A mysterious web page, called "Freedom" in its URL, has appeared on Opera"s site making the rather bold claim that, "[o]n June 16th at 9:00 a.m (CEDT), [the Norwegian company] will reinvent the Web." This sounds like hyperbole, but it has got people all over the Internet talking.
Some believe that this is the date the final for Opera 10 will be released, but others say that, however much promise that new version holds, it is unlikely to "reinvent the Web." Others speculate that it has something to do with Turbo, a manner of compressing web pages so that they load faster. The presence of clouds on the "Freedom" page has got some thinking that Opera is about to do something important with cloud computing.
One Opera employee writes enigmatically on Twitter, "We"ve put the internet on a USB stick so that you can always have a connection wherever you are!"
Checking the source code for the "Freedom" page exposes part of a hidden message that is slowly being revealed. As of today (June 13), the secret message reads: "We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer. Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things. But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers...".
Whatever the case, we are promised a webcast on June 16 in which Opera will tell us what it is all about. With the mystery and the growing hype, many will be counting on them to deliver something sensational.