A Blog From Behind the Trenches

The Opera Unite team now has an official blog. If you don't want to miss out on Unite related information, head over there and subscribe.

You know that "best internet experience on any device" thing Opera has going?

In late 2007, a semi-annual seminar took place at a secret location. And what do you do with a place filled with Opera engineers? You have geeky competitions using Opera technology, of course.

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I think I like this campaign much better than the one from Microsoft:

Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts STRAIGHT

If you are wondering how the Web server in Unite performs, our friend over at unitehowto.com has benchmarked it.

His benchmarks show that Opera Unite can do up to "impressive 800 requests per second" on decent hardware, and even with dynamic content. You also can't DDoS a person via Opera Unite. He also says that Opera Unite uses "very smart file I/O", and that even if you save data to file, you can push out 744 requests per second.

As a comparison, PHP+Apache+MySQL is almost 2 times faster, nginx (one of the fastest servers available) is only 5 times faster, and the MadFish WebToolkit ("compiled raw C++") Web server is only 6 times faster.

Still, he concludes, Unite beats them both at ease of use.

Read more: Opera Unite benchmark @ unitehowto.com

Well, not exactly.

But Opera's Chief Standards Officer, Charles McCathieNevile (Chaals), has been elected for a two-year term to the W3C Advisory Board:

Created in March 1998, the Advisory Board provides ongoing guidance to the Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution. The Advisory Board also serves the Members by tracking issues raised between Advisory Committee meetings, soliciting Member comments on such issues, and proposing actions to resolve these issues. The Advisory Board manages the evolution of the Process Document. The Advisory Board hears appeals of Member Submission requests that are rejected for reasons unrelated to Web architecture

This group is similar to the Board of Directors in a company, although it has no formal executive role.

One of the most frequent questions I see about the Microsoft antitrust case in the EU is why Microsoft should have to include competing products in Windows. Is poor Microsoft being hunted by the evil EU with its silly laws that ensure competition in a free market?

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Opera Unite is here.

From opera.com/freedom:

Today, we unveiled Opera Unite,
A new technology that shakes up the old client-server computing model of the Web.

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Wow, I have clearly missed a lot while on vacation for a couple of weeks! Not only did we lauch the beta of Opera 10 and Opera Mobile 9.7, but there are other developmens such as Opera reinventing the Web, and of course Microsoft is up to its regular tricks.

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Microsoft has decided to cancel a hearing it requested in the current EU antitrust case. According to Microsoft's Dave Heiner, this is because the dates of the hearing coincided with the "International Competition Network" competition law meeting, meaning that "many of the most influential Commission and national competition officials with the greatest interest in our case will be in Zurich and so unable to attend [their] hearing in Brussels".

Microsoft is concerned that this will deny them their right to be heard, and their "rights of defense", despite their admission that the hearing has no legal weight as such.

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According to a report by Finjan, Opera is used on 3% of a recently discovered botnet consisting of 1.9 million malware-infected PCs.

While a "fun" fact in itself, this number actually confirms the global Opera usage figure reported by StatCounter. However, the botnet figures have a much higher usage share for IE, and lower for Firefox, than StatCounter reports.

Again, we should remain skeptical of browser statistics because of all the error sources that exist. The botnet figures are very interesting, though, because the methodology is obviously very different to that of StatCounter and other browser statistics companies.

It does indicate that Net Applications's <1% for Opera must be way off, if nothing else. And yet, journalists and bloggers repeat the numbers from Net Applications without batting an eye.