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Microsoft Sends Broken Stylesheets to Opera
An anonymous reader writes "The Register has a story that the MSN homepage serves a different style sheet to the Opera web browser that makes Opera appear to be broken. Is this deliberate or a mistake? Who can possibly say? Opera's own take on the situation can be found here." This is not the first time.
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Seriously, isn't this why the W3C tries to make people follow standards? So it doesn't matter what browser you use, it should all work?
Anyone, including Microsoft, who writes a site that serves seperate pages to different browsers is doing a disservice to the public.
..if there's an innocent explanation for this, it wouldn't be the first example of paranoia from Opera's general direction this month.
Opera should respond by automatically translating any page on the Microsoft web site into German and back again with Babelfish.
While there are still copies of Netscape and Netscape users out there. It looks like the majority of the people use Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape (not sure what order). It looks like Microsoft is taking aim at Opera now.
For what its worth, I think Opera is the best browser out there. It has great speed, and renders the HTML like its suppose to be rendered. Can't speak for stylesheets though, don't use them.
am I mistaken or can't opera report itself as MSIE? In which case the only way it would get a bad CSS is if MS has evil extensions to CSS that will kill any browser except IE. Also, I'm no lawyer, but what are the legal implications of this? none is what I would guess. If you go to hotmail with Safari it will tell you that you can't use safari to check your hotmail account. Not to mention that I have had websites complain about mozilla, suggesting that I instead go get netscape 6...duh.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
I have Opera set to identify as MSIE 6.0. Maybe there's something I'm missing out on by doing so, but at least this way I don't get warnings from Hotmail or, as this article says, different pages.
I'm starting to think this isn't the best place to promote my Anti-Sig Campaign.
It would be nice to see a browser capable of masquerading around as IE or Netscape to decieve these foolish websites into not knowing what they are.
I've heard plenty of stories of forms suddenly working when a feature in a browser was changed to show Internet Explorer for Windows/Mac, and otherwise breaking when they work just fine. Or in my case, I came across a site that said IE and Netscape only, but used Opera and it worked perfectly - this sort of ignorance on the part of web developers really is intolerable.
I think we should give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here. I mean, it's really easy to slip up and identify a specific user agent, and serve a web page to it that has a content margin set to -30 pixels. We've all done it before, right?
...
What if Realplayer had clips on their website, and you couldn't view them without the geniune realplayer software?
MSN should be able to block non-IE browsers if they want. It's a free country. Until you become a rich and powerful corporation that is.
In either case...
I've noticed many Linux browsers over the last 2-3 years having trouble with Hotmail and MSN web sites. Mostly just fonts, and other display anomolays. I didn't think it was somethig MS would have been doing on purpose though.
I submitted the same story 3 hours ago. Stop stealing my scoop :)
Anything that can be explained away as an accident, while it makes your competition looks bad, sounds like the old Microsoft we know and love.
Just like how they are whinning that because of open source, they may have to lower prices. Poor guys.
In MS case, it looks like a good offense IS a good defense.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I love the bald-faced lying that MS pulls out for this behavior. "We're heavily invested in following standards." or "We're trying to produce the best site for all viewers." Yeah, right. Explain why there would be any reason at all to force every child entity 30 pixels to the left of its parent. For that matter, why does MSN still use the tired old hack of sending different pages to each browser? I don't need 4 versions of my site to handle every viewer. Amazing.
Illegitimi non carborundum
..is fucking irritating. Don't mess with it!
NO! It it not necessary. It just makes things worse in the long run, so if you're doing this _you're_ part of the problem, so don't complain about how you have to treat browsers differently.
Sheeesh. Write to the standards, not browsers.
(And no, this isn't "insightful", it's totally _obvious_ to anyone with a clue)Belief is the currency of delusion.
Why did they pick Opera, and not Mozilla or Netscape, not to mention Safari?
Just tried www.msn.com with Opera 7. No matter what I set the agent identification to, msn keeps sending the wrong (faulty) stylesheet.
It looks like MSN uses more advanced techniques to find out what the client is than just the agent identification, in order to sabotage Opera in this case.
....this doesn't make much sense. MS makes a lot of money based on the popularity of their MSN portal. this portal links to a lot of their other properties as well and it is against their best interest to make it difficult for users with a different browsers to access this page.
one would think that since they want people coming to this page and accessing it regularly they would make it easier for them to get here.
conspiracy theory aside this doesn't make sense from a business point of view. i have a feeling this is a mistake of some sort.
"Unlike most of you, I am not a nut." - Homer J. Simpson
This is just another prove over how Microsoft cares about standards with they monopoly over the information technology market.
The worst thing is that most people don't care, since most of the home-pc users are acually using the technology Microsoft has control over.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I think you miss the point. People don't use alternative browsers because of bullshit like this.
Isn't MSN meant to be commerically independent of Microsoft?
Older version of IE were also purposely broken in the same way; forced obelesence? As a regular Opera user I notice the same problem on some portions of the Microsoft web site as well (not just MSN).
To me this just proves that the remedy isn't working, that MS as a company prefers dirty tricks to competition and that the states that have not agreed to settlement had better press MS hard. (Wow holy run on sentence batman). It's sad that a company as successful and as full of talented people as MS has to resort to this type of behavior when a competitor comes out with a good product.
I'm reminded of a famous quote "Can't we just all get a long". I guess if your MS and you can't or won't compete the answer is no.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Why?
Why browse with flash, style sheets, scripting or Java turned on?
I have one site that requires IE and most days I never turn it on.
If it can't be written in plain text then it's probally not something I really need to read.
Henry J. Cobb http://www.io.com/~hcobb Any sufficiently cool technology is indistinguishable from religion.
And did you ever try looking at Microsoft help pages via Opera? The fonts are all reduced to about 3 pt.. Perhaps it's just my own ineptitude, but that's the only site that does that to me, and it looks fine in other browsers.
Example:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=202633
It is Microsoft's website afterall.
Who says it has to work with other companies browsers?
If you don't like it, either use IE (not me thanks) or not visit the website (that would be me).
Microsoft will notice the lack of ad revenue. Then they might fix it. If it is enough for them to care. Being that this is Opera, I kind of doubt it.
For a while I had to change my User-Agent string under Mozilla to that of IE6 under WinXP when visiting MSDN pages. Thanks Mozdev's uabar, and later Xulplanet's prefbar! Content served to Mozilla UA strings was unreadable with much of the text over-lapping. This went on for almost a year, but it seems to have been okay for about a month.
:D The whole time though, I had no problem with the MSDN subscriber downloads site, which even had a message for Netscape users.
Rather coincidentally, it was fixed shortly after I filled out a MSFT survey that appeared as I tried to leave the site - I claimed I was leaving because I was fed up with changing my UA string. Of course, I'm not conceited enough to think they fixed their problems because of me
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Long ago, like version 0.98, mozilla had a nifty ability to render msnbc.com's news navigator, which is done in IE using an activex control. Microsoft's Evil(tm) spys found out and broke it. Praise Jebus for news.google.com.
I just tried what the Opera folks said, and it's giving me a page that is a much different size than they say they received, and doesn't appear to render incorrectly. I dunno, maybe MS "fixed it"...
According to the web logs on the various sites I host, Mozilla and other Gecko-based browsers make up almost 15% of web traffic now, and Opera has a signficant enough user-base that it also makes it into the top 10 user-agents on web sites that get 1M+ hits per month from 100+ countries. I think the problem is that people need to move away from Microsoft web deveopment tools until they can learn to play nice and output standards-compliant HTML code. Ever try using the "save as HTML" feature in a Microsoft product? A 100-row table becomes a 2MB plaintext file by the time it makes it to the web...
I used to have different style sheets for different browsers in an effort to make my websites look good for all of them. More than once I updated some of the html and only tested the pages in IE where they looked fine (I know, I know, but programmers are naturally lazy.) It turns out the style sheets for the other browsers totally made the pages look broken. I'm not defending MS. It would not surprise me if they did it on purpose, but I am saying it is easy to do. Now I just have one style sheet and I made sure to use simpler html that would look good on all browsers. Sometimes simple is better.
Pocket PC Games
browsers sometimes modify the content before saving then to disk.
Just skip it, I say. It would lead to more correct code.
Maybe they just think Opera is a better browser than IE? Opera does, after all, run primarily on Windows...
I also use Konq once in a while when a site tells me I don't have the right browser. I have it set to report that it's IE and that works just fine. It really pisses me off that by telling the server it's IE, it can display the page perfectly. Why do people require a specific browser? That's just plain ignorance.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
It does not amaze me that Microsoft is doing something funky, and while I remain curious why Microsoft would target Opera specifically - it doesn't surprise me in the least that they are still busting browsers.
:)
It will be interesting to see how they respond to this considering that they went out of their way to block access to MSN by non-IE browsers in the past. I guess the only good thing that can come of this is that people will stop using MSN
You can see how webpages react to various browsers at www.wannabrowser.com
I'm not going to bother posting the results here but it's easy enough to see for yourself what the differences are.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
The same thing happens on some versions of the support.ms.com site and it's annoying as hell. I belive that MS just takes the default IE one and then strips out what they think to be for "inferior browsers" which leaves a broken and messed up template.
Perhaps Slashdot are using stylesheets to make Slashdot work differently on Opera! It makes us look like Opera users' comments are being more highly moderated on average, when in fact Rob has found a clever method of making all of my posts look like fives!
;)
Update by JD: Nope, I forced myself to check it in IE (shudder) and Lynx (just to be sure), and it turns out that us Opera users really ARE that much cleverer than the masses of Microsoft using drones.
I think you miss the point,
99% of people don't give a shit.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
MS are free to serve up whatever they like on their servers. You don't have to go to msn.com, nobody is forcing you. So while this seems unethical nobody is being coerced into anything. An alternative might be to have laws that force companies to serve up sensible HTML to all browsers. How is that going to be implemented? That would be one hell of a legal nightmare. And what about people who write shoddy HTML for all platforms? Should they be punsihed less than people who can at least get it right for some platforms? So while we might not like what MS is doing there really isn't anything you can do about it. If you need to use msn.com, don't use Opera. If you like Opera, don't use msn.com. Nobody is forcing you to do anything.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I use Opera 6.0. I've got 7.0 loaded as well, but haven't paid for it yet. MUCH better browser than IE for many purposes. I still have to keep IE & Netscape around for those pages that DON'T follow the standards (or rather, are tailored to run on IE non-standard).
While MS isn't above dirty tricks like this, it's entirely possible that this is just faulty autodetection. I remember that there was some issue with sites detecting Mozilla as NS 4.x and sending a faulty stylesheet.
As has already been said, Opera should just add a config option to send an MSIE User-Agent.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
MSN (and other Microsoft sites) is very IE-centric. It uses several IE features, so probably it would already seem broken to Opera or Mozilla users. Probably that's why they serve a different stylesheet, to make the site work with other browsers. The reason why it doesn't work? Well... do you expect any Microsoft product to work flawlessly? ;o)
Just kidding, of course. I think it doesn't work with Opera because nobody uses Opera anyway :o)
I'm using Mozilla on the Mac, and MSNBC is one of my preferred news sites. I have it all set up with the stocks I want to watch, local stories, et al.
It seems that, every few months, the cookie is reset/deleted/whatever, and I have to go back through and set it up again. Very annoying, though I just accept it as the price I have to pay for accessing a Microsoft site with a non-MS OS and a non-MS browser.
I use Opera as my primary browser, and have Netscape 7, Phoenix, Mozilla and IE on my system. I resort to NS7 if something is inoperative in Opera (when I was using O6). Hopefully, I won't have to do that with O7, but we'll see.
I use IE to check if a page I've written looks good or not. Meanwhile, my web stats say that Opera has about 1% of the market, NS/Moz about 2%, and the rest is IE. Gotta love competition.
Wonder why MS is only trying to break Opera and not NS/Mozilla.
Illegitimi non carborundum
Perhaps he is talking about Netscape "classic", i.e. the versions before NS6. They were a very different code base.
-twb
The real telling truth here is that Opera loads the page just fine when you load the MSIE version. Makes me think that there is in fact something fishy going on there.
...the fat lady sang years ago...
Looks like a direct violation of the following law:
11568.5. (a) It is unlawful and a violation of this code for the holder of any web page issued under this article to display HTML representing the web page to be of a model different from the model designated at the time of manufacture or first assembly as a completed page.
(b) It is unlawful and a violation of this code for the holder of any web page issued under this article to directly or indirectly authorize or advise another holder of a web page issued under this article to change the HTML of a web page in the browser of the other client.
Hummmm...
I just tested this and Opera displays a messed up layout for msn.com if you identify as MSIE 6.0 or Opera (with cache emptying and restarting Opera in between just to make sure)
I am no fan of MS, but it looks like it's Opera's css renderer that's messed up more than anything else. Mozilla displays msn.com fine...
Uh, it looks very good. It's strict XHTML, and works very well. If you have problems, then you have problems with your browser. Hint: try validating Opera's site and Microsoft's.
I do. So what's your point, that it's okay to be an unprofessional prick when few people will notice?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
You know it as Mozilla, many others don't.
They still think Netscape.
A specific browser is not plain ignorance, it's an attempt to convey information.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
... it might be a simple mistake.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
How is it insightful to think that 85% of /. users don't know what a browser is? Perhaps this post was so modded because of the insightful use of higher mathematics - 85 + 5 = 90 on a yes/no question....
Do you know what a browser is? (Yes/No)
Yes 5%
No 85%
I use IE 10%
And we wonder why IE centrics can't get their pages right?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
The problem is that MSN does a "grep" of the user agent string, which contains "Opera" even when set to identify as MSIE or Mozilla.
Illegitimi non carborundum
Man, is your browser #!#$ed up.
How do you take this as evidence as it sounds just as fishy as Microsoft would do that. I wouldn't believe it.
Anybody else notice that the new MSN Messenger 5 will only open IE 6 to read email? Even if you've used their "settlement software" to completely remove IE 6 as a useable web browser option.
MSN Messenger 4.x happily opened Mozilla without any problems... BEFORE the settlement software...
(By settlement software, I'm referring to the FTC settlement program "Set Program Access and defaults" which allows you to specify which programs get called for what uses. Specifically, I've got Mozilla set as my default, and IE marked to not (or unchecked) Make available to other programs.)
if u go to eye doctor and s/he serves you a false chart to make u buy a pair of glasses that u don't need then it is called malpractise. how is this not?
When the revolution comes, your ass will be 6 feet under.
Like Microsoft really gives 2 shits about a browser with probably 3,000 paying users, if that.
;)
Come on, man - how often do users actually pay for their software?
This is fine for a personal or hobby site but for e-commerce, you need to write to users, not standards. It makes no difference to the user that your page is coded to standards if he/she can't view it. Telling them they need a different browser isn't the answer either. Showing them what they want, in a manner that works correctly with their browser, is unfortunately the best solution if you want to be profitable.
I've had to code drop down menus differently for different browsers to get things to look the same, however when I'm done, you get the exact same page, with everything the same size and in the same place in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, and Konqueror. I've never used Opera so I don't test that one, but I guess I probably should.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
What content is there on msn.com that is so compelling that even users who swear off MS browsers would have to go there?
Seems like a pretty boring portal site to me. Wouldn't yahoo or myway or any one of a gazillion other portals do?
On my website the numbers for the year 2002 are more like:
Of course many non-idiots revere opinion (especially their own) over empirical evidence.
but it really looks like an honest typo in the style sheet. i can understand how they'd be pissed, but did they try contacting MS to get it fixed first? the fact that the server sends a client-specific style-sheet isn't exactly damning. it's a very common (though misguided) practice.
never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Anyone who *doesn't* write a site that serves seperate pages to different browsers is doing a disservice to the public. Most are too lazy or too apathetic to do so however.
The most obvious case in point being Lynx.
For various reasons ( including access to the reading disabled) every site should, at the very least, serve a different page to pure text browsers than it does to graphical browsers.
The whole *point* of identifying browsers at all is to allow the server to serve optimized pages for different browsers.
Anyone who writes a site that takes advantage of this to deliberately make certain browsers look like shit is a shithead.
KFG
I love Opera and use it as my main browser. I use Mozilla for mail. Mouse gestures are so automatic for me now that I get annoyed when, without thinking, I try to use them in Internet Explorer.
Again, I say, "Is this news?"
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
I know you probably meant the post just to point out how dominated the market is, but I'm an Opera user (6.0), and yes, I even paid for it.
What? Pay for a web browser? And it's closed source too? *gasp!* Sorry, but for me, it was a matter of "one part ethics + one part right-tool-for-the-job = Pay for Opera". Opera has been my only browser on both the Win2000 machine in my office and the one Win2000 system I have at home (the Linux box uses Konquerer). Sure, MSIE is still installed, no real way to get it out of there, but it doesn't appear on my desktop, and most people when they use my system are a bit confused at first, but are quickly up to speed.
Opera has been the best tool for the job for me for almost 2 years now, and I don't see myself switching any time soon (except to Safari on my iBook).
-jason
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
not to nitpick, but I think you have the verb (Carborundum) in the wrong spot. However given the fabrication that is Latin, you really can do whatever you want!
...would be to use a regexp-based filtering proxy like privoxy under *nix or proxomitron under windows. Then one can write a regexp that matches the offending stylesheet, have it fixed on the fly by the proxy, and even contribute the filter to others.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Not that it should have to do this were MS not being slimey again, but:
Have an option in opera where it can download lists of "tained" stylesheet sites, have opera identify itself as MSIE for those sites.
I admit I don't know this to be a fact. Really I'm just guessing but in order for your first two sentences to make sense (in this case) I think you need to define the term "a lot of money". To me and you Microsoft makes a fortune off of their MSN portal. To Microsoft I think the amount of money they make off of this is nearly negligable.
