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.

Comments

No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[Sun Tzu]

It's back to the bad old days at Microsoft... Sounds a lot like how they killed DR-DOS, but on a smaller scale.

Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles.

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[ichimunki]

Forced... because I have a hotmail account?

But is someone forcing you to use Hotmail?

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[ackthpt]

MSDN has a similar behavior.

MSDN has an annoyingly high number of broken links, too. It's like the option of last resort when looking for assistance on Visual Studio .Net, best results seem to come from punching in a few keywords in Google and picking through what comes up, that or hit USENET groups.

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[spike hay]

Dude, this MSN page looks pretty messed up in *any* browser. How's that for cross-browser compatibility eh?

msn.com is the pinnacle of shitty design. Why does anybody care about this Opera thing anyway? 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. The site is basically advertisements for microsoft products, or other paid advertisements. And the actual stories that are on the site look like they came out of a woman's fashion magazine.

Nobody smart enough to use Opera or Moz visits MSN. There are better newssites, like news.google.com or the Guardian.

Standards schmandards.

[Boogaroo]

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.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[rknop]

Anyone, including Microsoft, who writes a site that serves seperate pages to different browsers is doing a disservice to the public.

While I agree with the philosophy, unfortunately it's unrealistic. Reason: so many browsers, worst among them Netscape 4, try to support CSS and fail so miserably that a standards-complaint CSS page is likely to be unreadable. And, unfortunately, some people still use NS4 and old versions of IE.

What I've done some places is write some SSI that detects the browser. If it detects Netscape 4 or lower, or IE ... probably 4 or lower, I forget at the moment ... it sends a "dumbed down" style sheet that will present only a faint echo of the layout of the page, but which will leave the text readable. Any other browser, you get the normal "standards compliant" style sheet. Note that here I am sending specific style sheets for specific browsers-- but I assume that any version of Opera, and any version of Netscape or Mozilla 5 or greater and any recent IE and any other browser that may come is standards complaint.

-Rob

Re:Standards schmandards.

[methuseleh]

...but you're doing a disservice by "enabling" people to continue using standards-ignorant browsers. The sooner these people get a clue, the better... for all of us. By coding to standards now, we hasten the pace of standards compliance, thus making the present discussion moot. It's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing.

CSS1 became a w3c recommendation in Dec. 1996. There's been plenty of time for browsers, and browser users, to come up to speed.

Not necessarily saying this story isn't true, but

[Anonymous Coward]

..if there's an innocent explanation for this, it wouldn't be the first example of paranoia from Opera's general direction this month.

Standards and lies

[Andy Social]

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.

Re:Standards and lies

[Andy Social]

They obviously do something wrong. Check out the spiral demo in various browsers. The ones that actually follow the CSS standards can render it perfectly. Want to guess which ones render it well? Mozilla-based browsers, and Opera 7 are the only Windows browsers to work correctly. That means the only major browser that does not follow the standards is the most popular one.

Extend and enhance (also known as extend and extinguish) is not the way to go about making a standards-based system. There are standards. They are not mutable, they are not extensible (except where stated).

In this particular case, they purposely serve a messed-up CSS stylesheet to Opera. If you browse with CSS turned off, the site looks fine. So, regardless of their adherence to standards (which is not very good), they purposely try to monkeywrench Opera. That's the point of this story, really. Every page should render identically on every browser. All information should be visible on every browser. Purposely hiding your text under a graphic is unacceptable behavior.

Re:Standards and lies

[pacc]

Anyone using CSS at all would be aware of bug in
every browser, even Opera: Real-world example

There are no chance that they would have gone through the process to server different code to different browsers without testing it out afterwards.

IE on macintosh is reported to work very good, and there are XML engine updates for Windows to download. This all points to the fact that microsoft is very capable of actually supporting the standards, but we also know that standards would give people no reason to prefer IE over some other browser.

logically speaking....

[theBrownfury]

....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.

Re:logically speaking....

[samoverton]

You seem to be missing an important point. By making Opera render the page incorrectly, the MSN users are not going to stop using MSN, they are going to change browser. At least this is what Microsoft seem to intend.

No doubt MSN users will still want to access their MSN email and communities, so they will find another way to access it, viz. Internet Explorer.

Re:Who uses Opera

[joebp]

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?

so what?

[BigBir3d]

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.

Re:so what?

[Isofarro]

It is Microsoft's website afterall. Who says it has to work with other companies browsers?

How can you call it a website if it doesn't work on the Web. I haven't seen an official definition of the World Wide Web that indicates what browsers are allowed and what browsers aren't allowed. Care to shed a light on a reference of this nature?

