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?

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

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: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

[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

[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: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

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.

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.

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.

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: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?!?