Just like the impact and potential consequences of screwing up the view for people who refuse to get with the program are negligable in their way of thinking. Looks like the same Microsoft to me.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
From the old article, one of Microsoft's marketing directors should get his facts straight:
... He added that Microsoft wants users to visit the Web site "regardless of the browser they choose."
"We supported the latest W3C standards when developing the content and services delivered from MSN,"
But Visse recommended that for the best experience with MSN, customers should use a browser that tightly adheres to the W3C standard.
"If customers choose to use a browser that does not tightly support W3C standards, then they may encounter a less then optimal experience on MSN," he said.
except, that if you ask the W3C validator, it doesn't work!
www.microsoft.com
www.msn.com
Microsoft has a long history of intentionally breaking compatibility with other products to promote their own, as early as (and maybe earlier) the Windows 3.1 -> 3.11 "upgrade" which conveniently broke the diagnostic and repair software PC Tools.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
I read it that way as well...
I assume this "news" is related to the recent burst of press surrounding Opera 7, so I should be happy this software is getting recognition.
I do and I'm very happy with it.
You're missing the point. M$ is going out of their way to break competitor's products.
If M$ just said "We don't care about users of other browsers. If they can't properly display our pages that's their problem. So we're not going to waste time checking for browser information - we're just going to serve our pages our way optimized for our browser.", this would be Opera, Mozilla, Netscape's problem.
But instead, they're going out of their way, for no technical reason, to make competitor's products appear inferior. Most importantly, this is exactly the type of behavior that M$ has done for years to eliminate competition.
So frankly, I don't care how many people out there use what browser. That isn't the point. M$'s disgusting business practices are. And anyone who continues to use and pay for their products are supporting this type of activity.
sPh
rather than writing only downlevel code, Microsoft's asp.net components detect the browser version and treat different browsers differently.
Why is this useful?
It can eliminate tons of server work and bandwidth by keeping some stuff on the client (if the client can support the required scripting, css, etc.). For downlevel browsers, a server postback may be required, but why do it for the latest Mozilla or IE?
There must have (at one point) been a non standards-compliant css implementation in Opera, and that must be what Microsoft wrote its code to support.
Sure it would be nice if everyone wrote web pages to standard. But then anyone doing e-commerce would write to the level of the standard supported by all browsers. This would drastically limit the kind of code that could be written, not to mention the headaches it would cause to keep up with what was supported by who, etc.
Microsoft's asp.net software, by automatically supporting downlevel browsers, makes it easy to write the code once and have it display/behave properly on all browsers. In this case, it appears that the requirements for Opera support have changed, so it would appear that an update to the asp.net downlevel tools would be in order.
Amazing magic tricks
This is also the company that came up with a web site that doesn't work in their own web browser! IE2, which came as the default install with Windows 95 can't access the Microsoft web site, especially not the IE download pages where you would go to update to a newer version. It doesn't even have the smarts to throw up a 'you must download a newer version from here' link. It simply fails with a scripting error. The only way to upgrade IE on a Windows 95 machine from the default install was to use IE2 to download Netscape, which could then be used to download a new version of IE. Nuts.
Looks like they need to learn how to program in old europe. Don't blame Microsoft, Opera should be able to handle whatever is sent to it.
Who said it was invalid? Hint: I said it looks like shit.
There is nothing in this article to suggest that the actual code of the site is non standards compliant,
just that it deals out a different one to opera that is badly laid out, the code may be fine and perfectly compliant but it will still look wrong.
I hope these don't show up at my Ikea.
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2002/i/jul-tub/
The Opera folks should stick to software. They do that okay.
This doesn't happen only at MSN, it happens at MSNBC.com as well. I found this out when I used mozilla-based browsers to surf it and found broken segments. So I got a tool to modify the browser identification tags and surfed there in mozilla faking it as IE. Lo and behold, it comes out perfectly.
I sent off an e-mail to the site admin talking about dirty practices. Now, I NEVER go to msnbc.com, NEVER watch MSNBC, and any link to a news story on msnbc.com I avoid and find the story elsewhere.
I am amazed that IE doesn't perform 'custom' rendering depending upon the site being visited. For example, it could replace this with this.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
I just check in Opera on msdn.microsoft.com and I definitely get served two different pages wheter I identify myself as MSIE6.0 or Opera. Oddly enough, the MSIE6.0 page renders just fine in my version of Opera. Hmmmmmm....It must be an accident!
On (semi) related topic. Why has slashdot.org blocked validator.w3.org? Are they embarresed by the results? After all I can always do a "Save as" and then upload the page to the validator.
Pretty childish, if you ask me.
J.
according to this cnet article the faulty style sheet sent to opera 7 doesn't work w/ ie either! the style sheet sent to ie works just fine w/ opera. so there's a style sheet that works w/ ie and opera but its only sent to ie. there's another style sheet that doesn't work w/ either ie or opera and its only sent to opera!
imo opera has every right to cry foul.
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What do you want, a fucking medal?
It's nothing to be proud of, you ugly cockmongler. So you use Opera and you don't use IE? I don't give a fuck. Fuck off.
Opera: Microsoft is hurting our style
Methinks someone at Microsoft really needs to take their coffee regularly, especially with shots like this one (Read the caption!).
:)
Whatever you say, it's still probably the most ironic screenshot I've ever taken!
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Why comb your hair, or wear any color other than gray, or speak any way other than monotone, etc. Style sheets make it possible to make all your shit look the way you want it to look. When not abused, this can add meaning to your content & make it less confusing/ more cohesive for your end users.
I wish I could say the same about Flash, but it only seems to exist to annoy people. I have no opinion about Java - I guess I haven't seen any annoying "craplets" in quite a while.
No you only do this the first few times, then you switch.
Humans has a very finely tuned sense of fairness and accurately evaluating likelihood of veracity is fundamental to our survival. Leave the presumption of innocence to the courts, in life it will not serve you well.
Help fight continental drift.
Uh, dickhead. Being 'strict XHTML' and getting validated on w3.org does not necessarily imply a good-looking website.
I agree with him - Opera's website looks crap.
And, incidentally, it hangs IE4.
I've used Opera for a year, after reading about it here on Slashdot - it's the cheapest defense against pop-up ads, takes up fewer resources, loads quickly, & is all-around more fun to use than NN or IE.
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
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I mean, it's not uncommon for large companies to play dirty because they know noone can possibly go after them unless they do something really, REALLY bad and cause MAJOR difficulties. Breaking the law a bit here and a bit there is okay though, you are safe.
Sounds like a real problem with the legislation system.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
Is providing different style sheets to different browsers actually a bad thing?
Isn't one of the purposes of style sheets to separate content from formatting? So as different browsers interpret style sheets differently, does it not make sense to provide IE with a style sheet that it can correctly display, and provide Opera with a style sheet it can correctly display, and provide Mozilla with a style sheet it can correctly display, and provide screen readers with a style sheet that interprets things correctly?
MS lost out bigtime by failing to convince the cellphone manufacturers to adopt their embedded OS - most of the bignames plan to use Simian (is that how you spell it) which uses Opera as its browser.
The reality is that most windows users will never change their browser from IE to something else, so they are not afraid of Mozilla, konq, Safari, etc.
The cellphone market on the other hand is HUGE, and given recent advances in wireless bandwith, has the potential to be highly lucrative.
More than likely its probably safe to say that a significant percentage of all web browsing in the future will be on cellphones.
They are attempting to ensure that non MS cellphones can't surf the web properly, in an attempt to make consumers prefer buying MS enabled webphones, which in turn will generate more revenue in the embedded market for them, which they desperately need.
Just my opinion tho - can never tell what does guys are up to...
I'm sure they would, if they knew what was going on.
find sarcasm itself interesting. There's nothing wrong with that. Nevermind that sarcasm, properly done, is the instrument of insight *and* funny, all at the same time.
Think of it as multitasking.
KFG
If I went to MS's site and the webpage they sent was broken, I would think MS had an incompetent webmaster who didn't know HTML. I wouldn't think Opera was broken.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Currently I am presenting completely bogus user agent strings (for example how about being a misconfigured version of a Cisco PIX v6 beta antivirus proxy or some such other nonexistent crap.) MSN page still shunts stuff off to the left even though I'm definitely not using Opera.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Humm, MSIE v.4.72 crashed while I was reading the article this blog is about. It happened while I was moving from the article to opera's hime page www.opera.com I'm sure this is a coincidence and isn't a bug or something intentional. Just a really coincidence occurance.
You've certainly come to the right place for an objective opinion on Microsoft policies.
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.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
In other news, for a long time MS has required IE for Windows Update. It makes sense that they'd start pulling the same trick with other Web servicies.
Of course, this is totally unfair... And so unlike MS to do something like this... ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Actually, that should read any page with MSIE under osx doesn't render right. I'd say 3 out of 5 pages I browse under IE has spotty page rendering. I have to resize the window to get the screen to redraw and display properly. And I'm using g4/400mhz, osx 10.2.1, MSIE 5.2.2. More and more Chimera is becoming my browser of choice...
----
Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
If you RTFA, Opera engineers changed one part of the Agent string to read "Oprah" instead of "Opera" during their test and got the MSIE version which worked fine. This means that MSN deliberatly designed a page for Opera, and that it is broken. The question is WHY, and the answer is obvious. MS has a long history when it comes to the browser market.
Having worked for a mid to large commercial web site, I can assure you that the QA team tests with Multiple versions of multiple vendors browsers on several platforms. If MS with their ~$40B in spare cash doesn't do the testing that we did with a 40 person company on a shoestring budget then they are incompetant, arrogant, and criminally abusing their monopoly.
Then, as I said, you're part of the problem. If you don't realize that, that's doubly sad.
People who say things like "I have to [...] get thinks to look the same" are saying "I don't understand the web" and should probably not be working with it until they clue on.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Do you honestly think that Microsoft would try such heavy-handed tactics as this? Come on. MSN and IE are in _totally separate_ product groups. MSN is not about to make themselves look bad in order make IE look better. Let me repeat this, as it's an important point: this doesn't make Opera look bad, it makes MSN look bad. Being one of the few people on here who has met the MSN general manager, and is responding here, I can tell you for a fact that this is not what they're trying to do. It was a screwup, plain and simple. Microsoft isn't infallible and evil, they're people too. Articles like this one do a great disservice to the ideals that slashdot is, in theory, attempting to pass on. This merely reinforces the view of many that slashdot is nothing but a collection of knee-jerk reactionaries. If Konqueror suddenly croaked on the Gnome website, no one would think that Gnome was trying to make the Konqueror project look bad. Same thing if mozilla.org stopped working correctly with IE.
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
Opera is one important part of the problem: they refuse to send out a browser id string which would truly report it as MSIE, instead they continue to add 'Opera' at the end of it.
It is wrong from MS to sabotage the pages, but Opera gives them full potential to do so!
Since I do use Opera as my primary browser, and have since it came out, I tried clicking on the MSN link to see what would happen. Nothing. Took me a bit to remember why.
I have well over 100 msn sites loopbacked in my hosts file (along with lots of advertising and pop up sites) on all computers, using Andrew Short's file as a starting point (http://remember.mine.nu). I can always try Mozilla if a site doesn't look right, but I'm not going to reboot for the rare useful content on MSN!
Kind of off topic but I just thought I'd share something with my fellow slashdotters.
Incase you didn't know, IE does not strickly follow the wc3 CSS box model. Most specific between the width and padding tags.
If you author a that has the follow attributes:
width: 400;
padding: 50;
You will get two versions of that box between a wc3 compliant browser like moz and IE.
In IE you will see a box 400pixels wide with text stopping 50 pixels before the edges.
In Moz you will see a box 500pixels wide with text enclosed within 400pixels.
Although they break standard, I do happen to think microsoft has a better idea of how width and padding should interralted. I think width should really act as the overall value with everything else being taken within, but the wc3 model says the width is then added wtiht he padding figures (and a few other instances, border etc) and then combined and displayed.
So just keep the above in mind when you author your pages or wonder why some things look funny in another browser.
The filter tag is also another tag which has differnces between the wc3 standard and IE.
You can see a glimpse of the code with the filter tag for an alpha transparent div in the screenshot there.
Merry February.
http://www.sh0t.com/iephoenixcss.png
I noticed that my Opera6 version screen shot looks nothing like Opera's Opera6 screen shot. What's the difference. Additionally there appears to be some significant differences in the screen shots between Opera 6 and Opera 7. If you just look at the screen shots it appears to show that Opera 6 renders the page more accurately than Opera 7. Why such a big difference there? I mean from what I read both versions are using the same document, but rendering it in significantly different ways. Maybe this is what MS saw and tried to fix. Unfortunately some developers have a tendency to "try things out" in production or make 'minor' changes AFTER testing/qa - after all "how many people will it really effect if it's wrong?"
I think it's premature to lambaste MS yet again for 1 css entry the entry could have just as easily been "margin:-2px 0px 0px -3px" or "margin:-2px 0px -3px 0px". Typo? I've done it MANY times cutting and pasting code around.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
If you're on Windows, try Stroke-It, a gesture recognizer that works across all Windows applications.
At least for this particular conundrum. If only it could be accomplished.
I do. I've also converted numerous coworkers and friends to Opera. Everyone is impressed with Opera's speed and features unavailable in IE.
Not to through more fuel on the fire but a similar thing happens on the main M$ site. If you use IE, then you get drop down boxes when you hover over the links in the top right hand corner. However, with Mozilla, I get no such menus and you have to navigate manually through several static pages to get to a page accesable with one click from IE.
I have always found these little inconsistencies with the MS site. I use Mozilla 99.99% of the time, however I find that every now and then, I have to use IE to get the page to display correctly.
And yes, that's why we have standards. So many to choose from.
That way, Microsoft can make people believe that Opera has a lower market share than is really the case.
I find it very pleasant. At the code level, it's XHTML compliant. Visually, it's clean and organzized. What else do you want? http://opera.com
Your web site looks to be for a consulting service.
Could we see some numbers for a more general interest site, perhaps another portal, for a better comparison?
By forcing users to identify their browsers as "IE6", Microsoft is padding the statistics at the websites to show that their browser is more popular than it actually is. It is fraud, no doubt about it.
I wonder how many of those IE hits are from people like me who use Opera (or another browser) set to report that it's IE.
Bizarrely, when I rushed off to http://deb.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/ to read Opera's opinion, I found that the page looked fine in Opera whereas in IE the text in the yellow tables was rendered too small to see! IT'S ALL A HUGE, DARK, EVIL, CONSPIRACY!
No, seriously, it depresses me to see a company trying on these ridiculous tricks (remember their trial evidence) -- what the heck do the many very skilled developers at Redmond think when they hear about this?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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.
A few years ago I was teaching an HTML class. The director wanted me to do a short segment on Frontpage. I tested some code in Frontpage, and found something interesting. Frontpage would move my Javascript code to below the Close Head tag. This wouldn't cause a problem in IE, but caused Netscape not to properly display the page. Even if you opened an already made page in Frontpage, it would move the code. Needless to say, I did not teach the section. -js
Because I wanted to see this behaviour first-hand in my browser, after reading this post on Slashdot.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Please someone create a browser (just use the Moz code) and call it "I can't believe its not Internet Explorer" and have that as the User-Agent string!!
Honestly - it would be soo tops. That would appear in everones web access log, and they'd be wondering what it was, and so they'd download it too.
Or just add a "not internet exploder" user-agent string option to Moz? Because you shouldn't need the UA string anyway - just use the Accepts header!
Please someone... do this? For me? For us?
Argument Number One. (The behemoth software giant).
"Really, what we've done is improve the information our service provides. Because Opera is so much faster, by pushing the margins further to the left, we are able to fit more information on the same pages. TRUST US, IT'S A "FEATURE"."
Argument Number Two. (The scrappy little company trying to make a buck)
"Really, what they did amounts to a direct marketing attack on our software. They can now say "Look! Opera doesn't display all web pages correctly!" But, in truth, it's their own capitalistic approach to a problem in a capitalistic society... erm, wait. No, it's still not right, whatever they did.")
Argument Number Three. (The Slashdot effect.)
"Well, microsoft is evil (It's Thursday) anyway, so it's no surprise. But, it doesn't matter because MY system is designed to filter out anything that comes from ANY microsoft server. Now excuse me while I go gopher around for that pr0n site."
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Is that Microsoft does these things (and I do believe it was on purpose) and thinks everyone else is to stupid to realize whats going on. Granted the masses won't know but it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
I bet you opera messes it up, even just a little. It did mine.
why would someone SMART enough to NOT use IE even GO to MSN?
freaky!
I think of Opera as a kind of "geeky" browser, for the more progressive or literate users. Similarly, I regard MSN.com as a rather non-useful site overall. They don't provide (IMO) any unique or overly valuable content.
I guess what I'm saying is: does anybody really care that MSN is shooting themselves in the foot to prevent some people from accessing their site? Do they really beleive that people want to see MSN.com so bad that they will switch browsers?
-This sig intentionally left blank
who cares.. i mean does any one actually want to view MSN webpages to begin with?
When Hotmail first introduced text editing features (font, color, emoticons) a couple of years ago, they worked in Netscape without a hitch - for about a week. Then those options disappeared. Today, Netscape loads a different page when you compose in Hotmail, a page that doesn't the editing features available in IE.
(Yes, I use Hotmail, but I never inhale.)
So what ? Hit Ctrl-G (to switch to user stylesheets defined in Opera) and you can see the MS content. If you love your mouse, hit the "Page" icon left of the address bar labeled "Toggle between author mode and user mode". Repeat this step after you changed to a non-broken page to see the original styles again.
