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Und noo a luuk et thees ifeneengs noos, bork bork bork.

I'm claiming that Opera 6 (and originally, Opera 7) get served the version of the site designed for Netscape 4.7.

And you're just as wrong now as you were when you said that the first time. I really do not understand this. The only possible explanation is that you didn't read The Fucking Article, or you didn't know what I meant by TFA.

The -30 in the stylesheets was to work around a bug in Opera 6.0.

A quote:

Isn't this just a problem with the newly released Opera7?

You mean, perhaps MSN had to write special versions of the page for the older Opera6? No. Opera6 handles the pages sent to MSIE6 just fine. Here is a screenshot:

The CTO of Opera Software uses the handle "howcome".

http://people.opera.com/howcome

Please stop using my name when you sign your messages.

The css MSN served Opera in their tests checks out with only a warning about a missing background color.

Well, I've never liked IE -- worms aside -- and so I've mostly been a Netscape user. Tried NS5: hog, didn't like it. Tried NS6: hog, didn't like it. Went back to NS471 and have been mostly happy. Tried Opera (6, I think) and whenever I ran it my entire system shortly went massively unstable so I went back to NS471. I do hit the occasional page with problems, so if I really want to see that page I try several other browsers until I find one that works.

Point is, to quote from Opera's MSN page:

We encourage and expect major sites to test their pages with many different browsers, including Opera. If a page looks distorted in some browsers, there is probably something wrong with the page. It is possible to write pages that work in all popular browsers.

Whatever its faults, Netscape 4.71 is a popular (albeit old) browser.

Why doesn't MSN work with Opera

It's within their press release

They get delivered the stylesheet written for Netscape 4.7 - a much more popular browser than either Mozilla or Opera.

TFA seems to dipute that point.

It's just not true that the msn pages render perfect in every version of opera except the newest ones.

As shown by the above link, if MSN had spent less money and *not* developed specific opera pages, they would have enhanced the Opera compatibility of the code.

Håkon,

This is very smart marketing in an industry in which marketing is usually very primitive.

As others have said, you are making your point without going to court. That's admirable.

Microsoft is so abusive that I wrote an article about the abuse so that I would have some way of explaining it to my customers: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

LOL! At one time, the Swedish chef was my favorite TV character. Although I was an adult, and didn't often watch TV, I watched the Muppets more than the children in the neighborhood.

Be sure to give credit to whomever wrote the original Swedish chef software. I don't see that now on your web pages. Also, notice that the press release about the Bork edition says, "Pal A. Hvistendahl, Marcom Director". Shouldn't this be "Marketing Director"? If you mean MARketing COMmunications, that isn't an advisable word because it communicates only to people who think about marketing all the time.

Opera began as a research project at Norway's national telecom company (Telenor) in 1994. It was spun off into an independent company the following year. Opera Software ASA is privately-owned, mostly by its own employees. If you made them a really good offer, you could probably buy the whole company.

They're not open source. They're just examples the best of what closed-source companies should be. They respond quickly to customer issues, they patch rapidly, and they make a superb product. For the record, 'OSS' is not always equivalent to 'good', and 'closed source' doesn't always have to mean 'crappy abominable bloatware'.

Opera began as a research project at Norway's national telecom company (Telenor) in 1994. It was spun off into an independent company the following year. Opera Software ASA is privately-owned, mostly by its own employees. If you made them a really good offer, you could probably buy the whole company.

They're not open source. They're just examples the best of what closed-source companies should be. They respond quickly to customer issues, they patch rapidly, and they make a superb product. For the record, 'OSS' is not always equivalent to 'good', and 'closed source' doesn't always have to mean 'crappy abominable bloatware'.

That is not true. Opera 6 renders the page just fine, as described here. It is just typical of Microsoft to resort to dirty tactics as posting anonymously with such false information.

Håkon Wium Lie
CTO, Opera Software

No, it is quite obvious that they have done this to deliberately undermine the newest version of Opera, otherwise why would they send the correct stylesheet to Opera 6? You can read more about it here.

Håkon Wium Lie
CTO, Opera Software

That's pretty easy to find out - just hit select 'small screen rendering' in a desktop version of Opera to try it out. Also check out http://www.opera.com/products/smartphone/smallscre en/ for more info - it works surprisingly well!