Now if someone can't author a website properly, calling it a website could be misrepresentative. Why not call it an IEsite, not a website - since it fails to meet the requirements of a website.

Re:so what?

[IamTheRealMike]

Who says it has to work with other companies browsers?

Uh, we do. As in, society does, in much the same way that we demand our kitchen appliances use the type of electricty that is most common in the country. In fact, the govt enforce such standards, partly to stop an electricty company trying to force its way into the market for cookers by giving you free "special" electricity that only works with its products.

Why can't I refuse to hire somebody because they are black, or because they drive a Fiat? Because that'd be unfair discrimination, and it'd be illegal. I don't see why it should be different for products. Clearly it's very easy to make it work OK in Opera, just remove the browser sniffing code.

When big companies pull tricks like this, everybody loses. The web becomes more fragmented, and some idiots might look at such behaviour and think that it's actually ok to do something similar.

Re:Sites del. diff. content to different browsers.

[Blimey85]

Write to the standards, not browsers.

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.

Re:Oddity to me

[sulli]

My theory is that they particularly hate Opera because it's commercial. To their customers (OEMs and corporate licensees) they can bash Mozilla for being open-source and therefore unreliable, Netscape for being too tied to AOL, and Safari for being too new and half-baked, but Opera proves that there's something better, separate from the OS, that people are willing to pay for, and this must really piss them off.

Of course, I am happy with Moz and never think of using MSN. But that's just me.

i dunno

[sydlexic]

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.

Re:i dunno

[Otter]

I'm inclined to agree with this for a simple reason -- what other explanation makes sense?

Modifying SMB to break Samba could well be worth the potential bad press. Why would Microsoft care about Opera? Or think that misrendering the MSN home page is a good way to undermine it? And decide that the rewards outweigh the downside of such obvious meddling?

It just doesn't make sense to me. If they did the same thing to Mozilla or Konqueror/Safari, that I could see...

Re:i dunno

[ink]

did they try contacting MS to get it fixed

It took microsoft SIX MONTHS to fix a one-liner that prevented Mozilla from working with Passport (buggy browser "detection" code). See bugzilla bug #141279 if you are curious. Interoperability and open standards are not placed anywhere near the top of the queue at Microsoft. In fact, the dragging of feet would point to more sinister motives... but of course there's no proof of such (without Halloween memos, at least).

Re:i dunno

[KoolDude]

...but it really looks like an honest typo in the style sheet...

The point is that the page rendered exactly same as IE provided the stylesheets are same. Unless MS thinks there is something wrong with the way IE(or Opera7) displays the page, why type out a different stylesheet and commit a typo in the process ? If it ain't broke, fix it to break it ?

Re:i dunno

[raretek]

"Why would Microsoft care about Opera?"

Opera is becoming a serious contender in the mobile arena. This is an area that Microsoft cares a good deal about. Doing that to Mozilla would generate too much press, and as for Konqueror, that isn't even a real competitor on the windows platform or in the mobile arena.

They would do this. This is just the type of crap that monopolies pull, largely because they can.

Re:i dunno

[JohnnyBigodes]

and as for Konqueror, that isn't even a real competitor on the windows platform or in the mobile

Probably not, but Apple is using the Konqueror engine for their new browser, which does present a significant market-share.

Re:i dunno

[SubtleNuance]

I dont agree. If you are going to the trouble of specifically sending a Opera-specific css, wouldnt that be because you are INTENDING on having it work (unless you have other unspoken sinister motives) - wouldnt you specifically be testing w/ Opera in that case? the opera.css(whatever) sheet proves the point - someone at MSN actually is testing Opera.

in that case, they can see the page is f'ing borked when compared to NS && IE...

Typos that are inserted into something created so specifically is almost proof in-and-of-itself...

Re:i dunno

[stinky wizzleteats]

but it really looks like an honest typo in the style sheet.

Really? Let's look and see...

MSIE stylesheet:

margin: -2px 0px 0px 23px;

Opera stylesheet:

margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;

I don't know how you go about typing, but I'd have to throw silly putty at the keyboard from the other side of the room to hit the "-" key instead of the "2".

Re:i dunno

[Wraithlyn]

You make some very good points about bias and motives, but your central line of reasoning that MS probably doesn't care or know that Opera handles MSN differently is bogus.

You're spinning it like MSN is simply unaware that Opera handles their site any differently. But... their site SPECIFICALLY CHECKS for the "Opera" string in the browser and gives it different files! Obviously someone there designed this mechanism, and they would certainly have Opera installed. You can't say "how would they know about this?"... someone there DESIGNED it this way. Why? Well, that's inconclusive. But they can't claim ignorance on this one. This didn't "just happen" through carelessness. This took deliberate steps on someone's part.