BTW: MS is not the only one who has broken style sheets. But most other pages I've seen used broken style sheets accidentally. And yes, Ctrl-G helped with those pages.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
They broke Opera....
:p
THOSE BA*TARDS!
(the lameness filter broke on my caps above - it said:
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING." - LOL...I was yelling! Stupid filter...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Thats not the point. An average user who frequents msn.com, who may be trying out the Opera browser would be deceived into thinking that Opera is flawed because of these display problems. It specifically targets the Opera browser in a way that would be invisible to most users. Yes, if you are aware that this is what MS is doing, you could make an informed decision not to frequent msn.com, but most users would not be aware of what was really happening.
Besides that, its cheesey.
It was like that when I got here.
As with many of the other posters, I'll add an
'I do', or at least an 'I did'. I'm using Phoenix
thesedays, but mainly because some MS patch I had
to apply to my machines broke O6 at some point,
and I haven't gone to and upgraded to O7 to fix
it.
I think the key edges are:
1) Tabbed Browsing. Not for everyone, but I love
it.
2) Mouse gestures. Another control method is
great
3) Speed and it's not an M$ product
If MS is doing this deliberatly is it really going to be effective.
The average person currently will not be using opera, they will use IE or Netscape. The people using Opera are using it for a specific reason, they don't like IE or Netscape etc.., I would also assume they are fairly technically advanced.
I can only assume that if this was on purpose it was to make more people use IE, while that may be the result is it going to actually benefit MS by having this? If I'm a pissed of Opera user who "must" use IE/Netscape to view the microsoft website that will just make me more unhappy with them, it's not going to make me like IE anymore and I sure as hell wouldn't recommened IE to others without at least making this point to them.
I am not an Opera user BTW, I use IE.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
A lot of MS sites, eg MSNBC, MSDN, deliberately screw up pages served to non-IE browsers.
MSNBC deliberately serves a misaligned page to Mozilla. If the tags are modified and Mozilla gets the page given to IE, it's rendered perfectly.
I even e-mailed MSNBC site admins about this, so they KNOW it's a problem. They could care less, as it's still broken.
Don't be so naive to think that malice is stupidity, and write MS off.
Just my $0.02
don't you look at the news? remember the anti-trust suit of a year or two ago?
Opera tried to test whether or not this was deliberate by changing identification to the non-existent browser Oprah.
Maybe she's expanding to an eBook club?
Seriously though, this isn't hard to find out. We've had View-Source in all browsers since version 1, any developer worth his salt would find this out immediately, therefore one can only assume they don't give a rat's ass and are trying to make it as difficult as possible for others to compete - no surprises from MS here!
---
>I think the page they generate is tailored to work on Opera v6, which I believe it does.
Read.The.F*cking.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.'
I just made my install of Mozilla pretend it was Opera, by adding the following to the user.js file:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]");
I restarted Mozilla (1.3a), checked the about page (it shows the user agent) and then visited the MSN page. The page showed up fine. I thought that maybe that maybe MS had changed the CSS. I downloaded the style sheet in Mozilla and saw the -30 there. From what I can tell Mozilla must have a check to ensure that text does not appear outside of the cell, not matter what the css indicates. If Mozilla can do it, then the guys over at Opera can do it too.
Note - I am not saying that this clears MS, as any well implemented web site should only need one version of any page, unless they have localization. What I am saying is that this is a fixable issue on the part of Opera.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
remember that v7 was only release last week. the page in question appears to render correctly on the previous version (although it's just a bug in the browser hiding the bug in the stylesheet).
I am a developer, I always use Opera, *Except* when visiting MSDN to search for documentation. MSDN (and MSN it seems) is the *ONLY* page I have ever visitted that consistently fucks up in Opera... I've always thought it was a Microsoft problem, and this clinches it !. Now, if only there was another development environment even remotely as good and user friendly as VS.NET, i wouldn't have to visit MSDN at all....
Try going to http://msdn.microsoft.com/tce/ and clicking on 'MSDN Library' on the left. The experience in IE6 and Opera 7 is quite different!
is there any browser that displays the page correctly with the opera 7 style sheet?
....
if so, possible mistake.
if not,
I smell a shill.
Read the article, and you'll find that the style sheet served up for Opera is telling it to move list elements 30 pixels to the left of their parents. That isn't, nor never has been, a useful thing to do. You'll also find from the article that the same style sheet hoses up IE, and that serving the IE stylesheet to Opera lets Opera render the page just fine.
As to ASP.NET, I've been wrestling that pig for a while, and it likes to send every damn thing to the server, even for IE. It's a programming model for lazy developers who are content to their servers to carry loads that are often better handled by client-side scripting. The enthusiasm for ASP.NET seems to come from legions of VB programmers who don't have a clue about efficiency or bandwidth.
It's not useless --- old style ASP can still be written and client-side scripting can still be included --- but ASP.NET certainly does not encourage developers to use resources wisely.
"If MS didn't support all the basics then I'd care. But since they do and then some"
That sound of laughing you hear is the rest of the Internet who just read that someone said "MS supports the basics". IE partially supports real standards from 5 years ago and is lacking in support for modern standards compared to Opera and Mozilla.
"If Mozilla/Opera can't be bothered to invent a little like MS is doing then oh well."
They should deviate from real published standards so that when a webmaster uses them IE is now broken? Nice logic.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I think it's more so that when statistics are published by MS saying how many people are using IE based on website logs, they get a vote from non-IE browsers. Cunderhanded Unts.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
FWIW, msn.com looks dreadful on Omniweb 4.2b1 (just released) but checks out fine on Safari v52 ....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Nope, sure doesn't. One any OS, IE6 will render that page just fine, until you scroll a bit or play with the buttons on the left side. Then you'll see that IE is doing something that violates the web standards. The spiral should NEVER move, and should not repeat. Yet, it does funny things with the buttons and slides up the page on the center div.
Illegitimi non carborundum
My MSN page looks exactly like that using IE6 and WebWasher. I have WebWasher configured to change the user-agent string to "Webwasher! Surfing advertisement free since 2001."
I havent got a computer atm, but i was using opera6 before, and i remember somewhere i could set what browser Opera should 'identify' as... So i could set Opera identify as MSIE, wouldn't that be a solusion?! Anyways, thoose guys at MSN shouldnt do that :/
If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it. - Hobbes
Read the artical.
I've seen this with MSDN I think, or maybe it was TechNet. Anyway, it's not just MSN that do this, I've seen content shifted too far to the left in Gecko based browsers in deeply buried pages. Very irritating. I never bothered looking to see if it was deliberate sabotage, but this sounds too close to be coincidence.
Wow, that makes a lot of sense why hotmail/msn looks horrid in Opera. It seems like Microsoft is not going to let non-IE users use their services (remember the 'Your browser isn't supported'?) without a little trickery on the browser side. To bad, competition is good!
It also irritates me that M$ would pull a stunt like this. It sends the message, "Only M$ IE works all the time," which would be true if IE worked. You don't imagine that they would also break hotmail and other sites they own, do you? Or how about putting a break into sites dumb enough to use M$ webservers? You know, like corporate and government sites intentionally sending out bogus code to non M$ browsers. A priciple, once identified, can be apllied anywhere.
No, but it's just an innocent mistake, right? Just like them shutting out alternate browsers a while back, or messing with Mac versions for hotmail users, or, you get the picture. Why do you write shit like this?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I don't see why they shouldn't be able to do it, but its still deceptive...
...because they insist on calling it html? if they named it .IEonlywillbreakforanyotherbrowserallyourbasearebe longstoushtml they could do whatever they like.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
have an option to change its user agent on the fly? If so, It could impersonate one of the more popular browsers if the user said the page looked funny.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Opera always includes "Opera" in the ID string (ex.: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]"). Which sort of defeats the whole point of identifying as a different browser. It'll only fool scripts that first check for "MSIE" and, if they find it, don't even bother looking for "Opera". All other scripts will still see it's Opera.
RMN
~~~
as MSIE 6.0. I just downloaded 7.01 and set it to MSIE 6.0. The page still shows wrong on MSN.. As well the MSNBC site also shows a problem...
So I don't know what they are talking about as the article was wrong and it would appear to me that it's more there bug at Opera..
Its about ethics. MS has as much right to serve Opera broken CSS as we do to complain about it. Nobody's forcing anyone to do anything, but MS is intentionally misleading people to believe that Opera is somehow broken (not that Opera Software needs help, seven holes found in one week seems a bit severe).
As far
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
They own the sites, they can do whatever they want with them.
Which is why /. does the right thing and writes HTML 3.2.
Maybe, MSN assumes when it sees "Opera", it bases on the fact that an older Opera needs special support.
Microsoft does not have to test other company's browsers. If Opera fixed a problem in a newer version of their new version, that's Opera's problem, not Microsoft's.
This is the most likely scenario, Microsoft did not test their web site with the Opera 7 - they tested it with an older version.
Why is it everytime there is a bug, its blamed on anti-competive means. Sometimes a bug is just a bug.
People get a life!
The page looks exactly the same on Opera and MSIE. Make sure you haven't manually changed IE's "text size".
RMN
~~~
You don't design separate pages for each browser, you design for structure. That is, use H1s when you need a first-level header, use floating DIVs instead of tables when you aren't dealing with tabular data, use ULs or OLs instead of BRs for lists, and take care of all stylistic information in the style sheet. It'll take a good bit of testing to get it to look right in several browsers and you do need to be a little clever to pull it off, but it's possible and necessary. Or else you get crap like this.
If opera is such a good browser, then why does mozilla have a larger market share than opera? It didn't six months ago
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspira l/glassy.html
that also does not work in my latest patched IE6, and it never has.
Photos.
I just went there and it worked fine for me.
The JZA
Sounds painless but let's apply that logic to other M$ products. How about M$ web servers? Hey, it's their software, who says it has to work with other people's browsers? Hopefully, the collection of big_dumb_companies clueless enough to use that package will mind, when people like me can't read their website, buy their shit or apply for jobs with them because I refuse to pay the M$ tax. Think they would not do that? Well, like you, I would not have imagined they would break their own portal and thus show the world what a buch of incompetents or anti-competive jerks they are.
Way to go M$, drive trust to zero!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I do place a lot of blame for this on Opera. As an avid Opera 7 user, I still get frustrated. I have to fire up a 'big boy' browser just to visit certain sites. I don't agree with others that have said that Opera identing as IE only promotes IE. With such a small market share, it should not matter what Opera does or does not do, but as a user of Opera, I care a lot! My opinion is for Opera to fake IE in all regards and STOP WHINNING. Be happy with your product and don't cry because big brother hits you... it's what all mothers tell the youngest.
to use a game whose developers were blackmailed by M$?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This is once again M$ using is dominance in the warketplace to kill competition through deceptive means. It is really sad that people will defend this large conglomerate corporation when they keep showing time and time again that all they really care about is the bottom line.. money..
THe Microsoft corporation doesn't care who they put out of work in the process or what sort of innovation and creativity that they stifle(sp?). They dont love you or your dog, don't care about your "web experience" they just want your money.
Granted they are a for profit corporation and that mean they need to make money.. But look at the cost of their means.. innovation, jobs, consumer choice, there is quite a bit more (not enough coffee to list them).
Hopefully M$ will one day change their tactics and begin to embrace the new technologies that other people create instead of holding them under the waves untill they drown in a sea of Microsoft Brand Technology(tm).
Here's my thought on the MSN site. If MSN was a real website they would try to get as many people there (and returning) as they possibly could, this would give them value with advertisers and MSN would continue to make money as an advertising/news service site. THis doesn't seem to be the case. This tactic shows that MSN is nothing more than a web tool that is being used to make people get off of competing web
browsers/Operating Systems.. You know why they are not doing this with Netscape/Mozilla.. they already got in trouble with the DOJ regarding NS and they wouldn't push that envolope again.. but opera, what can opera do without revinue.. (get the slashdot community on their cause!)
What can slashdot do you might ask?? think of it this way. With enough butterflys, you can make a hurricane.
Oh well, maybe one day Microsoft will realise that they don't need to kill competition, and they can make ALOT more money in the long run by fostering the market, instead of destroying it.
just some thoughts....
:)(smile)
The way hatelife does it is pretty classy - try visiting the site in your modern browser, and then NS4.7...
Much of the problem comes from browsers not reporting errors to the user. If browsers popped up messages like "Defective web page - 3 errors - Abort, Continue, Report to Webmaster, Report to badpages.org", the problem would be more visible, and would get fixed.
It only works if you surf to the captured pages that they display in the article. Look at the URL they have in the screen capture and you will see it's not actually from www.msn.com, but rather on Opera's webserver. If you tell it to identify as MSIE 6.0 and goto www.msn.com, the problem is still there.
I wish they would have read there own article before posting it...
...don't visit Microsoft's websites.
Then, as I said, you're part of the problem. If you don't realize that, that's doubly sad.
People who say things like "I have to [...] get thinks to look the same" are saying "I don't understand the web" and should probably not be working with it until they clue on.
Well, gee Eddy, since you do, "understand the web", maybe you can give us all a solution for the follow problem that also fits the following criteria:
1. any visitor using any web browser that comes to your site can view a working web page without having to upgrade their browser or use a different version.
2. You must be able to use any HTML feature approved by the W3
3. You must not modify the HTML sent based on browser type
Please help us understand as well as you.
--
My duck doesn't like you.
This is fine for a personal or hobby site but for e-commerce, you need to write to users, not standards.
You need to write to users and standards. I hope you didn't really mean what you seemed to say.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
All your browsers are belong to MS.
All your webpages are belong to MS.
Whenever I think of Opera, I think of a fat woman singing opera-style. And when I think of that, I think of the woman's round wide open mouth. And when I think of THAT, I think of the goatse.cx man. For obvious reasons. Also, reminds me of that superbowl commercial of the guy wearing the upside-down person costume and asking for a hotdog. Heh. Last post?
You're right, it must be an mistake. It's well known that most web designers will post browser specific versions of major sites without ever testing/debugging them on the browser for which they're built. This sort of thing happens all the time.
Now, what's the W3C compliant way to get my [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] tags to display properly?
That's an order of magnatude cheaper than whatever Opera is charging for their browser these days. ($39! For a web browser!?)
I must admit, mouse gestures look to be a pretty keen feature. I hope the Mozilla team is paying attention.
I have no basis for comparison on the other points (Resource consumption, or load time) as I don't use Opera, but Mozilla has become a pretty good browser, and I very rarely have to utilize IE (except for some totally retarded Web application we use here at work, built on .Net) anymore.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
This is like the old "be mean to Opera" trick that's been done for years.
It makes no difference to the user that your page is coded to standards if he/she can't view it. Telling them they need a different browser isn't the answer either.
Clearly you use IE as your default browser. As an avid user of non-Microsoft browsers (Phoenix, in my case) it is almost a daily occurence that some site blocks me based on my user-agent ID and tells me to go download IE. I'm sure you have also seen "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" bottons before, too. Your argument is specious.
The irony is that when I looked at the ad with this article... it wasn't a Micrsoft Ad. wtf?
-pyrrho
Having several versions of Opera around ...I fired up msn.com in Opera 5.12 Opera 6.0, Opera 7.0b ..I can assure you that is it severely broken in 7.0, mostly broken in 6.0, and rendered semi-okay in 5.12. MSN's pages have been notorious for not working well with Opera since I started using it several years back. Same page in Mozilla 12.X looks pretty good. I didn't test IE 5.5.
The main difference seems to be in 7.0 it draws the lines wrong and chops off bits of text. In 6.0 it draws the lines wrong, but doesn't chop off bits of text -- it does, however, change their formatting to appear very odd. In Mozilla is renders probably about what it should in IE. No chopped off text bits, lines drawn okay.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
I messed around with a few other UserAgent strings, and it gets a little clearer:
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]" -> site.css
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Oprah 7.0 [en]" -> site-win-ie6.css
So far, exactly as reported in the article
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible) Oprah 7.0 [en]" -> site.css
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Oprah 7.0 [en]" -> site-win-ie5.css
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1; Opera 7.0) Oprah 7.0 [en]" -> site.css
It's pretty clear what they're doing:
In other words, it doesn't matter what Opera claims to be compatible with - they always get the default sheet, just like a completely unrecognized browser does.
I'm trying to apply Hanlon's Razor here, but it's hard...
My biggest complaint about the .NET framework:
.NET framework does a check to see which browser you use and then sends formats aspx pages for the capabilities of that browser. So if you use abs positioned divs, you'll get those for modern browsers but Netscape 4.7 (for instance) will get the same page (theoretically) but formatted via tables. This is great, if only MS were honest about it.
the
I constantly have to hard-code formatting for controls because MS treats Netscape 6 as a 'down-level' browser and doesn't bother sending out certain formatting tags. So some pages look bad in Netscape 6, the reason behind it would be that the formatting tags weren't sent out because Netscape doesn't support them, but this is false because when I add them by hand, netscape handles them fine and my pages look the same in both browsers.
I have to believe that MS does this so people say "this page looks like azz in Netscape" and assume that it's Netscape's problem.
the framework has been out for too long and this is still not fixed, so I can not believe that it is an honest or innocent mistake.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Waah Waah Waah
Technical Implications: In any number of filtering proxies (and in Opera itself!!), you can set the useragent to be whatever you want it to be. Proxomitron's default is SpaceBison ;). Seriously folks, this is a problem only for the completely ignorant.
Social Impliciations: What about the social problem of M$'s behaviour in the community. If M$ was a guy in a dormitory or apartment building, I think everybody living there would pretty much agree that that guy was a jerk. I don't like jerks. Their presence, however, is reassuring. When nobody has the right to be a jerk, we'll be living in the dystopian dreams of the dominant culture in "Demolition Man". IMHO, that would suck.