What it is is a time-honored Microsoft tactic to diminish consumers' opinion of competing products. There's a new browser war being fought, only this time, the battleground is the mobile market, where the biggest threat to IE arguably comes from Opera, and it's very much in Redmond's interest to make people think Opera's a crappy browser that doesn't display sites correctly.

As to the pettiness of Opera's response, I think it's a clever move. It's irreverent, it makes a pop-cultural reference, and it'll reveal Microsoftian assholishness to a bigger audience than the more reasonable explanation can.

Børk! Børk! Børk!

Opera 7 has very sophisticated rendering functions for small screens. For example Nokia uses Opera on its communicator and it's press releases like this one, which provides the Redmond paranoiacs with the willies.

The Opera guys are from Norway, but they have a satellite office in Sweden.

Too bad you're lying.

The Opera guys seem to be quite media-savvy, but not without irony. Go to the webpage of Håkon Wium Lie and discover what the did there. Håkun Veeoom Leee-a indeed... :D

Tom.

Try again... I downloaded it just fine.

No Opera 6 is not broken in that way. See here for a screenshot of Opera 6 displaying the page correctly (given the correct style sheet)

Maybe the homepage of Opera's CTO have some info that can enlighten you?

http://people.opera.com/~howcome/2003/2/msn/

Actually, it uses W3C's Document Object Model to alter the text on the page. You can check the script from:
http://www.opera.com/js/bork/encheferizer.js

I talked to Mr. Håkon Wium Lie myself, and he said that they repeatedly hav complained to MS about this and other problems over a long time, but nothing happened. The Opera problem was very, very obvious and could be seen very easily. Yet, they did not fix it. The error MSN on Opera error was the most reported Opera error of them all and I imagine that MSN got their fair share of complaints from the MSN on Opera users as well.. Mr. Lie said to me that "there's a fair shar of incompetence at Microsoft, but this problem is not caused by that." Seems like he has borked his own site as well... :)

This is untrue. Opera6 displays the page which is sent to MSIE6 just fine. You can see screenshots on this page.

Håkon Wium Lie
CTO, Opera Software

I'm very excited about the new Bork technology in Opera, however I am disappointed to find it is not available for Linux. I am a little distressed that Windows users get the superior browser, while Linux users are stuck with yesterday's news. Does Opera Software plan on bringing this enhancement to other platforms? I hope in the future all platforms will be equally supported with enhancements to the Opera browser. Many thanks!

Inspired by work on gesture-based marking menus (Callahan et al 1988), in 2001 we designed, implemented and evaluated a gesture-based mechanism for issuing the Back and Forward commands. Similar features were simultaneously released in the Opera 4 commercial web browser, and slightly later by the Mozilla Optimoz project 5. To our knowledge, neither of these commercial implementations has been formally evaluated.

Join the mailing list and you'll get an e-mail when there's a new version out.

Um.. if you read the article, the guy who WORKS for Opera used wget with different browser identification strings. He includes links to the pages that wget obtained for different browser strings.. you can download them and diff them easily enough. If you put 'Opera' in the identification string, you got a broken style sheet, whereas if you put in 'Oprah', you got the IE6 one that works just fine. Earlier and latest versions of Opera rendered fine with the IE6 stylesheet.. a specific check was being made for Opera, and Opera was being fed a style sheet that made it appear very broken.

Funny thing.. as of last night, though, MSN now looks fine in Opera, where I saw it was broken before. Power of Slashdot, huh?

http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/

"The default style sheet in IE and Netscape gives the body element margin: 8px, Opera uses padding: 8px. Padding is the margin between the body element and the content, while margin is the margin between the body and the html element (or the head element if visible). If either margin or padding is explicitly set on body, the other property should be set too."

BTW, why do the moderators give Mitreya's BS posts high scores, when he is wrong -- even by his own admissions?

BTW, why do the moderators give Mitreya's BS posts high scores, when he is wrong -- even by his own admissions?

That read the source for the Opera page and saw this commented out gem that says what Opera really thinks about MS (and Netscape)?

<!--
<h2>Give it up! Don't you realize that Microsoft won the browser war?</h2>

<p>No. The Web was created to offer universal access to information. No single vendor should be allowed to treat it as private property. Netscape used to be the bully on the block, but Microsoft outperforms them in this role. If you would like the Web to remain a place where no single vendor dominates, please consider using Opera.
-->

This is not correct.

Opera6 shows the page that MSIE6 receives just fine. I even included a screenshot of it on my page -- scroll down to the second image.

