I’m still kinda that Opera Unite didn’t take off. It was a decentralized server built into the Opera browser, that was easy enough for regular people to use. You just set it up in a config UI in the browser and could enable features like chat, blogs, photo galleries, a music player, etc. At the time, everyone had UPnP enabled, CGNAT wasn’t a thing, and Opera handled UDP hole punching for it, so it mostly just worked.
https://www.wired.com/2009/10/opera-unite-puts-the-web-server-in-your-web-browser/
This was back when Opera were still based in Norway, had their own browser engine, and were very innovative. A large number of features that became commonplace were in Opera years before any other browser, like tabbed browsing, full-page zoom (browser zoom used to only increase font size while keeping everything else the same size!), restoring your tabs when you re-open the browser, pop-up blocker, a new tab page that shows your commonly accessed sites, private/incognito browsing, sidebars, and more.
Sure, there’s a bunch of downsides to a server being built into your browser, but it was an interesting idea. People that don’t know anything about servers were able to easily try it out.
Unfortunately regular people don’t understand why they’d use something like this rather than just using Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, etc. and the major limitation of self-hosting this way is that it’s only accessible when your computer is on, which regular people aren’t used to.
A lot of people also had pretty limited bandwidth. I was in Australia on ADSL2+ with around 9Mbps down and 700Kbps up.
Maybe a similar idea would work today now that a lot of people have faster connections. Comcast boosted upload speeds in some markets last year - in my area their regular plans start at 300Mbps down and 100Mbps up.
The US does! The majority of internet traffic in the USA (around 55%) is via IPv6. This was driven by two things:
Comcast was the first major ISP worldwide to roll out IPv6 to customers, 15 years ago in 2011. They finished the rollout in 2014, and 70% of their customers were using IPv6 within a year.
Mobile carriers use IPv6 a lot. T-Mobile’s network is fully IPv6-only, using 464XLAT to connect to legacy IPv4-only servers. No CGNAT. They’ve done several presentations about it. The other carriers aren’t too far behind.
The fact that IPv6 usage isn’t higher is mainly limited by servers not having it enabled, not users. IPv6 usage spikes on weekends and after business hours because there’s a lot of enterprise systems that people use at work, that only use IPv4.
It’s frustrating that other countries adopted CGNAT instead of switching to IPv6 like the US mobile carriers did. Argentina has less than 30% IPv6 adoption for example.
I’m still kinda that Opera Unite didn’t take off. It was a decentralized server built into the Opera browser, that was easy enough for regular people to use. You just set it up in a config UI in the browser and could enable features like chat, blogs, photo galleries, a music player, etc. At the time, everyone had UPnP enabled, CGNAT wasn’t a thing, and Opera handled UDP hole punching for it, so it mostly just worked. https://www.wired.com/2009/10/opera-unite-puts-the-web-server-in-your-web-browser/
This was back when Opera were still based in Norway, had their own browser engine, and were very innovative. A large number of features that became commonplace were in Opera years before any other browser, like tabbed browsing, full-page zoom (browser zoom used to only increase font size while keeping everything else the same size!), restoring your tabs when you re-open the browser, pop-up blocker, a new tab page that shows your commonly accessed sites, private/incognito browsing, sidebars, and more.
Sure, there’s a bunch of downsides to a server being built into your browser, but it was an interesting idea. People that don’t know anything about servers were able to easily try it out.
I really hope technologies like Veilid, Tailcat, and I2P take off more, but they require Developer, Developers, Developers!
Oh man, now you ruined my evening, I didn’t know about that, it’s awesome!
Maybe I wouldn’t have spent so much time building a modern P2P decentralised sharing protocol if I already knew it was tried and killed off…
Thanks for the history nugget!
++
Unfortunately regular people don’t understand why they’d use something like this rather than just using Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, etc. and the major limitation of self-hosting this way is that it’s only accessible when your computer is on, which regular people aren’t used to.
A lot of people also had pretty limited bandwidth. I was in Australia on ADSL2+ with around 9Mbps down and 700Kbps up.
Maybe a similar idea would work today now that a lot of people have faster connections. Comcast boosted upload speeds in some markets last year - in my area their regular plans start at 300Mbps down and 100Mbps up.
Instead of just adopting ipv6 they started sharing ip addresses across customers lol
One does not simply adopt ipv6
The US does! The majority of internet traffic in the USA (around 55%) is via IPv6. This was driven by two things:
The fact that IPv6 usage isn’t higher is mainly limited by servers not having it enabled, not users. IPv6 usage spikes on weekends and after business hours because there’s a lot of enterprise systems that people use at work, that only use IPv4.
It’s frustrating that other countries adopted CGNAT instead of switching to IPv6 like the US mobile carriers did. Argentina has less than 30% IPv6 adoption for example.
We gonna get ipv8 before ipv6