Legal Implications: IANAL, so I can't speak to this. I would like to hear someone competent to do so make a case that M$ is engaging in anticompetitive practices (or whateve the trust-busters call it) when they pick on poor lil' ol' Opera.
Legal Precedent (maybe): Is this in any way similar to Pilsbury refusing to sell Haagen-Dazs to any store that carried Ben & Jerry's? Remember the bumper stickers several years ago "Who's the Doughby Afraid Of...Ben&Jerry's"
Shameless Plug: Oh, yeah--Opera absolutely kicks ass. Been using it since about Opera3. Wonderful browser. Way better than anything else I've ever used. Too many advantages to mention. Maybe that's why M$ is scared.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
What's the problem? Just pretend to be IE - MSN won't send broken formats to such a "favorite" browser :)
Less is more !
Fortunately, the Opera browser can spoof a fake user-agent string. Ever since I've set Opera to always tell servers that it's IE, I've seen no problems.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I used CrazyBrowser (tabbed IE). Very nice popup blocker, et.
But sometimes on MSNBC, the text is aligne screwy (text overlaps ad or vice versa)
Sounds like fast programmers. (Working a little too fast to meet some sort of deadline.)
I Encrypt My IM's
check out Slumtone on a Friday with IE, it'll break. Thanks to mod_msff.
The opera page points out that maybe the Opera page was custom made for Opera 6, and then they run the IE page through Opera 6 and show that it renders fine. Therefore, they say, there's no need for a custom Opera 6 page, therefore it couldn't have been a custom Opera 6 page.
But the right thing to test would be whether Opera 6 renders the "bad pages" acceptably or is similarly broken. I could easily picture a developer trying to customize things for Opera 6 (for some reason or another) and testing something and Opera6 handling it fine and it accidentally getting left in.
I mean, maybe this really totally is MSN screwing with Opera, but the omission of the above data point, and the way they say
when testing the Opera 6 case makes me a tad suspicious.i've tested it in as many browsers as I can find and it's usable in all of them
;) ]
[not tried NS4 - it really doesn't count as a browser
http://TheBigChoice.com
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
They specifically designed their web site to send a different style sheet, (and '30' is not a typo.. '33' or '34' or something I'd believe) AND a larger page with less content, JUST to Opera. That seems pretty far from "an honest typo". This is MSN's HOME PAGE. You don't think they know what it looks like in different browsers? I work at a 4 person company, and we know what all our websites look like in IE, Moz/Netscape, and Opera. Furthermore, they have a motive to make it look better in IE, and they've shown in the past OVER and OVER that these kinds of underhanded tactics are their bread and butter. Someone at MS knew about this, and also knew it could never be proven in court.
By the way, the full quotation is:
"Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incompetence"
- Napolean Bonaparte.
I think one of Microsoft's new unwritten policies is "When accused of malice, always hide behind incompetence".
"No no... we'd love to, but we simply CAN'T remove IE from Windows." Sound familiar?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
It's incorrect Latin, but quite deliberately correct *pseudo-Latin* (see also Mock Swedish). A google search turned up the following historical background. See also the Harvard Band (which uses the even more incorrect "illegitimum" in its motto).
Illegitimi Non Carborundum
"Don't let the bastards grind you down"
According to Safire's New Political Dictionary, this is "a pseudo-Latin phrase meaning 'don't let the bastards grind you down'. Small signs and plaques carrying this message have appeared in U.S. business offices and army posts for at least a generation, since General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell used it as his motto in World War II. Carborundum is a trademark for silicon carbide, a leading commercial grinding substance...In politics, the motto was popularized by 1964 Republican nominee Senator Barry Goldwater, who hung the sign in his office." (--from Safire's New Political Dictionary, p. 353)
Source: Safire, William Safire's New Political Dictionary : The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics Random House, New York, 1993.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
They refuse to serve Opera, based on the user agent - seems they only have a very small whitelist of user-agents (for online banking, not the home page).
Of course, if I tell Opera to lie about the user agent everything's fine.
I'm wondering what I should do at this point - I guess I could always change banks. I need to cancel my visa and get another credit card anyway because visa's a big domain bully (check evisa.com).
>>> Why would anyone pay for a browser which can be obtained for free?
That is why: Honesty.
Nowadays, this is pure gold.
There is no stinking thing you all can do about this....
I got the justice department right here
MUHAHAHAHAH!!!
Instead of removing IE from the OS, make it identify as Opera!
This just in:
Final score for the revolution : goats : 1 - sheep - 0
1) Tabbed Browsing. Not for everyone, but I love
it.
2) Mouse gestures. Another control method is
great
3) Speed and it's not an M$ product
4) Ability to disable/enable cookies/plugins/javascript/java/referrer logging/ gif animation/annonying embedded audio/popups from a single panel by pressing F12. Very handy.
5) Ability to turn graphics off completely.
6) Good CSS support (Opera7)
7) Zoom feature -- handy for guys like me with coke bottle glasses.
When I have to use other computers that don't have Opera or Mozilla installed it's a painful experience.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
a quote:
MSNBC News
- * Powell titty fucks his case to Congress
pretty accurate, too.there is a non-standard 38 pixel indentation that Opera6 applies to lists. the change in the stylesheet is designed to overcome this bug. the rendering in Opera6 may look 'just fine' but in fact there's extra space in there that shouldn't be.
the fix in Opera7 means that the stylesheet causes the list to be indented 38px to the left.
Yes, you have to write to users, meaning that it's pointless to use a CSS feature that is broken in MSIE on PCs. Just the same, in this case it appears that MSN is putting out a special, broken page just for Opera users, when if they saved the work and just provided the same page as for MSIE users, Opera users would achieve better results. That is, MSN is working harder by doing something special for Opera; if they ignored the existence of Opera things would be better.
Now, it's possible that the explanation is stupidity rather than malice; perhaps someone tried to tune the thing to an earlier version of Opera and bitrot set in. But if that's the case, I'm sure that MSN will address the issue by getting rid of the special casing for Opera.
On the other hand, if MSN does not fix it, then it would be appropriate to assume malice.
Sorry about the problem with your eyes. I advise you to see a registered eye doctor for a prescription.
Netscape and M$IE 4 have less users than opera,which has less users than Netscape 7, the best browser in the world
Erik's Revised HTML Specification
1. All sites start and end with and have no other tags.
-eof-
# Erik
I use Opera for everything except for my hotmail and my company's Outlook Web Access... those I am forced into IE for.
When I used to visit microsoft's web site last year for vbscript information, it would crash explorer while in the developers pages.
It would crash so bad, that the explorer window would close.
Netscape had no problem with the same pages.
I was using a current version of explorer at the time, too.
Human nature is to believe in evil more than incompetence. However, I am pretty sure that the people at MSN were just so incompetent they could not get a simple thing like margins correct, rather than so evil as to try such an in-ept form of sabotage. Of course, does it really matter if Microsoft is evil or stupid? The result should be the same, do not consider them a viable company to do business with.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In light of the compelling evidence compiled and presented by the Opera team, France has immediately announced that they are calling for a round of new inspections...
Oh, wait, different dictatorship at fault this time...
The Hotmail site in Israel failed to load on Mozilla.
You would get part of the page and then wait for the rest untill the connection timed out. If you open it in Explorer and save it, it loads perfectly in Mozilla. Using Ethereal to compare the requests the browsers sent, revailed nothing obvius execept the browser Id. Was this deliberate or a mistake? I don't know, but I have a bad fealing about it....
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
Mouse gestures are being worked on at a project called Optimoz.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Therefor: Shut the fuck up.
Opera 7 came out of beta LAST WEEK, you fucking assholes. Microsoft isnt going out of its way to support each new version of a competing product the moment it comes out.
You know why it looks like Opera 7 has a "serious flaw" which makes some web pages completely unreadable? It's because It does have a serious flaw. Any time you break compatability with your older versions in such a way that whole blocks of formerly readable text now becomes completely invisible, That is a flaw. Don't cry foul to MS when your favorite browser suddenly does something which is completely fucking stupid.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
We need a mole. Someone to infiltrate the evil empire and expose all of microsoft for what it is.
I really doubt it's an accident as Opera7 renders the page perfectly when fed the IE6 CSS file.
But this doesn't prove that management dictated this. It could have been some jackass web monkey deciding to Fight The Good Fight. Especially as it looks like it's been fixed already.
Not everything a huge company does is dictated from the top. Sometimes you get overzealous jerks in the lower ranks trying to be cute.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Show me a site coded to standards that doesn't work with IE. The fact that IE allows things outside the standard doesn't mean it will fuck up things that do meet said standards.
I've been sending stylesheets to MSIE (and any other browser that comes along) that would make IE appear to be broken for more than a year now. I guess the difference is that my stylesheets are perfectly valid.
Re:Aww, come on... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 06, @11:47AM (#5243763)
certainly -- happened to me just the other day.
besides, Opera owed them those 30 pixels... they are only taking pixels that rightfully belong to them
because I just said so.
Comeon, give the AC some cred...
I wish w3c would release html 4.02 or something that allowed topmargin, leftmargin, margintop and marginheight.
Then I could make 100% w3c compliant sites that worked in all browsers.
I'm to the point now where I'm starting to say "screw the older browsrs, I'm just going to write w3c compliant code and not worry about it." but the sad fact is that a lot of people are still using older browsers, especially on older platforms. They're not the majority but I don't want to screw anyone over.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I have seen different versions of drivers for download displayed depending on the browser.
Specifically, and this was a year or two ago, I tried to download the Intellipoint mouse drivers in Mozilla, I was displayed a 3.x version...which I couldn't download, the link would just reload the page. I also tried it in Netscape and got the same issue. I then copied the URL, opened it in IE5 and was displayed a 4.x version, which I downloaded successfully.
They use browser version check routines, but not for cross-broswer compatibility...for IN-compatibility!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
Although you may be competing against another company and product in the same market space (IE vs Opera 7) that is no escuse to be at best sloopy and at worse sabotage.
Forget the fact that it serves up different style sheets depending on the browser string. That isn't bad (in fact given other evil solutions this is by far the lesser one to achieve similiar rendering behavior).
So what is going on here? MSN is being unprofessional by releasing broken stuff. Or MSN is being HIGHLY unprofessional purposely sabotaging their server (kind of a stupid thing to do since the risks of sabotage outweigh the rewards).
So while BigBir3d says "its there servers, they can do what they want" I say "its there servers and they can't even serve content right."
You're right that W3C puts out recommendations and not standards but that doesn't mean you can't make good web sites following these recommendations. Just to give you one example have a look at www.wired.com. I'm sure you've heard of them.
What you were saying about "anyone with a brain" again?
That is not a real post. Please only post real content to Slashdot... Here are the posting guidelines for your perusal:
Important Stuff:
Luddite.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Webmail is an awful email client anyway. The minute we were put on Webmail, I got spammed and my work email is used next to nowhere so the suspicion is high that M$ sells Webmail addresses to spammers. No filters, crap folder management, just plain user hostile. Webmail is crap and M$ is using it to drive users to IE. It ain't working.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I'm willing to believe that clumsiness and poor web page maintenance had a lot to do with this problem more than some conspiracy to "get Opera", which has probably two orders of magnitude fewer users compared to IE. MS doesn't feel genuinely threatened, but like all web site developers, they'll make sure they look right on 90% of the client browsers, then on the 99% of the client browsers the week after, if they have spare time, then on 99.9% of the client browsers, if they have spare time two weeks later, after the content gets refreshed, etc.
The most alarming problem, though, is that MS controls both a large web site that server content on the one hand, and controls a large population of browsers that are clients on the other hand.
That being the case, it would be quite possible for them to leave the W3C in the dust and create completely proprietary protocols between their MSN services and IE clients.
MS could trot out its old chestnuts about "innovation" and "improving the user experience" and no one would stop them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This is probably the most insightful post in the thread, and certainly the best "theory" as to the "why" we've seen yet.
Great theory, and great post...
That is not a real post. Please only post real content to Slashdot... Here are the posting guidelines for your perusal (I have taken the liberty of bolding what you have violated):
Important Stuff:
Hope that clears things up.
First, is it intentional, or not? My money's on the latter. You can only piss all over the legal system so much before people start tossing molitovs into yer building.
If, by some chance, it is intentional, is it official? I doubt such a thing would happen under direct orders from Billy G. Likely, it'd be some defunct middle manager sitting in a basement office somewhere.
Or even some random peon, who thinks that he or she is being 'cool'.
Microsoft's a big corporation. I'd expect shit to happen without consent from above; or even for dolts to join and try to do shady things to give MS a bad name. (And get paid while doing it, too!)
Yarr. Who uses Opera anyway? Mmm, IE and Mozilla. Tasty.
In a word: GUILTY!!!!
Seriously, that is the funniest reply to this article
In looking around Opera's response, they have style sheets sent to IE, Netscape 7, and Opera. IE doesn't have the -30 value in the css. Opera does, and that's what everyone's complaining about, but Netscape is also served the same value!
So, netscape and opera get the same value there. Opera doesn't display it right, but netscape does.
Of course, this is a very new version of Opera, so that could explain things. But let's not jump on MS's back just yet...
Jason
Microsoft has been losing the battle of the mobile phones, both in OS implementation for SmartPhones and in the specific browsers carried. If you look here or here, you can read further about the success Opera has been having in the field. Damaging the reputation of Opera, even in so petty, small and childish a manner, would help Microsoft in their eyes.
If you're a Hotmail account holder, when you log out of your account, you're redirected to the msn.com page.
Every time, so if it's ugly, you begin to become annoyed by it.
RFC 2068
(And no, this isn't "insightful", it's totally _obvious_ to anyone with a clue)
If you've ever tried to write valid HTML that works equally well in Netscape 4 and IE 6, and Mozilla, it's "funny", too.
Lord Bitman might have a point (and he's humble too). The style that's suspect is this line:
ul {
margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;
}
Thing is, this same style is in the style sheet that's sent to Netscape 7. And that displays correct.
I'd be curious if the same sheet and html in Opera 6 would display correctly. It just might.
Jason
Lemme see...
wget --user-agent="nice fucking investigation, guys" --output-document bullshit.html http://www.msn.com
Ooh, what's this? The same stylesheet the opera guys are complaining about is being sent to ME now? Why, Microsoft is targeting my bullshit browser! Scandal!!
The problem with the "Oprah" test the opera guys ran is that their user string pretty clearly contains the string "MSIE 6.0", which is probably tested for before the string "Opera" (if, indeed, the word "Opera" is tested at all)... and thus, they received the IE 6 stylesheet. site.css is most likely a generic stylesheet sent to any browser that fails all other string checks.
Good one, guys.
Why did they pick Opera, and not Mozilla or Netscape, not to mention Safari?
Apple is trying to switch people from PCs to Macs, so they have to serve up pages that look ok in Windows. Microsoft knows no Mac user would get a PC, or care about MSN, so it doesn't matter what MSN looks like in Safari. Microsoft isn't stupid enough to try a "switch" ad, right?
Or Technet... It's had the same problem with Mozilla for a long time. This isn't the first time- they had trouble with the knowledge base search and fixed it. Suddenly one day they made a minor redesign and the page comes up as 14pt Times Roman, with no way to select a product or enter keywords. If you use Prefbar to send the IE 6.0 user agent, it pretty much comes up okay (the button bar on all of technet doesn't look right for some reason).
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That would be a good solution for the user agent string in all the non-IE browsers. Have the "identify as this" be site-specific. That way you can set it only for the sites that are explicitly broken, but not mess up browser-usage counters or mess up sites that really truthfully are fixing a problem in your type of browser.
I clearly misspoke.
By the way, it's always been clear to me that God plays dice with the universe, however, since he is the *house* he doesn't *gamble* with the universe. A distinction Mr. Einstein never seemed to grasp.
KFG
Read the article. The IE page displays CORRECTLY in Opera! There is no need to identify Opera and send a different page. And there is no browser in the world that displays the page sent to Opera correctly, including any version of Opera and any version of IE.
they could just BLOCK opera browsers. (ie. this site support MSIE only...) More than enything, I see this as a misguided employee, whether lack of intelligence, or someone with a sense of humor. :)
They could just be incompetent instead of intentionally sabotaging. However, if it's just incompetence, shouldn't it have been fixed a long time ago? Oh, wait, MS only fixes problems when there's a huge outcry...good old monopolies for ya.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Honestly, this is not an effort against Opera. If I choose to break my own site, so be it..
/. story on that.
.0004% of our hits, I'd have to say "Do the change, ignore Opera".
.0004% of the browsers hitting them were Opera, they wouldn't waste the time to do make special pages specifically to break Opera.. It's simply a bug.. It's not worth the effort.. If someone did anything, I'd bet they were trying to make a better page for the Opera people, and failed.. Probably a newbie was given the job. Who cares if you mess up the page that no one sees..
In my industry, just about every site does video of some sort. There's always some group that feels they were intentionally blocked because of whatever reason. I've seen sites that stream exclusively Windows Media, and some that use propriatory plugins like "Emblaze".. Some were using the Netscape "Push" method (send a multipart header, and then send a new mime delimiter between frames). Netscape "Push" doesn't (or didn't) work with MSIE.. Windows Media doesn't work with Linux. (with a few exceptions).. Something doesn't work with something else.
If I choose to make my site not work with MSIE or Netscape, and only let Opera viewers see it, well, it's my site.. If Slashdot decides tommorrow that they like a feature of Mozilla 9.999, and it doesn't work with any other browser, including MSIE, how many of you are going to be bitching for MSIE compatability?
I'll get a bunch of comments back "Microsoft Sucks", but I'd *LOVE* it if they'd put the REMOTE_USER_AGENT string beside your name in the comments.