And changing the margin from 23 to -30 is not a typo, nor is delivering a larger size page with less content.

Re:i dunno

[stinky wizzleteats]

Well, I appreciate your candor. I always regard an honest statement of "I'm not sure" as a very reasonable and respectable point of view, but I guess I just don't see the ambiguity here. Many of your questions are answered in the article. I've written a quantity of CSS, and having a completely seperate CSS document that keys off the browser identification, and which has a left margin that could be 26(!) pixels different under the most explicable and innocent of circumstances is just a bit much.

Re:We need browser masking.

[rknop]

As an unfortunate side-effect, this would reinforce webmasters' belief that everybody in the world uses MSIE.

Yep. What we really need is too late to accomplish. What we really need is a protocol that forbids you from identifying which browser you are, but only allows you to specify to which standards you conform.

Then maybe webmasters would write their HTML and such the way they're supposed to, and what's more the browsers would have to really support the standards they claim to support.

But, unfortunately, that's an ideal world, not the one we live in.

-Rob

Re:Realplayer

[jasonditz]

This isn't the same thing at all. MSN isn't blocking Opera-users from its website, its deliberately serving them a different (and somewhat broken) website in an effort to make the user think something is wrong with Opera. I don't see why they shouldn't be able to do it, but its still deceptive... and I don't blame Opera for being mad. If Real identified non-genuine realplayers and served them with a different clip that looked garbled and had choppy audio I'd be saying the same thing. If they spent half as much time working on their products as they did trying to make everyone else's products look bad I don't think they'd take as much criticism.

Re:Oddity to me

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why did they pick Opera, and not Mozilla or Netscape, not to mention Safari?

One at a time, grasshopper, one at a time.

Too many browsers break on the same page, it's the page's problem. One browser breaks, it's "obviously" the browser.

At least that's how MS hopes we'll all think.

the faulty style sheet doesn't work w/ ie either!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Foolish notion

[bstadil]

I think we should give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here.

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.

but again, MS is not punishable

[boomka]

what irks me is that Opera guys publish their accusations, we fume here and it all ends at that. MS has done a lot of "mischief" like that in the past to a lot of folks, but noone can go after them, maybe it's the fat laywer bill, or maybe because it's hard to beat fat team of MS lawyers. But things like these really undermine people's belief in that in this country everyone is equal before the law...

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.

the reason they are targeting opera

[a7244270]

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...

Make Opera appear broken??

[MongooseCN]

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.

It's not MSN, my browser breaks too

[badzilla]

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.

Re:Quite the contrary

[veddermatic]

I disagree completely...

I can write a page that looks good in EVERY browser, including NS4 and lynx. So can you... so can anybody...

all it takes is a little time, and a bit of a brain.

Unfortunately, far to many people in web dev don't have brains, and far too many to "save time" use wysiwyg crap to gerate code for them.

having muyltiple pages for multiple browsers is a sign of not doing it right the first time, not a 'service'.

MSIE on OSX doesn't even render MSN right

[HomeGroove]

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...

Re:Clearly This Sucks but....

[greg_barton]

For Microsoft, this is a win/win. If Opera users change their user-agent identification, it look to browser statistics as if Opera has ceased to exist. "No one is using Opera," says Microsoft. If Opera users fo no change their user-agent identification, Opera users are inconvenienced (and may not use the browser) and no Opera hits are recorded at Microsoft sites. "No one is using Opera," says Microsoft.

Neat, huh?

Re:Quite the contrary

[dtobias]

Baloney... a well-designed site, with good logical structure and proper ALT attributes, for instance, will work fine on Lynx while looking attractive on graphical browsers.

Browser-sniffing has led to the ridiculous situation of an "arms race" between webmasters doing clueless redirects or blockages based on user agent string and browser makers putting in "cloaked" user agent strings that pretend to be some other browser, to the detriment of logic.

Re:Quite the contrary

[rgmoore]

No, no, NO! A web site that is properly designed and standards compliant can send exactly the same web page to IE and Lynx and have it render properly in each. That's a major point of the HTML 4 standard. Of course that standard compliance includes things like including ALT tags in images and providing regular links in addition to image maps, which some people seem strangely reluctant to do. But if you actually follow the standard, you can make pages that look good in graphical browsers and are still useable in text-only browsers.

Re:What is the alternative?

[DickBreath]

MS are free to serve up whatever they like on their servers.

Are you sure?
Without consequence as to what?

Okay. I'll use your logic, and the same logic as some other posts here from Microsoft agents.

I want to start serving stuff from my site that takes advantage of all known exploits in IE browsers. After all, it's my site. I can serve whatever I want. It's my business.

