibility to share files within your network, with your friends or with everyone easily. You may share pictures, files or your music (but don't get in trouble with the law – it isn't a pirate bay). So what is the gorgeous thing in Unite? It is simple: Everything runs in one – united. You have media player, file sharing tools, chat, instant messaging, web-server and browser all in one, with the option to create more services. The trend goes to a multi-functional all-in-one online managing device and there it is.



¹William Shakespeare
picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg