Opera Software has told the world it will soon "reinvent the web."

With a cryptic post to its website - at the url www.opera.com/freedom - the Norwegian outfit claims this epic feat will be accomplished in less than four days. "On June 16th at 9:00am (CEDT)," the post reads, "we will reinvent the web."

Opera boast

We asked Opera to explain itself, and it seems the company will reinvent the net with a webcast. "With 15 years of continuous innovation, Opera will introduce a technology that will forever change the fundamental fabric of the Web," reads an email from the company. "Join us at this exclusive video-based press briefing for a glimpse of the future of Web computing and one of Opera's most significant innovations to date."

We'll fill on in on this supposedly net-shattering technology as soon as the cast hits the web - or maybe before, if we can get someone to talk.

In a recent Tweet, Opera browser designer Jon Hicks says the company has managed to shrink the net down to the size of your thumb . "We've put the internet on a USB stick," he writes, "so that you can always have a connection wherever you are!" But we're taking this with a grain of salt.

Opera's teaser page includes a graphic that would seem to indicate the pending announcement has something to do with the cloud. But since since the digerati insist on using the moniker to describe almost anything, this isn't very helpful either.

The teaser comes just days after Opera unveiled the first edition of Opera 10, which includes a server-side technology dubbed Turbo, designed to speed page loads on slow networks. So we can't expect a new browser on Tuesday. But the Opera faithful don't know what to expect.

"The page suggests it's something about web clouds... a large update to Link, perhaps?," asks one user, referring to an service that lets you sync your browser bookmarks and other data via the web. "Although that would be great (settings sync, password sync, cookies sync, rss feeds sync etc), it's hardly 'reinvention.'

"My other idea is that Opera is out of server capacity for Turbo, and wants all Opera users with fast connections to be a part of the global Opera Turbo farm, to compress and push out lofi-web to people with slow connections. Nah. P:

Or perhaps MS has given in, and start providing Windows with IE and Opera... freedom to choose between them? Extremely unlikely."

That, at least, we can be sure of. ®