For those curious, mine is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
I'm not defending Microsoft. It's shitty that they did it, but honestly it's their site. Try doing a Windows Update from Netscape, that doesn't work either.
Want more fun? Try installing a nice fresh copy of an older Microsoft OS (say WinNT 4.0), and get yourself up to day.. Years ago, they broke the Microsoft pages, so you couldn't get the updates. But I can't say that I've ever seen a
Where I work, we try our best to make our pages render correctly on our machines.. That means, keep everyone in the office happy, and hopefully it will make the majority of our customers happy. We have enough varity by choice to keep things interesting. here's the short list of the browsers we use:
Win98/Win2k/WinXP:
MSIE 5.0 -> MSIE 6.1
Netscape 4.7 -> Netscape 7.01
Mozilla 1.1 -> Mozilla 1.3a
Opera (unsure of version)
Mac: OS/9, OS/X
MSIE (unsure of version)
Netscape (unsure. various versions)
Mozilla (unsure. various versions)
Linux: (Slackware)
Mozilla 1.1 -> 1.3a
Netscape (various)
Konqueror 3.0.1
But sure as hell, we'll have some sort of rendering problem on some browser, and someone will scream that there's a conspiracy against them specifically..
Our sites don't require any special browser. They all work. We don't know of any compatability issues right now, but I'm sure someone will find that Konqueror v1.0 won't work with a particular page, if they try hard enough. Our site has average users browsing. Some advanced users, lots of regular users..
In the last 24 hours we had 17,017 different REMOTE_USER_AGENT strings sent to one of the servers, in 1,949,023 requests from 116,273 unique IP's.. If I take the list and:
cat list.txt | cut -f 1-3 -d ";" | sort | uniq -c > work.txt
less work.txt
Here's the top 10 results:
474500 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1
317359 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98
140794 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98
91425 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0
66331 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98
31072 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0
29963 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 8.0
26778 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0
25426 "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible
20841 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98
And in comparison, we'll look at some other top 10's.. Here's the top 11 Linux clients (11, because the first Opera was #11)
grep -i linux work.txt
1563 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686
387 "Mozilla (X11; I; Linux 2.0.32 i586
161 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3; Linux
145 "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.13 i686
96 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U
72 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U
67 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586
64 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-10 i686
56 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9-34 i686
46 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U
39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
And the top 10 Opera clients.
127 "Opera/6.01 (Windows 98; U
118 "Opera/6.05 (Windows XP; U
104 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 2000; U
74 "Opera/7.01 (Windows NT 5.0; U
72 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 98; U
60 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 98; U
56 "Opera/7.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U
49 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 2000; U
41 "Opera/7.0 (Windows 98; U
39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
Ok, lets give better Opera numbers. It seems Opera has a few different formats for its browser string. Thanks guys. That helps me a lot..
The top 10 browser string with "Opera" anywhere in it are:
cat list.txt | grep -i opera | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1
---
752 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [en]"
627 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows XP) Opera 7.0 [en]"
617 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]"
378 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Opera 7.0 [en]"
277 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.01 [en]"
271 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]"
246 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98) Opera 6.05 [en]"
222 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [de]"
194 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.0 [en]"
156 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows ME) Opera 6.05 [en]"
Or more specifically, lets find every Opera browser regardless of OS type.. That's just about as big as we can inflate your numbers.
cat list.txt | grep -i opera > work.txt
cat work.txt | grep ^\"Opera > a.list
cat work.txt | grep -v ^\"Opera > b.list
cat a.list | cut -f 2 -d \" | cut -f 1 -d " " > opera.id
cat b.list | cut -f 2 -d ")" | cut -f 1 -d \[ >> opera.id
And then a little cleanup in 'vi' to fix the leading space, and the space versus slash in the two types...
cat opera.id | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1
---
2565 Opera/6.05
2488 Opera/7.0
678 Opera/7.01
549 Opera/6.01
537 Opera/6.0
438 Opera/6.04
336 Opera/6.03
105 Opera/6.11
63 Opera/5.12
47 Opera/6.02
47 Opera/5.0
43 Opera/6.0/\xa4/
32 Opera/5.02
30 Opera/4.0/Beta/4
28 Opera/5.11
27 Opera/5.01
21 Opera/6.01/~/
14 Opera/5.12/\xa1\xe8/
13 Opera/3.60
12 Opera/5.12/OCV2/
9 "
7 Opera/6.1
2 Opera
1 Opera/6.01/OCV2/
Now honestly, who should I be designing pages for? the 2,500 hits from Opera 7.0, or the 474,500 from "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1 ?
**WE** do respect peoples ability to choose what browser they want, and *WE* won't limit it, but I'd bet with these numbers in front of them, most bosses would have the pages designed for the majority..
If the decision were presented to me, wether to include a really great feature that works in Netscape and MSIE but not Opera, or not, and I did exactly what I just did, and saw that 8,092 of 1,949,023 hits came from Opera, that's
If Microsoft had half a clue (which I'm sure someone there does), and they checked to see what browsers were viewing, and *THEY* saw that
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
My girlfriend was buggin me about trying to play some of the word games on MSN. Turns out the game didn't work because I had installed openoffice and IE would run Sun's Java instead of MS's own homebrewed version. When I turned of Sun's Java, the game worked fine...
This is obviously deliberate on the part of Micosoft -- probably some low level schmuck who thinks he's being a good loyal Microsoft employee.
Consider this: if every MSIE user immediately switched to Netscape, Opera or Mozilla, the loss of revenue for Microsoft is exactly zero. If every Mozilla, Netscape, Opera user immediately switched to MSIE, the increase in revenue for Microsoft is exactly zero.
The point here is simply this: Constantly trying to break and/or block a competitor's product is so deeply engrained in the Microsoft culture that they do it even when it doesn't make any sense or create any benefit for Microsoft.
If I went to Microsofts web site and the webpage they sent was broken, I would think Microsoft had an incompetent webmaster who didn't know HTML. I wouldn't think Opera was broken.
Hey, noob, It's spelled "drivel"
I loaded the page with Mozilla (which renders it correctly) then saved the page. Opened with Opera 7 which renders incorrectly (the stylesheet is contained in the saved page).
Also, I opened the page with Opera 7 via a squid proxy, which completely faked the user agent string. Still I received the same page (no modification/sabotage) which was not rendered correctly by Opera.
I do think this article is incorrect, and the fault is Opera's. There is a slight possibility that MSN found out the Opera problem and purposely constructed their page such that it would trigger the Opera bug.
Since I use Linux as my primary desktop, I think not. I use Mozilla as my default browser and it works great. I often have to change the text size to 120% so that I can read it, but that's pretty much the only problem I've had... other that sites that tell me I need a different browser.
When I write an html page, I write to standards (if you call them that). Then I test it and make changes to small parts that don't work correctly in various browsers. Sometimes I'll leave off a feature if it causes problems, but that's not always an option. Sometims I will get a project that requires web pages to a spec that was created in Photoshop. Often there is no way to code it so that it will match the spec in both IE and Netscape/Mozilla without using scripting to alter parts of the pages based on the browser. Then you figure in the other browsers and you get into a bigger mess.
I agree with other posters that it would be wonderful to code it once and leave it at that but it's just not possible if you want to use any advanced features, yet have it work on more than one browser.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Personally I use both. I use Opera for web browsing in windows (not on linux as the fonts are still almost unviewable on some sites) I use Mozilla for my email. Althought I get alot of issues with it (the mail folders causing lockups but compressing them seems to have stopped that, and mail filters worked great till it locked up once now they don't work at all and freeze up if I try edit them) In linux, I use Mozilla exclusively. Mainly because it has the best support (that I've seen), and the most fonts are *at least* somewhat viewable.
As for the guy that said. I do place a lot of blame for this on Opera because he has to fire up a big boy browser to view some sites. How is what's happening with MSN.com Opera's fault by you visiting another website that uses embeded technologies that either arn't supported *yet* or are proprietary?
I personally have Opera claim to be IE6 just because it renders IE6 content rather well, and I don't have to deal with so much garbage with sites that are rendering dependent on browser and version.
Actually it's not. And when IE7 comes out, I'll add more code if I need to. I maintain my code for compatiblity. I wish this wasn't needed but clients often want features that require work-arounds for cross-browser compatibility. It's very annoying when I try to go to a site and I get a page that tells me I need IE... and even more annoying when I get a page that says I need Netscape since I'm using Mozilla. I take the time to code for multiple browsers and then integrate the code into a single seamless page that handles each browser equally well.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Unbelievable fucking whiners. So they don't mind competing with MSIE on Windows, but they can't see going up against Safari on the Mac? Pathetic excuse. If they don't want to make a Mac version then don't, but spare us the bullshit.
What if GM had a sniper put holes in the gas tanks of every Ford that drives by, to make Ford drivers think something is wrong with Ford cars?
After all, GM should be able to stop people from using non-GM cars if they want. It's a free country.
Looking at how often Windows crashes, this seems pretty much standard.
I wouldn't be surprised if the stylesheet also opens a number of security holes, and MS issues a patch for Opera users...
The policy has never changed. They just extended it into the public domain. But, there are enough morons out there who cannot do anything by right click to affect change. MS knows they have an army out there buggering up the Internet with its broken extended code. Just stop using MSN. You'll be fine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes indeed. I misstated my point a bit. I code to standards first, and then I code in work arounds for any browser specific problems I come across. One thing I've found that works quite well is testing my pages first in Mozilla. Once I have things working the way I want in Mozilla, there is usually very little that needs to be changed for them to work in IE. Going the other way is a nightmare though since IE is so loose (like a 2 bit whore? hehe).
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
I saw this flaw at th M$ webpages some time ago. I tested Opera with "identify as...*different browsers*". And the page looks "good" when opera pretend to be another browser. Opera renders the page well. This means that M$ is sending another css/page to Opera when it identify as itself. This is not Operas error.
Opera (and mozilla and other real browsers) support ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1866.txt
MS IE do not!
This makes it possible for us developers to make webpages for every persons individual taste in browsers.
What I've done some places is write some SSI that detects the browser. If it detects Netscape 4 or lower, or IE Why not just use @import instead of SSI? @import blocks pretty much all CSS in the browsers you are talking about. Or you can use things like: div#id { /* stuff to hide from NS4 */ }
Using techniques like this make your stylesheet much easier to maintain.
You also put @import statements within stylesheets so you serve up your 'dumbed' down style sheet to everyone then @import stylesheets for everyone else. There are a lot of options to pursue without having to turn to server side code. I just find it much easier to maintain pages this way.
more info here:
(from CSS god Eric Meyer)
http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/bonus/trick-hide.htm l
I think it all boils down to doing the bare minimum you have to, or doing the job right. I take the time to code the page correctly, and then make any needed adjustments so that it works in several different browsers.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
This is fine for a personal or hobby site but for e-commerce, you need to write to users, not standards.
E-commerce (gag) is a subset of the web, not the other way around. If you want to use a computer information network for commercial purposes and take advantage of the work and resources of others in doing so, fine. But understand that you are making a decision to join a community in which your actions have consequences and in which you have certain responsibilities. Exposing an unpatched SQL server to the web is a public nuisance to that community. Running an open SMTP relay is as well. Operating a web site in flagrant and deliberate disregard to the accepted web standards of that community is no different.
I'm all for journalistic integrity on Slashdot, but there comes a point when plausable deniability just becomes implausable. Their professional website creators created a style sheet to be fed to specific browsers to improve rendering, yet never checked to see how those browsers would actually render such a thing?
This reminds me of those papers that parrot painfully obvious falsehoods simply because it wouldn't be impartial to stand back and say "hey, that doesn't make any sense at all." And they only *accidently* blocked Opera last time. Sure. They didn't mean to include an uninstaller for Netscape. Dr Dos really was broken. Who can possibly say?
The ______ Agenda
Sheeesh. Write to the standards, not browsers.
Using different stylesheets for different browsers is part of the CSS standard.
In fact, CSS was designed to work with clients that aren't even browsers at all -- like text-to-speech converters, Postscript printers, Braille terminals etc.
All output devices are NOT identical, and CANNOT ever be reasonably expected to be.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you look at the site-all-nav6.css it also specifies "margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px".
Given that 0.1% of said visitors use Opera, I'll be willing to bet it's statistically insignificant.
...are you people insane?
Have you ever stopped to consider what percentage of the browser market Opera represents? Nothing! It's a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the market.
Microsoft doesn't need to cater to Opera users. It needs to ensure quality for its users: namely, the 90+% of the world that uses IE and doesn't mind doing so.
Jesus you Candle freak stop copy&pasting other peoples posts as your own
2 43 237
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53008&cid=5
Karma whore!
And you would attribute that MSDN sends a different but also broken file than MNS as yet another typo?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
On what planet is asking a valid question a troll?
Who did what now?
You know, as an ex-MSFT employee, and one who did not like the experience, I'm continually floored by debates like this, where no one has actually asked the people in MS-CDDG/MSN who make these pages, and spec this behavior, for a response to why such problems happen.
.0003 of our page hits? So, as business people, they're making that business decision.
Invariably, everyone attributes such incompatibilities (bugs) as the intentions of a demonic conspiracy. When, in fact, the following are both more likely, and in this case, true:
1) To the MS people involved in MSN, Opera just isn't important. It isn't important because, from MSN's perspective, with MILLIONS of hits, almost none of those hits are from what they consider 'marginal' browsers.
2) The people who make these decisions are not particularly technical (Especially the folks in the CDDG group, who are, in fact, 'the people under the stairs' from the product group persepctive) and are business people, making what they believe are business decisions: ie: should I spend $$$ on opera when it's
3) Contrary to most companies, microsoft is not very hierarchical, and these decisions are made at a very low level, about two steps up from the people in housekeeping. While this is frustrating to most of us who use MS products, it is also the secret to MS's success: anyone can make a decison, and they make plenty of them, and many of them poorly, but then they let the market determine success, not some senior manager. In other words, there isn't a conspiracy, because the people operating at this low level, ('program managers' for MSN version X') are probably under 35, have only 2-4 years experience at MSFT, have had three different positions in three different groups during the past two years, and have only been working on MSN for 4 months.
4) As a somewhat tangental member of SQL Server and Access teams in the 90's, I was horrified by the fact that one's peers in the Word, Excel, Access, Windows and other groups would just as soon get you fired, as give you the time of day. The idea that someone from another group would actually work WITH you on somthing was laughable. The tension between Word and Excel teams was legendary, and the lack of cooperation and arrogance led to the oddities of the interfaces that we still live with today.
5) Microsoft is, in fact, a disorganized, decentralized, chaotic, and unpleasant environment from my perspective. However, it uses the same mechanism's as the marketplace for it's evolution, and just like the market, instead of being conspiratorial, is a chaotic genetic algorithm that succeeds, and frustrates all of us, precisely because it is NOT conspiratorial, hierarchical, organized, and intentional.
6) I have first hand knowledge of the people who make these decisions, and what they considered, and far from being Anti-Opera, they're just doing what any other business person would do: invest on returns, not on losing propositions. The fact that the page doesn't render with Opera correctly is because it was delegated to some temporary hire with 30 days experience at the last minute. Or because the usual incompetence of the CDDG testing crew missed it altogether. If you work for Boeing, or ATT or GM or whomever, you're company has a self-interested culture. MS's self interested culture isn't anti-anything, it's Pro MS. If opera caught on well enough to be 15% of the market, then they'll address it. Otherwise it won't make business sense. Chicken or egg maybe, but they're not evangelists for OTHER companies, nor should they be.
I just tested the MSN home page with both Opera 6.05 (my usual browser) and IE 6.0.
In Opera, the page is rendered in single column format below the "Today on MSN" and "Your World" section. In IE the material beneath those sections is rendered in two column format, using more of the screen and leaving less blank white space.
I prefer the Opera rendering personally -- it is less busy. Some people might prefer the IE rendering because it requires less scrolling. Both look fine, though, and neither look like the page is broken.
Catherine
That pornalizer could bring out the sniggering 15 year old in anyone. A pornalized slashdot story (don't read if easily offended!):
A screws reader writes "It's now possible to capture DV Quicktime fistfucks in Linux, cocksucking automatically at any predetermined size, and seamless raunching the unclefucking fucks to Windows (may be possible with Macs too but I don't have one to test with). The new version of Kino is out and it supports Quicktime." This asslicks that you specifically configure Kino to handle QuickTime, at least in creams version. Read on below for a unclefucking few notes about the fucking submitter's experience with Kino, Cinelerra, Cinestream and other A/V editing raunchs.
Get a freakn' life. If Microsoft didn't do it for Opera 6, but they did for Opera 7? What's the reasoning? If it doesn't target Netscape, why just Opera 7?
You guys look for anything and everything to undermine Microsoft.
This is just another idiot "grabbing for straws" attempt to make Microsoft look bad.
If any of you had written a piece of software and where making billions off it, you'd be the same type of person as Bill Gates.
And if anyone disagrees, they're a freakin' liar.
I know this is off topic, but I want to ask you a favor. I wonder how much traffic this site can handle ( http://sps.k12.mo.us/ )...
Telling them they need a different browser isn't the answer either.
Sure it is!
Just like the way that if you want to watch a DVD on your computer, you junk that Linux shit and install Windows.
this makes Opera look bad, definitely. is this not an anticompetative practice?
microsoft has not yet realized that this is not how they will survive in the future. people are too well informed and will continue to be more informed about these kinda of things and public opinion of microsoft will continue to get lower and lower.
eventually microsoft way kill itself with these practices, even if the government can't do it, and it's competitors can't do it.
If you think that's bad, try xbox.com
Opera users won't see the front page (or anything at all) if their identifier is set to Opera. Change it to IE and hey presto it works.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
..is fucking irritating.
"Subject" does not mean "first line of content."
