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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.
..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.
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
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
Um, I suppose you didn't read Opera's take on this; MSN's webserver(s) uses a special broken CSS for Opera. When using the stylesheet intended for IE6, Opera displays the page just fine.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
If you read the article you would see that Opera is perfectly capable of rendering the page that MSN sends to IE. If you change Opera to identify itself as IE, no problem.
p ng
The problem here is that if you've set Opera to the report the true user-agent, MSN sends a page with a broken CSS file that tells the browser to render the content so that the page becomes unreadable--Here, they set a negative margin on content in some divs so that the first couple words in any column are overlapped by the div to the left, frustrating the viewer. Even IE chokes on the page they give to Opera:
http://deb.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/opera7.
This is sabotage.
Read the original report here:
http://deb.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/
-- "Is this death or is this Ohio?"
> 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?
How the HELL did this get modded to 5?!? RTFA, the problem is MSN sending a perfectly-compliant, but deliberately flawed in values, CSS style sheet *only* to the Opera 7 browser. Note that the sheet values were chosen to instruct O7 to misrender the pages. Nothing the W3C can do about this, standards compliance wasn't the problem.
MSDN has a similar behavior. I don't give a shit about MSN, but I needed to download the DirectX 8.1 SDK (to use OGRE) the other, and it was hell. I fact, I needed to identify as Mozilla 5 to see more than a few unrelated links on this page (try it if you have Opera. Change your identifier and reload the page)
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
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.
No it doesn't......check the menu bar on left....its not transparent to the shell in the background...and the shell in the background of the blue area is fixed and moves with the scrolling of the page, it shouldn't....get Opera or any of the browsers that the page mentions and you'll see the difference. I just looked with IE6 /WinXP Pro and Opera7 / WinXP Pro and there is a difference
Yes, you can see the page, but it's not doing WHAT it SHOULD.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Actually I spoke too soon and am going to take back what I said. I loaded up the page in Opera 6.0 and the margin -30 is supposed to fix a bug in Opera 6.0's rendering of lists. In fact, it's the very same problem I ran into while designing some webpages a few weeks ago that annoyed me to no end. Basically, Opera 6.0 indents list items by about 30 pixels to the right, unlike other browsers. Thus that -30 value is there to correct that problem. Opera 7.0 doesn't exhibit that tabbing effect (thus consistant with the latest IE and Mozilla browsers). Apparently MSN is serving Opera 7.0 the same CSS sheet as Opera 6.0 even though 7.0 works best when it's served the same style sheet as IE. Thus, saying that this problem is browser sabotage is too strong of an accusation.
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
~~~
Here's a tip for including CSS without having to worry about NS4 and (I think) IE4 screwing it up:
Use the CSS2 @import rule to import your style sheet.
The version 4 browsers will ignore this tag, therefore you don't have to worry about crashing NS4 with your perfectly valid CSS.
Example:
If you read the discussion and set your filter below "+5 for loudly bashing MS", you would notice that Opera6.0 had a problem that was FIXED BY -30 OFFSET. So what you're looking at is the inability to distinguish between opera6.0 and opera7.0. Or, essentially bashing for the (somewhat screwd up) fix of opera6.0.
What truly amazes me is that opera.com description of the problem fails to mention that. I have to say that MSN guys come out looking *far better* than the Opera.
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
This is not correct.
Opera6 shows the page that MSIE6 receives just fine. I even included a screenshot of it on my page -- scroll down to the second image.
If you still believe this is Opera6's fault, please provide a test case showing how it fails.