Opera is the little browser that could.

For years, Opera has been pushing out innovative features – it was the first browser to offer tabs, for example. Yet, it has struggled to gain much of the spotlight, especially in North America.

That said, Opera has been thriving. A case in point is the mobile market where Opera has more than 50% market share – something I didn’t realize until seeing a slide at the Canadian Telecom Summit earlier this week.

In an excellent analysis, Chris Messina starts by taking the blogosphere to take by not doing a good job in tackling Opera’s newest initiative, Unite, which is an attempt by Opera to include a “personal server” in a browser so you can easily share music, documents, movies and photographs with family and friends.

It’s an ambitious project but it shows the kind of innovation the various browser makers need to provide.

While Unite has huge potential, the reason it didn’t get as much attention as it probably deserved has a lot to do with Opera’s modest profile. Many people have never used the Opera browser, especially if you don’t live in Europe, so when United was announced, it was quickly dismissed as uninteresting.

As well, Unite was swamped by another round of Twitter news – this time how Twitter postponed scheduled maintenance to keep the lines of communications.

For anyone who dismissed Unite, it may be time to take another look.

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