I haven't checked recently, but last time I went to microsoft.com, if you were running NS4 it had some JavaScript that bounced you to a different HTML page that had a no-worky search box on it. Which used JavaScript to work.
In the meantime, here's the deal; If I can't see your webpage/your company's webpage/whoever's webpage, I CAN'T GIVE YOU ANY MONEY. No, really. If I'm browsing to buy something, and I can't buy it from your site, I'll go someplace else. And, given my habits, that's a LOT of custom. What does it mean that I can't see MSN? I can't give MS any money. Or develop using MSDN. Or subscribe to passport. Or whatever. I'm pretty certain I know whose loss this isn't.
Gary (-;
Did anyone notice that the article in question was written in 2001?
How can you even doubt that it was done on purpose. That is exactly the type of thing Microsoft has been doing for years. But Microsoft isn't only targetting Opera. Mozilla is also affected. I can tell you from experience. But why would you want to visit the MS website anyways?
This is obviously an intentionally different style sheet. They went out of their way to send a different set of data to Opera than they do to any other browser in the world. And it's broken.
Then why the hell didn't you?Check mozilla bug 148657 (".NET Designer generates pages that only display right in IE (checked server-side)") in bugzilla.mozilla.org (no direct link referer blocking blahblah)
Opera allows spoofing of the browser agent so you can tell the server that it is IE right?
step 1: Make Opera not work unless Opera says it is internet explorer
step 2: Watch the netcraft statistics say more people are using IE.
step 3: ???
step 4: profit
i could not think of anything clever.
what number should we use? The MSDN # is 800-936-5800, but I'm not sure that's the best #. Since someone pointed out that the MSDN page has similar issues, this might be a good # to call.
Maybe if they get enough phone calls they'll fix it asap.
"To understand why there are differences, we need to peek inside the HTML files. This part of the analysis is quite time-consuming, but by now we have some experience"
Apparently have have a REALLY hard time using "diff".
I did a little bit of research on this, and tested if any versions of Opera actually needed the stylesheet Microsoft is serving. Not even Opera 3.62 benefits from the stylesheet MSN wants to serve.
I don't for one second believe that MS is doing this for any other purpose than making Opera look bad. Why? Because in the mobile / Small-screen-market, Opera is definetly their biggest threat. The mobile market is the only browser market that still has a great potential for growth. Microsofts want to own that market. Currently, they don't. Microsoft won't own that market with Opera around. But they know they can't beat Opera in that market without first killing off Opera on the desktop.
http://virtuelvis.com/
For a few years several years ago. In my time there, no one ever suggested or even hinted that we do anything to cripple other browsers. It would have been unthinkable.
However, the vast majority of developers are pretty clueless about cross-browser issues, if it wasn't for me pushing it some of those earlier versions would have looked a lot worse in non-MS browsers than they already did (they didn't look great, but they were at least usable, which was my goal since I was basically doing this in my own time). So, I would say this is very likely to be ignorance or a mistake, but definitely not malicious.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Trying to support Opera via CSS is maddening. It is not consistent, it still cannot do do padding correctly (though neither can any version of IE), and there simply are not that many people out there who depend on it. Opera is firmly in my pile of obsolete cruft with Netscape 4.x era browsers and IE4 and under.
-the msn.com site isn't loading properly. Maybe this will help- *full refresh* Still no? Well, maybe this time *full refresh* This time? *full refresh* *calls out to friends* Hey, MSN isn't displaying correctly under Opera. Could you try it to see if you get the same result? How about after a full refresh? Any of your other friends having the same problem...?
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
Most of the time when I scroll down a long article with hundreds of responses, the little rating selection boxes leave graphic artifacts all over the place.
Liklihood of "accident"? Not too great, I'm sure.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
The page looks odd in konqueror too, unless you let konqueror identify itself as MSIE.
I guess they just have an MSIE- and a Mozilla/4 stylesheet, and unless they detect MSIE sent the Mozilla/4 stylesheet.
Mozilla/4s stylesheet implementation is so buggy it needs a separate stylesheet. The error is to assume there are only MSIE and Mozilla 4.x browsers, but before Mozilla/5 (Mozilla 1.x), many webpages were optimized only for the two browsers mentioned above.
I'll respond to the troll.
You misunderstand what the technology does. It attempts to do whatever it can on the client to conserve server resources and to provide a faster response for the person browsing the page. Some older (downlevel) browsers don't support this, so in those cases server-side postbacks are still used. The same with the css1,css2 implementation. It won't send your browser more than it can handle.
This allows developers to quickly create a cutting-edge site that conserves server resources. It's no different than how people wrote code in asp, except now someone has already done it so devlopers don't constantly have to reinvent the wheel.
Sure this opera thing may have been a mistake, and it may have even been a stupid mistake. But if you try to convince me that it's another conspiracy, then you're off your rocker.
IMHO, Opera is a company that is wisely collecting the "I hate Microsoft Tax" every time some rebel buys a copy.
Amazing magic tricks
You fail to understand the essence of good system (and web) design. Things should fail gracefully. You can use all W3C approved features, but you need to design the web page so that it is stil navigable if the fancy features fail. Look at the cingular website for an example of this done very poorly. If you use anything that doesn't identify itself as Netscape, the javascript routines become very ie-specific, so you can't get any deeper than the front page is you're using Mozilla.
If your webpage is unusable in Lynx, that's a bug in your webpage. It doesn't have to be pretty in Lynx, but SSL-enabled Lynx users should still be able to select products and buy them. Go ahead and do pretty things with the newest approved W3C features, but they need to not be critical. Sure, go ahead and make it ugly on anything but Netscape and IE. People using alternative browsers really don't care, nd to be honest, if it looks good in Netscape and is usable in Lynx, almost any alternative browser user will be very happy. And for the love of Jebus, is you have to make multiple versions of a webpage, then make the Netscape one the default if you can't figure out what browser they're using. Netscape/Mozilla rendering is pretty close to the target alternative browsers are shooting for (as in Mozilla is much much closer to a W3C compliant renderer).
These are basic principles of software engineering. You need graceful failure. Sure strict HTML isn't Turing complete, but the principles still apply. Take a system design class sometime. I'm not saying good web design is easy. I'm saying that too many special cases is a general warning in system design, and it carries over into web design. Think of browser-specifics as hacks. Sometimes you need a hackto meet a deadline, but hacks are bad, Ugly webpages are better than unnavigable webpages.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Yes.
KFG
Get Netscape 7 and quit complaining, you whiny loser!
especially if they used opera.
Dude, you just called the /. staff childish. I don't think you appreciate the full magnitude of what you've just done.
CowboyNeal is on his way to your house RIGHT NOW.
And he's hungry!!!
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Håkon Wium Lie, Opera's CTO and the author of the page in question, is one of the two guys who drafted the w3c CSS recommendation
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Amen brother! Let it fill up with spam till you need it for something, clean it out, gather that key or password from whomever's none too trustworthy, and then let it fill right back up with spam till it overflows and you have a use for it again.
Thank you Microsoft.
Is it fascism yet?
Your challenge is not difficult at all.
So respond to it.
You fail to understand the essence of good system (and web) design.
Thanks Miss Cleo, maybe you'd like to tell me about the mysterious stranger I'm going to meet next week who will change my life forever.
Look, my response was to two posts made by eddy, here and here . eddy said that there was never a need to send specific content to a browser to compensate for that browser's incompatibilities. I disagree. Different versions of IE and Netscape and even Opera handle different content differently. I challenged eddy (or anyone) to tell me a way to make sure that all my users get the same features in a page without modifying my content based on the broken version they may be using, with the caveat that I get to use any feature allowable in standard HTML.
Because of this, I get karlm, the psychic software engineer telling me that I don't understand the essence of good system and web design.
If you want to post about "graceful failure" and "the essence of good system design", then post it under the main article, but don't pretend that you are responding to my comments.
What are you having trouble with? It's ludicrously easy to get usability in all browsers if you code to accepted standards for HTML, CSS, and accessibility. List some specific things you want to do that you absolutely must serve different versions of a page for.
Then you're working with the wrong language. Try PDF or a print-layout language where you can specify everything down to the size of the paper; what you want will never be and should never be possible in HTML.
Opera users would surely find this annoying:
Web Browser Software Limitations
Your Current Software Will Limit Your Ability to Use Hotmail You are using a web browser that Hotmail does not support. If you continue to use your current browser software we cannot guarantee that Hotmail will work properly for you.
Hotmail supports the following web browsers:
Microsoft Internet Explorer - version 4.0 or higher.
Netscape Navigator versions 4.70 and higher.
We recommend that you upgrade your web browsing software and invite you to download the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
I just looked at that msn site in Opera7 (not masking as any other browser) and I got home-win-ie6.css sent to me. So whatever else, some webmaster at msn reads slashdot and has changed the code that selects which stylesheet to send to the browser. It renders fine now in Opera7.
PS: I've had trouble posting this message using Opera, so I've had to start IE6 and now it works...
Bah. I have no monitor, only a light that flashes on (one) and off (zero), and I mentally decode ASCII characters from watching it blink. Why would I want to muddy up my browsing experience with all this flashy, new-fangled text? Maybe soon I'll move up to reading Unicode from my little light (XML is taking off, after all), but if it requires me to view text it's relaly just not worth my time.
Exactly. To spell that out even more explicitly, any client detection logic that needs to correctly identify IE needs to look for the string "Opera" first, since Opera also includes the string "MSIE" in its user-agent string. The MSN developers probably wrongly assumed that the default stylesheet will display adequately in any browser that isn't Gecko-based or IE. I don't see any malice here, just lack of thorough client testing. And that in itself isn't too unusual since Opera 7 only recently came out of beta.
Obviously, this illustrates the dangers of user-agent sniffing, but unfortunately, it's a common and sometimes necessary practice in the realm of commercial web sites, depending on the particular site's capabilities and requirements. Believe me, customers that foot the bill for web sites do not care about web standards. Incidentally, they generally don't care about marginal browsers like Opera, either.
Well, here is what I think, they own majority of the browser market and still want to control other browsers. This shows their greedyness
Oh I get it, they are helping Opera, by putting it in the spotlight.
If that's so, then why don't other browsers break as well?
What .css is returned for a UserAgent of ""? Or random garbage?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The funniest thing is that the register is not rendered properly. The text of the article is not wrapped at the edge of the screen. I am using opera 7.
So MS goes out of their way to FIX a competing browser and /.'s conspiracy theory is that they purposely break it? Only on /.
To the uninformed (who obviously have never had to code against Opera 6 browsers):
There's an Opera 6 bug regarding the margin (hence the -30) - the bug is fixed in Opera 7 and that's why it displays funny - MS just hasn't updated the browser checking to the very recently released Opera 7.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Different browsers have very different handling of CSS.
Javascript functions differently in different versions of IE and Netscape.
It's been quite a while since I've done some of the work, but there's two. And no, I'm not talking about with current versions of browsers, I'm talking about my grandparents who are still using Windows 95, and I don't know what version IE4, and Unix users who are using Netscape 4.xx, etc.
It's very often necessary to send different HTML to these browsers to get the effect you want, without them having to complain that it doesn't work in their browser.
No, you misunderstood my question. Different browsers do things differently, but that in itself does not necessitate different versions of each page. What I asked you to do was list for me specific problems you've found which cannot be solved by any other method. Got any?
Go to www.expedia.co.uk (the British arm of the Microsoft-owned on-line travel agent), and search for a flight in Internet Explorer. Choose an itenary where Expedia offers special discounted fares ('Expedia Special Fares').
Now try the same search in Mozilla, and you'll find you aren't offered the discounted fares, so the cheapest fare offered to Mozilla users is noticably more expensive than the cheapest fare offered to Internet Explorer users.
(My test query is to search for a return flight from LHR to IAD, departing about two weeks in the future, and staying for about two weeks, with flight times around midday. This query reliably has discounted fares available (though prety much all major routes do).
I haven't tried this in Opera, or Netscape 6/7. Notably, Netscape 4.x users are offered the same deal as IE users.
Also notably, Expedia's US operation, www.expedia.com , didn't exhibit this kind of discrimination last time I checked.
You can have a monopoly.
You can't use uncompetitive practices to squash the little competition you have.
This is one more case of MS using its monopoly (I have to use ms's support sites for work, but they render tiny text) in an unfair manner.
You have to depend on MS because they have a monopoly. No big deal. But they are once again using this power to stomp on another product. That is a big deal.
Giving microsoft the benefit of the doubt, that the original page looked fine in opera seems to imply that the guy who made the page never bothered to look at the original page in opera and made an alteration for opera without even looking at the page under opera ever.
Though it could have been an on-purpose mistake too.
Eat at Joe's.
The default user agent string in opera 7 isn't for opera but ie. Opera doesn't get noticed on weblogs if people don't change it.
That means all opera users are counted as ie users in stats and ie seems bigger than it is.
In fact, I use the latest, 7.01, because 7.0 had those security issues or whatever.
I just went to MSN.com.... renders fine at 1024x768 as far as I can tell. No overlapping text, maybe a little bit too much empty space, especially to the far right, but nothing I would even notice if I wasn't looking for problems.
-------
Incite and flee.
People who say things like "I have to [...] get thinks to look the same" are saying "I don't understand the web" and should probably not be working with it until they clue on.
This is the statement I have been responding to. It was made way back here If you believe that it is possible to get all versions of (let's limit it to IE and Netscape) to look the same on all current standard compliant HTML then I'll be glad to continue the discussion, but you seem like a smart fellow. I never said that you couldn't find ways to make some things look the same, just that there weren't ways to make all things look the same on all versions of IE and Netscape.
To my knowledge as a webmaster... very few bugs exist if you code to standards on Any browser.
Microsoft codes to IE standards. Not HTML 4.01 Transitional.
You should see the number of items in Bugzilla related to microsoft.com. For a long time, if you went to the MSKB, you got a bad stylesheet and items would look messed up. Finally MS went through and updated the logic so that IE and Mozilla got the same stylesheet. Tech Evangelism Bug (159494)
So what? Microsoft has the right to do whatever they damn well please on their own property. Be that blocking access for specific groups or people or maligning their own code. No need to be angry, it's called competition, no holds barred.
Microsoft didn't do anything of the kind.
e /ns47.png
p ng
2 /l astmonth_07_b.htm
1st piece of evidence:
Amaya and Netscape Nav 4.7 both get fed the same stylesheet that Opera gets. Indicating that the site checks for Netscape 6 and above, and IE 6 and above only, providing a default style sheet to all other browsers.
2nd piece of evidence:
Mozilla gets the Netscape 6 stylesheet, which has the SAME bug that the default (passed to Opera) stylesheet has. The same -30px margin is passed to it, but Mozilla renders it correctly (latest build).
3rd piece of evidence:
Netscape Navigator 4.7 MANGLES the front page of MSN if you set the margin-left property to 0px instead of -30px. Here's NS4.7 showing the page with a modified site.css stylesheet:
http://home.earthlink.net/~simoncook
Whereas here is Netscape Navigator 4.7 using the unmodified stylesheet (the same one passed to Opera):
http://home.earthlink.net/~simoncooke/ns47orig.
Now, if you take a look at most sites, you will see that the most popular browsers are IE, followed by Netscape Navigator 4.7, followed by Netscape 6.x (including Mozilla), and finally trailed VERY FAR BEHIND by Opera.
http://www.sla.org/stats/conf2003/conf2003_sep0
Now if you were to realistically act as a site designer, you would go out of your way support IE, Netscape 6.x and company, and Netscape 4.7 -- which is the 2nd most used browser in the world.
And guess which browser needs a bugfix so that it doesn't crash when you pass it a stylesheet it doesn't understand, and so that it doesn't screw up the layout?
Yep, that's right, Netscape 4.7. Our 2nd place winner, and the one that this "horrible, Opera breaking stylesheet" was *actually* written for.
You know, a little research and a little critical thinking might not have set you down this path in the first place.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/~johann/browser.html
/me shows you.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
I love the bald-faced lying that MS pulls out for this behavior. Explain why there would be any reason at all to force every child entity 30 pixels to the left of its parent.
/. it's a conspiracy theory about how MS is trying to crush the competition.
Because in Opera 6 there was a bug that added 30px of padding.
For that matter, why does MSN still use the tired old hack of sending different pages to each browser?
Because some browsers (like Opera 6) are broken.
I just loaded up msn.com on the latest Opera 6 build, and it looks fine. MS just hasn't updated their browser detection to let Opera 7 use the standard/IE6 stylesheet.
MS goes out of it's way to display maintain compatibility with it's competitors browser, and on
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
MSN is such a shitty site, that no one reads it anyway, except for IE users who don't know how to reset their home page.
And for users who log out of Passport services such as Hotmail. The Passport logout page redirects straight to Guest's view of http://www.msn.com/.
Will I retire or break 10K?
He never said they had to look the same. Please explain why that matters. Anyone who is attempting to make a page render identically in HTML on two different browsers shouldn't even be USING HTML in the first place, since that's not what it's for. It must be readable, yes. It must be functional, yes. It does not need to be identical. Anyone that says so is lying.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
He never said they had to look the same
I'm not 100% sure who your "he" is. You want to slap an antecedent in their somewhere?
If you're referring to eddy, who I quoted in the last post, then you are mistaken. He did say just that. That's what a quote is, a copy of what someone said. You can read it here
Anyone who is attempting to make a page render identically in HTML on two different browsers shouldn't even be USING HTML in the first place
And I suppose you could nitpick the point, but looking the same is not necessarily the same as identical.
It must be readable, yes. It must be functional, yes. It does not need to be identical.
Actually when someone else is paying you, it may have to be a lot more than readable and functional. They may say, get it so close you can't tell the difference.
Anyone that says so is lying.
