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Microsoft Sends Broken Stylesheets to Opera

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the accidents-happen dept.

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.

8 of 938 comments (clear)

  1. Oddity to me by unterderbrucke · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  2. Not Just opera broken by cluge · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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.
  3. Actually by hafree · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  4. Re:Standards schmandards. by u38cg · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Well, not neccesarily. I don't think it's unreasonable (as a provider, not a web zealot) that a server doles out pages that are renderable. Where it's possible to predict what needs to be changed to get a browser to render that page properly, you might as well do it. Of course, it does have the potential to be abused.

    My browser is set to send nonsense as its id strings; it doesn't seem to do my surfing experience much harm.

    --
    [FUCK BETA]
  5. It is pretty easy to do by MetalShard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  6. Re:Standards schmandards. by questionlp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    W3C calls their CSS and HTML specifications as "Recommendations" rather than "Requirements" or "Standard", per se. Instead, they provide specifications on how user agents (be it browsers or cell phones) are recommended to follow.

    Of course, it would be lovely if all browser makers were to forced to follow the recommendations down to the nitty gritty, but even the recommendations don't always provide strict requirements on how a property or class should be rendered.

    The fact that Microsoft is pushing out (delibrately) a broken style sheet is just wrong.

  7. Slashdot and w3.org... by jonr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Truly unrecognized browsers are treated similarly by Noel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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:

    if string contains "Opera", use site.css
    else if string contains "MSIE 6.0", use site-win-ie6.css
    else if string containse "MSIE 5.5", use site-win-ie5.css
    else use site.css

    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...