If users don't like it, then they should use Mozilla or Opera.

If you're a Microsoft user, why would you want to come to my site anyway?

It's just an accident. Give me the benefit of the doubt.

I'll probably get modded redundant since my above four arguments have already been made.

Re:Quite the contrary

[Isofarro]

I don't know where you got this myopic view of the Web from, but it is certainly trollish from a standards POV. Obviously the technique of augmentative authoring has eluded you.

If you are creating multiple copies of resources for different user agent strings, then it is a prime indication you haven't understood the very simple concept of the World Wide Web.

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.

Making a website accessible does not mean text-only. This is a myth, and a badly misinformed piece of strawman fluff. Text-versions of websites should only be a last resort, when you've reached the point where you admit your design and markup skills are inadequate to do even a competant job, let alone a good one. Accessible websites can also be well designed, there's no mutual exclusivity.

The whole *point* of identifying browsers at all is to allow the server to serve optimized pages for different browsers.

If you so strongly want to believe this nonsense, please post a reference to either a standard or recommendation that states that User-Agent is a mandatory HTTP parameter. You know as well as I do that User-Agent strings are optional, and relying on them to determine presentation is so typically short-sighted that its now laughable.

You cannot succeed over the medium to long term adopting a browser-sniff route. It is folly.

Re:Quite the contrary

[You're All Wrong]

"
all it takes is a little time
"

No! It's _easier_ to write bread-and-butter HTML that looks _fine_, if a little unexciting, than it is to write anything that could break any half-decent browser (i.e. one that understands what it's told, like w3m or opera).

YAW (who writes his boring but perfectly usable (100-hits a day on some pages, which ain't too bad) web-pages using 'cat > filename')

I see why....

[Kjella]

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

Re:Quite the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

post your sites. i would be surprised is they looked good and were functional. as a point of reference, /. is an ugly site. can you imagine one version of espn.com that would work in all browsers and still have the same functionality?
The story is not about Microsoft disobeying standards; it's about msn serving a bad css to some browsers. For ui/graphic/front end people, ie became the standard when it got the biggest market share.

Re:Sites del. diff. content to different browsers.

[rainwalker]

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.

this is typical, the .NET framework does this, too

[sirshannon]

My biggest complaint about the .NET framework:

the .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.

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.

Fortunately Opera lies, too...

[Remus Shepherd]

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.

I doubt it

[Wraithlyn]

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?

Re:No problems with Mozilla as Opera

[unDiWahn]

Wait... so you're saying I shouldn't be able to clip stuff if I want to? Positioning any element to a negative coord is not valid? I can no longer scroll my banners like I used to?

Wow, that sucks man. You just crippled all my javascript games!

Mobile Phone Browsers

[burgburgburg]

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.

Re:Doubtful.

[sydlexic]

But this doesn't prove that management dictated this. It could have been some jackass web monkey

this is the most thoughtful reply so far. it's true that you will often find more zealots at the lower levels in organizations like microsoft.

but what I'm curious about is whether or not this css file causes the page to render better in any version of opera. since they're serving up different css for many different browsers (not just opera) and each of the css files is quite a bit different, it does look as though some thought was put into each file. perhaps a) the file was legitimately tailored for opera and b) opera is a victim of producing a better browser or (as I asserted earlier) this is a typo.

someone claimed that you couldn't get 3 and 0 confused. but if you're editing this file and the points are -2 0 0 0 and you meant to change it to -2 0 0 3 then, yeah, you could make that mistake. especially if it's late (or early) and you haven't had enough caffeine.

in the last couple of million lines of code that I've written, I've made less excusable typos.

Re:Clearly This Sucks but....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm suprised that noone hans written a worm that randomly changes IE's identifier to that of another browser. There are panty to choose from, IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and I assmune that Safari will use it's own as well. If you couldn't reliably identify which browser was being used to visit your site then site designers would be forced to make W3C compliant pages.

That'll fuck'em.

Re:Clearly This Sucks but....

[Mitreya]

Please mod the parent up if you have any points. As much as I enjoy the discussion that bashes MS, this is the most insightful/informative post that I have seen.

And, not to defend MS or anything... but how come EVEN THE OPERA.COM SITE NEGLECTS TO MENTION THAT OPERA6.0 HAD A +30 BUG WHEN RENDERING CSS SHEETS?? Who is sabotaging who here?!?

Re:Kuro5hin busts IE 5.0

[MrBlint]

Microsoft web page fails to render on non-Microsoft browser. Conclusion: Microsoft bad. Non-Microsoft web page faile to render on Microsoft browser. Conclusion: Microsfot bad.