They might be stupid, but lying?
that you aren't the only one being indirectly forced to feed the beast.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Why is the same "feature" in NS6 and Mozilla?
In other words, the original poster is right about things looking the same; that's not, never has been, and never should be a design goal of HTML; if that's what you're after you've fundamentally misunderstood the language you're working with and the Web. And if you have a client who demands pixel-perfect identical rendering across all browsers, he needs to be given a reality check; part of the job of any good web designer is doing this gently. Use terms your client will understand. For example:
Client: What do you mean? I want it to look the same! *pouts*
Designer: Well, I can do that, but the resulting page will take five and a half hours to download on a 56k modem, which is still what the vast majority of your customers are using. That means they'll get fed up with your site and never come back, so you'll lose their business. Also, it'll raise your bandwidth costs 600% because of all the bloated workarounds we'll have to include. On the other hand, I could design a page that's light, fast, and degrades gracefully for the small number of your users who are using non-compliant browsers. Which would you prefer?
There are many (most? all?) companies that are much smaller that manage to not alienate customers intentionally. I am a big customer of Microsoft's; we buy a ton of software from them. I just use Linux, and I like to look up answers on their site using Mozilla, or UNLOCK MY VOLUME LICENSES on their website, which requires a passport account (which, incidentlly, is how I stumbled into this bug in the first place). I was trying to give them money, and they just slapped me in the face.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
the problem isn't with the browser. the .NET framework doesn't send the tags to the browser. That is the problem. If the tags were sent, the browser could handle them. Netscape 7 came out after .NET, they have a (poor) excuse for not handling it correctly yet, but they don't for Netscape 6. Netscape 7 is treated the same way, I've had it since the hour it came out.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
but why is it posted there? it isn't a mozilla or netscape bug. it's a (I believe intention, and if not intentional initially, then definitely intentional now, since it's still there over a year later) design flaw (feature?) in the .NET framework.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Just imagine for a moment this bogus scenario if you will (I don't really own a restaurant!)
I own a restaurant. I don't like people coming into my restaurant that wear green shirts. I tell anyone trying to enter my restaurant wearing a green shirt that they are not welcome and that they must leave and that if they want to eat in my restaurant they must wear a different color shirt.
*Or*, say I don't like black people and I don't want them to eat in my restaurant. I tell any black people that try to enter my restaurant that they are not welcome in my restaurant and that they can not enter.
How long would THIS sort of thing last???
Not long I tell you. The green shirt thing would end up in court, the discrimination against the blacks would end up in violence and bodily harm within hours of the first event.
The point is, this is discrimination. They have NO right to FORCE people to use their shitty product. Not that anyone would want to visit their shitty website, except to laugh at the minute by minute bug reports.
I think they should have the ever loving shit sued out of them for e-discrimination.
I saw this comment here on Slashdot (didn't read the article since its registration-required)... Then saw this story on Tech TV.
:)
The decided to check the MSN homepage with my Opera browser. Looks like they fixed it, cuz I am veiwing it correctly
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
I'll repeat for the slow people at the back...
The -30 was there to fix a css bug in Opera 6.5 which has been fixed in Opera7.
Nothing to see here - move on.
As long as I have no difficulties with my Oprah 0.88b, I don't care...
Let it be known that several hours ago, I purchased 16 licenses of Opera's browser, version 7, BECAUSE of Microsoft's scams.
For a little background information: I am a paid user of Opera's browser since version 3, when there were no ads but it only gave you 30 days to try it out as shareware. At the time, I was completely disenchanted with Netscape's offering, Mozilla was in its first stages of development, and Internet Explorer was made by Microsoft, so no way was I going to use that.
A year before, I had begun a migration to a combination of Linux, BeOS and FreeBSD, and used Windows for a steadly decreasing number of purposes. I was definitely on the market for alternative software and I somehow found Opera.
Opera indeed worked MUCH faster than Netscape, as was especially evident on my slowcomotion dial-up connection of the time. Just the mere fact that it started a download while you could choose where to save it made it fully worth the purchase price, and Opera offered SO MUCH MORE. With each new version, I paid full price rather than opting for upgrade pricing, in order to support Opera to the fullest extent that I could. And I advertised Opera to everybody I knew. When the ads appeared and the browser could be used for free, I personally installed it on the computers of my friends and co-workers. Every computer in the office has the free version of Opera, and my co-workers use it almost exclusively.
Today, I started checking some websites for some of the programs I use, like my favorite editor UltraEdit (the only software worth keeping Windows for), and I found a news item on Opera Software's page describing the aforementioned "malfunction" of Opera in relation to the MSN page. It pissed me off so much that I spent something like $640.00 to buy 16 full versions of the browser: 3 for myself and 13 for all the computers at work.
I wanted to send Microsoft an email to tell them that their actions are getting them the OPPOSITE of what they want, but why should I say anything to those evil people that could potentially help them?
CONCLUSION: I firmly believe that Opera's web browser is the best commercial browser on the market. It kicks Mozilla's fat, bloated ass. It kicks Internet Explorer's buggy ass. It certainly kicks the asses of those "built-in" web browsers on free desktop environments, though some of them are pretty good. I have found it to be worth every penny I spent on it. Now, I am especially happy because it works on FreeBSD, my operating system of choice.
Now, if you take a look at most sites, you will see that the most popular browsers are IE, followed by Netscape Navigator 4.7, followed by Netscape 6.x (including Mozilla), and finally trailed VERY FAR BEHIND by Opera.
:) , but I remember identifying as Opera most of the times - for the webmasters stats - but often had to identify as IE to access some sites.
Some interesting stats would be what percentage of people use Opera, identifying as Opera, and not Mozilla or IE.
I don't use Opera much anymore (restricted at work, thanks for phoenix.zip
However, if you do need to serve different content to different browsers, do it by testing for known-broken browser/versions and serving only these a fixed version that codes round their failings. Assume that all unknown browsers, or newer versions of known ones than the version known to be broken, conform to standards - either they do or they'll never get enough market share that you need to care about them.
The ubiquitous bad practice of serving good content to known-good browsers and serving dumb or actually broken content to unknowns is the real issue here.
This is the man that wrote the report. He knows what he's talking about. Mitreya clearly doesn't, by his own admissions! I can't believe you gave him "+5 Insightful". Morons.
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.
-->
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
BTW, why do the moderators give Mitreya's BS posts high scores, when he is wrong -- even by his own admissions?
hey, why do you think you easily get relevant hits when you look for a problem that isn't covered in the Visual Studio .Net help files (or whatever)?
;-)
maybe more people were looking for it? maybe google is designed to give you hits that were ofetn linked and therefore more relevant?
it's like saying camels are brown, and therefore it's dry in the desert...
PS. I'm as anti-M$ as can be, but don't resort to their style of argumentation. pride stops me from doing so
...has to say about that site.
(What's amusing is that you get a different version every time you click).
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Isn't the issue that the developers of MSIE/Opera7 and NS/Opera6 have chosen to implement their list indentation differently? If I remember correctly, one strategy is to give the list a large (38px sounds right) left margin and no padding; the other is to give it a normal-size left margin and 38px of padding. (The difference: padding is applied inside any borders, margins are applied outside the border. If you've used the presentational attributes on HTML tables, think of padding as like cellpadding and margins as like cellspacing.) The consequence of these different choices is that if you want a list to stop being indented, you have to explicitly set the padding and the margin; but to be honest, if you're messing with padding and margins you should probably be setting them both anyway and not relying on the browser's defaults. (My site does this, as well as some css-fu to collapse nested ul elements in the navigation into a single horizontal line; view a "deep" page in my site once in a modern browser and once in NS4.7, or use a "Disable CSS" bookmarklet, to see what I mean :-)
No, that was not your callenge. Read your post again. Here are your only three criteria.
Your original three criteria are good criteria. The extra constraints you added in the post I'm replying to are impossible, even with browser-specific code. My first web browser was MacWeb. The only graphics format it allowed was GIF, and background images weren't actually made into background. You simply can't meet the requirement in this latest post even with browser-specific HTML. Your earlier criteria were good criteria. You don't even really know what you want. Sit down and think out your goals. Next, make them possible. (Hint: you can't have every W3C feature available to all users w/o forcing them to upgrade thier browser. You can't even closely approximate/emulate all of the newer features using only the features in the original HTML standard.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
On the other hand, I could design a page that's light, fast, and degrades gracefully for the small number of your users who are using non-compliant browsers. Which would you prefer?
Or I can make a couple of places on the page that have different HTML and get 99% of what you want without huge bloat. For the love, what are you Captain Extreme? "I don't agree with what's he's saying so I'll make up a worst case scenario and take his phrases out of context and make him look stupid"
At the most, it usually takes a few conditional PHP statements to create a page that renders 99% the same in almost all browsers, and keeps customer complaints to a minimum. I really don't care if you choose to do it another way.
Just cause you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get ya. Just ask Marc Andreessen. Opera has good reason to be worried about a free browser being distributed on the Appple OS. Did you actually read the article?
"...competition from a free Apple product is the kiss of death--perhaps even worse than competing with a free Microsoft product."
I realize it's quite impossible. eddy didn't seem to. There is a balance that can be achieved in any web page between efficient design and kludge. I know this and use this daily in different tasks. eddy was slamming people if they ever sent any different content to an end user based on browser type/version. No matter what. I say sometimes it's necessary,if you want to take advantage of features that didn't use to exist, if you must make apperances as close as possible. I wasn't posting about specific problems, or hoping that eddy could enlighten me so I'd be a better employee. He called people fools for ever deviating from theory, and that sucks in practice. You don't seem to be a bad guy. You only assumed I was asking a real question.
I should also mention that I meant to make my original challenge impossible. That was partly the point. And what I meant was you could use different versions of the page (servlet driven or PHP or JS driven) to handle the older browsers that didn't suport features you wanted to use. There is a point with old browsers like MacWeb where you may have to have your page fail to say, "you can't shop here. you are too old. very old. old. please be younger."
;)
Again, my whole reason for posting, eddy irritated the crap out of me (as I'm sure I've irritated the crap out of you with my inconsistencies - sorry about that
Umm, anyone ever navigate to Netscape.com after installing Netscape 6 on the first day?
It crashed. Coincidence or on purpose?
I wonder...
INcidentally, a few days later, they commented out the section that crashed their own browser. Netscape.com comes up slower on IE, Microsoft.com comes up slower on Netscape.
Bank A charges $1.50 to use their ATM with yuor bank B bank card.
Welcome to capitalism.
Has anyone noticed that hotmail does not work with the new Mac OSX Safari. When I try to login I am redirected to the following link http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/dasp/hac kerr.asp?errmsg=16778795&curmbox=F000000001&a=6a72 41afb4960aaa3df0344a0968282b
Notice that hackerr.asp is the document name. I guess anyone who doesn't use IE is a hacker????
That is THE BEST P0ST 0N THIS article yet...
Come on, it'll edify people
Funny, works fine for me. Then i noticed your text about it not working in IE 4. Gee really?
IE 4 was released Sept '97...CSS2 wasn't made an official recommendation until May '98.
By that logic, i bet the latest version of lynx isn't standards compliant as well.
I'm certainly not suprised that it took a while before browsers caught up to the standard...it takes time to code them!
Come on, it'll edify people
Mod me up, I'll edify you!
Who visits your site often depends on what you offer. Lots of site offer windows themes, windows software and/or windows-software reviews and then mention that 90%+ of their visitors use windows and IE. What a surprise.
My own site is pretty OS neutral (I'm not, but my site is, especially the parts of it that make up 95% of the traffic, namely a web-based online game working on all browsers and the decss mirror):
Top 10 of 439 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 1102402 55.54% MSIE 6.0
2 269680 13.59% MSIE 5.5
3 260668 13.13% Mozilla/5.0
4 245700 12.38% MSIE 5.0
5 17260 0.87% Opera/6.0
6 15497 0.78% Opera/5.1
7 14021 0.71% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
8 10378 0.52% MSIE 5.1
9 8816 0.44% Mozilla/4.5
10 4861 0.24% Mozilla/4.7
Now if I take into account that a lot of stuff that is not actually IE can or does identify itself as IE (yes, Opera is one of these), then the usual "IE is 90% of the market" turns out to be a little exaggerated. My guess on Opera is that it's 2-3%.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Another reply with a different aspect: If Opera's market share is indeed barely worth mentioning, why does msn.com then serve them a custom-made stylesheet?
.css as everyone else (or as IE, the default as one would assume on msn.com) and can't render it. It gets a custom stylesheet that it renders correctly, but whose correct rendering happens to look like crap.
Remember, it's not that Opera was forgotten, gets the same
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yes, Modfather, you did do me a favor, so I will of course never forget it...
Do I look like a clown sent here to amuse you?! Am I just some made up fruit with floppy shoes that you can laugh at! Is that what you're sayin? Huh?
You owe ME thirty pixels you punk... give em NOW.
Check the time stamps!!! WOOOHOOO. Nine hundred and one, Here I come.
1 0vvnz J00, LU$312.
I am the BESTest... I gotz my Nines Hunerts and Too Post, fool. Step.
NNNNIIINNNE Huuunnddrreeeddd and TTtthhiirrd PppooosssttT, DDDdduuuuuudddee! Rrrriiggghhttteeeouuuss!
Get a life man... what do you do, just refresh articles until they get 902 replies and then post?!!!_ ___te_ ___.
How lame... you should get a life like all us
r
e
a
l
_sl
___as
_____hd
_______ot
_____
___________rs
_____________..
__________
NO 0NE is P0sTING eXCept ME?! WHY why why Has the discussion died?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??! Please tell me. I need to understand... will someone at least post some ASCII art? (non-Goatse.cx)...
IIIIiii RRrrruuuullleeesss, yYYyyooooouuuu SsssuuuuxxxxOooooorrrsss....
Noo I rules youu.
Y0U FAIL IT
ST0P TH3 TR0LLING... 1T HURTS...
This is an obvious ploy to try and get attention.
No soup for you!
"Why would Microsoft care about Opera? Or think that misrendering the MSN home page is a good way to undermine it?"
Just wanted to say that I'm glad you took a moment to take a step back and and say "Why?" as opposed to jumping the gun and saying "Damn MS trying to enforce it's monopoly as usual". Frankly, I'm tired of the wild assumptions that MS works that way.
As an Opera user and a Windows user, you can understand that I've run across exactly this problem. I'd like to share with you a few observations I've made on this topic:
- As an Opera user, I find myself having to deal with a number of sites that just don't care about me. Having IE available as a backup is just part of my everyday Opera life. I don't see MS as being very different here. Some sites block me totally, like the site I use to send payments to my credit card.
- Because of my having to keep IE on hot standby, it doesn't even occur to me anymore to email MS (or any other site) and complain about lack of Opera testing. If they don't get feedback, they ain't gonna fix it.
- Website maintenance is a perpetual, priority based job. Often problems are ranked by how many people are affected by them. Truth be told, Opera's just not significant today in light of other things going on. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if nobody there had Opera installed. Anybody who's ever done web development at a Dilbert-esque corp would probably understand this.
- Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?
- What possible benefit could that bring them? Despite my comment earlier, Opera handles the vast majority of sites(*) just fine. When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera. * Sites that I personally have visited, other people's experiences may vary.
- MS's site is a marketing tool. Head on over there and you hear all about TabletPC's, PocketPc's, MS's latest server stuff, Windows XP, etc etc etc. Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that.
If other Opera users share my observations, then it actually makes sense that MS just doesn't care. But the idea that they're doing it to enforce a monopoly is not so evident.
Please don't flame me for not jumping on the "MS is like OCP!!!" bandwagon. I'm just the type of person that'd rather look at all the details than try to find details to support a bias.
Sig: Why is my fans list so long? Tell me your story?
"Why would Microsoft care about Opera? Or think that misrendering the MSN home page is a good way to undermine it?"
Just wanted to say that I'm glad you took a moment to take a step back and and say "Why?" as opposed to jumping the gun and saying "Damn MS trying to enforce it's monopoly as usual". Frankly, I'm tired of the wild assumptions that MS works that way.
As an Opera user and a Windows user, you can understand that I've run across exactly this problem. I'd like to share with you a few observations I've made on this topic:
- As an Opera user, I find myself having to deal with a number of sites that just don't care about me. Having IE available as a backup is just part of my everyday Opera life. I don't see MS as being very different here. Some sites block me totally, like the site I use to send payments to my credit card.
- Because of my having to keep IE on hot standby, it doesn't even occur to me anymore to email MS (or any other site) and complain about lack of Opera testing. If they don't get feedback, they ain't gonna fix it.
- Website maintenance is a perpetual, priority based job. Often problems are ranked by how many people are affected by them. Truth be told, Opera's just not significant today in light of other things going on. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if nobody there had Opera installed. Anybody who's ever done web development at a Dilbert-esque corp would probably understand this.
- Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?
- What possible benefit could that bring them? Despite my comment earlier, Opera handles the vast majority of sites(*) just fine. When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera. * Sites that I personally have visited, other people's experiences may vary.
- MS's site is a marketing tool. Head on over there and you hear all about TabletPC's, PocketPc's, MS's latest server stuff, Windows XP, etc etc etc. Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that.
If other Opera users share my observations, then it actually makes sense that MS just doesn't care. But the idea that they're doing it to enforce a monopoly is not so evident.
Please don't flame me for not jumping on the "MS is like OCP!!!" bandwagon. I'm just the type of person that'd rather look at all the details than try to find details to support a bias.
Sig: Why is my fans list so long? Tell me your story?
"Why would Microsoft care about Opera? Or think that misrendering the MSN home page is a good way to undermine it?"
