A decade ago, the Opera web browser shipped a virtual fridge and a built-in web server right inside its web browser. Why did it fail to decentralize the web?

A look back at Opera’s attempt to bundle peer-to-peer web self-hosting in their browser back in 2009.

    • ​@lemmy.ml
      3·
      3 years ago

      I did, I also tried Opera Unite back in the day. Opera Unite was far simpler and even if you didn’t know html or programming you could use it, it wasn’t P2P so if your computer was off so was your website. Beaker requires some html and programming knowledge (and knowing their JavaScript APIs* if you want to build something relatively complex) but if you publish interesting enough content other people may also contribute bandwidth and host your website so in theory you could turn off your computer and the site will remain online. In practice I’ve found that for most sites there’s simply no interest so they are offline most of the time. I haven’t tested it recently, when I tried there was a requirement of a Twitter account if you wanted your website to be on their list of websites, I hope they could get rid of that. I should probably try it again and see how things have improved.

      * I tested this a year or two ago, I just installed the latest version and it seems to have changed a lot, it used to work with an “index.json” file and several JavaScript components but it seems that those old websites are now broken so I’ll have to test the new way of building websites with Beaker.