If you still believe this is Opera6's fault, please provide a test case showing how it fails.

Isn't this just a problem with the newly released Opera7?

You mean, perhaps MSN had to write special versions of the page for the older Opera6? No. Opera6 handles the pages sent to MSIE6 just fine.

What Opera 6 bug was Microsoft working around? According to Opera in this article: "You mean, perhaps MSN had to write special versions of the page for the older Opera6? No. Opera6 handles the pages sent to MSIE6 just fine."

Opera doesn't import your IE home page. On install, Opera's default homepage, like most browsers, is one of their own. (And it looks just fine in IE.)

"To test this, the User-Agent filed was changed slightly -- from "Opera" to "Oprah". Since there is no "Oprah" browser on the market, one assumes that MSN has not created special versions for it.
...
Looking into this 37k file, we find a reference to the same style sheet as MSIE6 receives. Just to make sure the server does not modify this style sheet before sending it to the browsers, we fetch the style sheet with the "Oprah" browser:
...
The resulting file is identical to the one MSIE6 receives. Therefore, MSN looks for "Opera" in the User-Agent string and on purpose send Opera7 a style sheet which distort pages."

"If you read the article you would see that Opera is perfectly capable of rendering the page that MSN sends to IE. If you change Opera to identify itself as IE, no problem.

The problem here is that if you've set Opera to the report the true user-agent, MSN sends a page with a broken CSS file that tells the browser to render the content so that the page becomes unreadable."

I agree that this is most likely a deliberate attempt to discredit Opera. However, you appear not to have read the report that carefully yourself: "MSN looks for 'Opera' in the User-Agent string and on purpose send Opera 7 a style sheet which distort pages. [...] Opera 7 handles the HTML pages sent to it similar to other browser, including Microsoft's own MSIE. That is, when you feed the page meant for Opera 7 to MSIE 6 it shows the same distortions as Opera 7 [and] Opera 6 handles the pages sent to MSIE 6 just fine."

And this is Opera's default UA-string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]

This is actually how it looks when you "identify as MSIE6" in Opera! As you can see the UA-string looks nothing like the one found in MSIE6. "Opera" is in fact always present in the UA-string -- no matter what you choose to identify as. This is what Microsoft has exploited. Some Opera users work around this by using Proxomitron, to make the UA-string look exactly like the one in IE.

However the same page is returned when using Opera v7 which renders the page differently.

It's not surprising that msn hasn't tested their pages on Opera v7, which, as far as I can tell, was released last week .

This is nothing more than Opera fishing for press coverage for their new browser. And it's a pretty juvenile attempt at that.

Does it bother anyone else that the linked page on Opera's site which explains the problem looks horrible? It features a difficult-to-print color scheme, oversized fonts and tables that are way, way wider than the accompanying text?

I just thought that was kind of ironic for a page about how MSN is feeding their browser bogus style sheets, that's all.

I'm shocked that Opera doesn't make that clearer, afterall the page you showed really should have pointed that out.

You know, I think Opera has a huge problem in marketing its efforts. For instance, Opera has a very nifty feature called OperaShow which basically allows you to present stuff a la PowerPoint using W3C-defined html and CSS2 tags. As the author of the page I linked to says, it's almost "technology indistinguishable from magic". Real good stuff, and it's been there since 2000.

For some mysterious reason, Opera isn't showing this as one of its main features. Which is a pity really; I know many people who have switched after I showed them this. (Not that they use OperaShow properly, but still)

Opera Goes to Hollywood

See Opera make its debut in Hollywood, starring in "The Recruit" alongside Al Pacino and Colin Farrell.

Opera fans: Wake up your fellow movie goers, give Opera a cheer during the film. ;-)

Opera Goes to Hollywood

See Opera make its debut in Hollywood, starring in "The Recruit" alongside Al Pacino and Colin Farrell.

Opera fans: Wake up your fellow movie goers, give Opera a cheer during the film. ;-)

and the company is not taking out bogus patents to "protect" them.

Yup. And they have a firm stance against software patents too.

The browser is available free of charge with a sponsored advertising banner in the top-right corner of the user interface. To remove the advertising banner users must register their version for USD 39. Various discounts apply. Until March 1, users can also enjoy 14 banner-free days from the day they download Opera.

Just noticed, but interestingly enough, the additional features listed for Opera 7 mention only free email support and an OperaMail account for six months. No mention of an ad-free version.

For the alpha previews of their unix versions, go here.