Just wanted to say that I'm glad you took a moment to take a step back and and say "Why?" as opposed to jumping the gun and saying "Damn MS trying to enforce it's monopoly as usual". Frankly, I'm tired of the wild assumptions that MS works that way.
As an Opera user and a Windows user, you can understand that I've run across exactly this problem. I'd like to share with you a few observations I've made on this topic:
- As an Opera user, I find myself having to deal with a number of sites that just don't care about me. Having IE available as a backup is just part of my everyday Opera life. I don't see MS as being very different here. Some sites block me totally, like the site I use to send payments to my credit card.
- Because of my having to keep IE on hot standby, it doesn't even occur to me anymore to email MS (or any other site) and complain about lack of Opera testing. If they don't get feedback, they ain't gonna fix it.
- Website maintenance is a perpetual, priority based job. Often problems are ranked by how many people are affected by them. Truth be told, Opera's just not significant today in light of other things going on. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if nobody there had Opera installed. Anybody who's ever done web development at a Dilbert-esque corp would probably understand this.
- Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?
- What possible benefit could that bring them? Despite my comment earlier, Opera handles the vast majority of sites(*) just fine. When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera. * Sites that I personally have visited, other people's experiences may vary.
- MS's site is a marketing tool. Head on over there and you hear all about TabletPC's, PocketPc's, MS's latest server stuff, Windows XP, etc etc etc. Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that.
If other Opera users share my observations, then it actually makes sense that MS just doesn't care. But the idea that they're doing it to enforce a monopoly is not so evident.
Please don't flame me for not jumping on the "MS is like OCP!!!" bandwagon. I'm just the type of person that'd rather look at all the details than try to find details to support a bias.
Sig: Why is my fans list so long? Tell me your story?
"Why would Microsoft care about Opera? Or think that misrendering the MSN home page is a good way to undermine it?"
Just wanted to say that I'm glad you took a moment to take a step back and and say "Why?" as opposed to jumping the gun and saying "Damn MS trying to enforce it's monopoly as usual". Frankly, I'm tired of the wild assumptions that MS works that way.
As an Opera user and a Windows user, you can understand that I've run across exactly this problem. I'd like to share with you a few observations I've made on this topic:
- As an Opera user, I find myself having to deal with a number of sites that just don't care about me. Having IE available as a backup is just part of my everyday Opera life. I don't see MS as being very different here. Some sites block me totally, like the site I use to send payments to my credit card.
- Because of my having to keep IE on hot standby, it doesn't even occur to me anymore to email MS (or any other site) and complain about lack of Opera testing. If they don't get feedback, they ain't gonna fix it.
- Website maintenance is a perpetual, priority based job. Often problems are ranked by how many people are affected by them. Truth be told, Opera's just not significant today in light of other things going on. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if nobody there had Opera installed. Anybody who's ever done web development at a Dilbert-esque corp would probably understand this.
- Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?
- What possible benefit could that bring them? Despite my comment earlier, Opera handles the vast majority of sites(*) just fine. When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera. * Sites that I personally have visited, other people's experiences may vary.
- MS's site is a marketing tool. Head on over there and you hear all about TabletPC's, PocketPc's, MS's latest server stuff, Windows XP, etc etc etc. Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that.
If other Opera users share my observations, then it actually makes sense that MS just doesn't care. But the idea that they're doing it to enforce a monopoly is not so evident.
Please don't flame me for not jumping on the "MS is like OCP!!!" bandwagon. I'm just the type of person that'd rather look at all the details than try to find details to support a bias.
Sig: Why is my fans list so long? Tell me your story?
"Why would Microsoft care about Opera? Or think that misrendering the MSN home page is a good way to undermine it?"
Just wanted to say that I'm glad you took a moment to take a step back and and say "Why?" as opposed to jumping the gun and saying "Damn MS trying to enforce it's monopoly as usual". Frankly, I'm tired of the wild assumptions that MS works that way.
As an Opera user and a Windows user, you can understand that I've run across exactly this problem. I'd like to share with you a few observations I've made on this topic:
- As an Opera user, I find myself having to deal with a number of sites that just don't care about me. Having IE available as a backup is just part of my everyday Opera life. I don't see MS as being very different here. Some sites block me totally, like the site I use to send payments to my credit card.
- Because of my having to keep IE on hot standby, it doesn't even occur to me anymore to email MS (or any other site) and complain about lack of Opera testing. If they don't get feedback, they ain't gonna fix it.
- Website maintenance is a perpetual, priority based job. Often problems are ranked by how many people are affected by them. Truth be told, Opera's just not significant today in light of other things going on. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if nobody there had Opera installed. Anybody who's ever done web development at a Dilbert-esque corp would probably understand this.
- Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?
- What possible benefit could that bring them? Despite my comment earlier, Opera handles the vast majority of sites(*) just fine. When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera. * Sites that I personally have visited, other people's experiences may vary.
- MS's site is a marketing tool. Head on over there and you hear all about TabletPC's, PocketPc's, MS's latest server stuff, Windows XP, etc etc etc. Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that.
If other Opera users share my observations, then it actually makes sense that MS just doesn't care. But the idea that they're doing it to enforce a monopoly is not so evident.
Please don't flame me for not jumping on the "MS is like OCP!!!" bandwagon. I'm just the type of person that'd rather look at all the details than try to find details to support a bias.
Sig: Why is my fans list so long? Tell me your story?
"Why would Microsoft care about Opera? Or think that misrendering the MSN home page is a good way to undermine it?"
Just wanted to say that I'm glad you took a moment to take a step back and and say "Why?" as opposed to jumping the gun and saying "Damn MS trying to enforce it's monopoly as usual". Frankly, I'm tired of the wild assumptions that MS works that way.
As an Opera user and a Windows user, you can understand that I've run across exactly this problem. I'd like to share with you a few observations I've made on this topic:
- As an Opera user, I find myself having to deal with a number of sites that just don't care about me. Having IE available as a backup is just part of my everyday Opera life. I don't see MS as being very different here. Some sites block me totally, like the site I use to send payments to my credit card.
- Because of my having to keep IE on hot standby, it doesn't even occur to me anymore to email MS (or any other site) and complain about lack of Opera testing. If they don't get feedback, they ain't gonna fix it.
- Website maintenance is a perpetual, priority based job. Often problems are ranked by how many people are affected by them. Truth be told, Opera's just not significant today in light of other things going on. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if nobody there had Opera installed. Anybody who's ever done web development at a Dilbert-esque corp would probably understand this.
- Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?
- What possible benefit could that bring them? Despite my comment earlier, Opera handles the vast majority of sites(*) just fine. When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera. * Sites that I personally have visited, other people's experiences may vary.
- MS's site is a marketing tool. Head on over there and you hear all about TabletPC's, PocketPc's, MS's latest server stuff, Windows XP, etc etc etc. Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that.
If other Opera users share my observations, then it actually makes sense that MS just doesn't care. But the idea that they're doing it to enforce a monopoly is not so evident.
Please don't flame me for not jumping on the "MS is like OCP!!!" bandwagon. I'm just the type of person that'd rather look at all the details than try to find details to support a bias.
Sig: Why is my fans list so long? Tell me your story?
Honestly, this is not an effort against Opera. If I choose to break my own site, so be it..
/. story on that.
.0004% of our hits, I'd have to say "Do the change, ignore Opera".
.0004% of the browsers hitting them were Opera, they wouldn't waste the time to do make special pages specifically to break Opera.. It's simply a bug.. It's not worth the effort.. If someone did anything, I'd bet they were trying to make a better page for the Opera people, and failed.. Probably a newbie was given the job. Who cares if you mess up the page that no one sees..
In my industry, just about every site does video of some sort. There's always some group that feels they were intentionally blocked because of whatever reason. I've seen sites that stream exclusively Windows Media, and some that use propriatory plugins like "Emblaze".. Some were using the Netscape "Push" method (send a multipart header, and then send a new mime delimiter between frames). Netscape "Push" doesn't (or didn't) work with MSIE.. Windows Media doesn't work with Linux. (with a few exceptions).. Something doesn't work with something else.
If I choose to make my site not work with MSIE or Netscape, and only let Opera viewers see it, well, it's my site.. If Slashdot decides tommorrow that they like a feature of Mozilla 9.999, and it doesn't work with any other browser, including MSIE, how many of you are going to be bitching for MSIE compatability?
I'll get a bunch of comments back "Microsoft Sucks", but I'd *LOVE* it if they'd put the REMOTE_USER_AGENT string beside your name in the comments.
For those curious, mine is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
I'm not defending Microsoft. It's shitty that they did it, but honestly it's their site. Try doing a Windows Update from Netscape, that doesn't work either.
Want more fun? Try installing a nice fresh copy of an older Microsoft OS (say WinNT 4.0), and get yourself up to day.. Years ago, they broke the Microsoft pages, so you couldn't get the updates. But I can't say that I've ever seen a
Where I work, we try our best to make our pages render correctly on our machines.. That means, keep everyone in the office happy, and hopefully it will make the majority of our customers happy. We have enough varity by choice to keep things interesting. here's the short list of the browsers we use:
Win98/Win2k/WinXP:
MSIE 5.0 -> MSIE 6.1
Netscape 4.7 -> Netscape 7.01
Mozilla 1.1 -> Mozilla 1.3a
Opera (unsure of version)
Mac: OS/9, OS/X
MSIE (unsure of version)
Netscape (unsure. various versions)
Mozilla (unsure. various versions)
Linux: (Slackware)
Mozilla 1.1 -> 1.3a
Netscape (various)
Konqueror 3.0.1
But sure as hell, we'll have some sort of rendering problem on some browser, and someone will scream that there's a conspiracy against them specifically..
Our sites don't require any special browser. They all work. We don't know of any compatability issues right now, but I'm sure someone will find that Konqueror v1.0 won't work with a particular page, if they try hard enough. Our site has average users browsing. Some advanced users, lots of regular users..
In the last 24 hours we had 17,017 different REMOTE_USER_AGENT strings sent to one of the servers, in 1,949,023 requests from 116,273 unique IP's.. If I take the list and:
cat list.txt | cut -f 1-3 -d ";" | sort | uniq -c > work.txt
less work.txt
Here's the top 10 results:
474500 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1
317359 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98
140794 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98
91425 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0
66331 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98
31072 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0
29963 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 8.0
26778 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0
25426 "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible
20841 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98
And in comparison, we'll look at some other top 10's.. Here's the top 11 Linux clients (11, because the first Opera was #11)
grep -i linux work.txt
1563 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686
387 "Mozilla (X11; I; Linux 2.0.32 i586
161 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3; Linux
145 "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.13 i686
96 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U
72 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U
67 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586
64 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.7-10 i686
56 "Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9-34 i686
46 "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U
39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
And the top 10 Opera clients.
127 "Opera/6.01 (Windows 98; U
118 "Opera/6.05 (Windows XP; U
104 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 2000; U
74 "Opera/7.01 (Windows NT 5.0; U
72 "Opera/6.05 (Windows 98; U
60 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 98; U
56 "Opera/7.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U
49 "Opera/6.0 (Windows 2000; U
41 "Opera/7.0 (Windows 98; U
39 "Opera/6.11 (Linux 2.4.2 i386; U
Ok, lets give better Opera numbers. It seems Opera has a few different formats for its browser string. Thanks guys. That helps me a lot..
The top 10 browser string with "Opera" anywhere in it are:
cat list.txt | grep -i opera | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1
---
752 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [en]"
627 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows XP) Opera 7.0 [en]"
617 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]"
378 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Opera 7.0 [en]"
277 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.01 [en]"
271 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 2000) Opera 6.05 [en]"
246 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98) Opera 6.05 [en]"
222 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.05 [de]"
194 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.0 [en]"
156 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows ME) Opera 6.05 [en]"
Or more specifically, lets find every Opera browser regardless of OS type.. That's just about as big as we can inflate your numbers.
cat list.txt | grep -i opera > work.txt
cat work.txt | grep ^\"Opera > a.list
cat work.txt | grep -v ^\"Opera > b.list
cat a.list | cut -f 2 -d \" | cut -f 1 -d " " > opera.id
cat b.list | cut -f 2 -d ")" | cut -f 1 -d \[ >> opera.id
And then a little cleanup in 'vi' to fix the leading space, and the space versus slash in the two types...
cat opera.id | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1
---
2565 Opera/6.05
2488 Opera/7.0
678 Opera/7.01
549 Opera/6.01
537 Opera/6.0
438 Opera/6.04
336 Opera/6.03
105 Opera/6.11
63 Opera/5.12
47 Opera/6.02
47 Opera/5.0
43 Opera/6.0/\xa4/
32 Opera/5.02
30 Opera/4.0/Beta/4
28 Opera/5.11
27 Opera/5.01
21 Opera/6.01/~/
14 Opera/5.12/\xa1\xe8/
13 Opera/3.60
12 Opera/5.12/OCV2/
9 "
7 Opera/6.1
2 Opera
1 Opera/6.01/OCV2/
Now honestly, who should I be designing pages for? the 2,500 hits from Opera 7.0, or the 474,500 from "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1 ?
**WE** do respect peoples ability to choose what browser they want, and *WE* won't limit it, but I'd bet with these numbers in front of them, most bosses would have the pages designed for the majority..
If the decision were presented to me, wether to include a really great feature that works in Netscape and MSIE but not Opera, or not, and I did exactly what I just did, and saw that 8,092 of 1,949,023 hits came from Opera, that's
If Microsoft had half a clue (which I'm sure someone there does), and they checked to see what browsers were viewing, and *THEY* saw that
trippin,
into the future
my mind keeps on
slipping
I guess I just don't get this "keep complaints to a minimum" tactic. If I went into a CD store and complained that the discs they sell won't play on my Victrola, they'd laugh me out of the store. But if I go to a website in a browser that's close to a decade old and complain that it doesn't render properly, some web designers will fall all over themselves trying to fix it for me. Why? Make your pages gracefully degrade, add a browser upgrade message if you're really politically-minded, and leave it at that.
On the other hand, if you keep designing different versions of pages for different browsers, you'll hold back web design and technology (people like you are the reason why CSS1 is a 7-year-old standard that I still can't use to its fullest effect) while not really doing anyone a service.
But if you really want to do it that way, it's your prerogative. Have fun in the Stone Age . . .
It's not so much that I want to do that, but plenty of bosses do, and he that writes the checks makes the rules.
On the other hand, if you keep designing different versions of pages for different browsers, you'll hold back web design and technology (people like you are the reason why CSS1 is a 7-year-old standard that I still can't use to its fullest effect) while not really doing anyone a service.
First of all, I'm not talking about a ton of changes, usually just a few lines on a few pages.
But honestly, I have very little sympathy for people who complain that accomodation holds back development. As a business you're goal is not standards compliancy or the accomodation of older browsers, it's to make money. And there's a balance there.
By the way, you're the one who brought up the old WebMac or whatever the heck Stone Age browser. But ultimately, it is up to the owner of a company to decide at what point he feels safe in potentially losing a sale/contact point.
Really? What balance is being thrown off by a gracefully degrading page? None. Hence I see businesses which accomodate old browsers with multiple separate pages and oodles of browser-sniffing scripting as deliberately holding back web development for no good reason whatsoever. Accomodate them by designing a page that still looks OK in old browsers, but pixel-perfect is a waste of time, money, and bandwidth for an unreasonable and in some cases unattainable design goal; is it good business sense to throw away resources like that? If your boss thinks so, maybe he needs a performance review.
I do visit Yahoo! Groups from time to time (w/ Opera 7 set to identify to Opera), but I don't think a great many people do that. There is absolutely no other reason to touch Yahoo! with a parsec-long stick.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I was, yes...
This is what he said:
Apparently you read that as "Eddy is trying to say that it's easy to make things look the same and thus people who claim they have to jump through hoops to do so don't understand the web." I read it as, "Eddy is trying to say that people who are making it a goal to get things to look the same don't understand the web. Using the web to lay things out precisely is like using a school bus to go off-road racing - that's not what it's for."
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
For the last time, I never said pixel perfect and I even pointed out that what I was talking about was just pretty darn close.
Yuo might talk about giving your boss a "performance review" but I live in the real world, where I am selling him my services. If he wants me to waste my time, I can either comply or quit.
I think I'm done here.
Sorta, I read it somewhere between the two. And I agree with you to a point. In the original discussion, the context of "same" was more "close enough" from a business point of view than "pixel perfect" sameness. Many businesses (whether rightly or not, I don't care) believe that their website's look is a sufficient part of their brand to invest some time and money in making it consistent across most browsers. Obviously, at some point it makes no sense to continue supporting certain browsers, but you base that decision on use percentages and other statistics. The emphasis of eddy's initial posts basically called anyone who modified the content sent to a browser based on it's type and version number, an idiot, end of story.
I think that's rather harsh. I don't work for the W3 standards committee, I work for my boss. And if on rare occasion, the only way to satisfy him is to break a W3 recommendation or send different content, I will, end of story.
You don't seem like half of an ass as eddy. His vitriol was the catalyst for my rage. I have no problem with you whatsoever, unless you start calling people idiots because they don't agree with you.
I read Slashdot on Opera with nested comments and an unlimited number of comments per page. When I get mod points Opera fails to properly display pages with too many posts. The mod dropdown is rendered on top of part of some of the posts. I'm currently on Opera 6.04 and this problem has existed for years.
whoohoo! the moderators are getting smart to your astro-antics buddy
You are misquoting "Hanlon's Razor" -- derived from the Beiters. (Worship the Mad God Finagle and the prophet Murphy) http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/h/Hanlon_s_Ra zor.html
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
This article makes the claim that Microsoft is undermining confidence in opera in order to keep pace in the embedded market.
"I changed my headlights the other day. I put in strobe lights instead! Now ..."
when I drive at night, it looks like everyone else is standing still
-- Steven Wright
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