Along with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, Opera is one of the world’s most popular net browsers, and it’s just rolled out a new service that could see it grab an even bigger piece of the user pie, Opera Unite. It’s not about faster load times, better security or flinging as many confusing acronyms as possible at you, but something entirely different. Instead, Opera Unite turns your browser into a web server. For consumers, it’s a fantastic way to stream music remotely through a browser (Ideal for those at work pining for their iTunes libraries) and pull up pictures from your hard drive wherever you are, but Opera Unite goes one step further by letting you simply and easily host a website through your own browser – and that doesn’t have to be Opera, incidentally.

It’s essentially an easy to use FTP server, but it opens up a whole new way for browsers and software to head. At a glance, it goes directly against the trend of cloud computing, sticking all the workload on your end, but Opera claims it’s the next step democratizing the cloud – by moving workloads away from data centres to every computer on every street.

It’s only a start of course: the web hosting service Opera Unite lets you run flat out doesn’t do PHP or mySQL, but it’s good to see a browser going away, coming up with something truly inventive and flipping the box. It’ll be interesting to see if Mozilla, the other relative minnow in the browser space (Microsoft, Apple and Google are the other main competitors), will move this way,and whether this will change how we see the internet working. Opera’s opened up the whole service to developers, so there’s no reason why not: it could make running an internet start up a whole lot cheaper. I’m waiting to have my eyes opened.