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!

[Strange Ranger]

>back to the bad old days at Microsoft

Drat, I must have missed the good days.

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[Znonymous Coward]

Why would anyone want to visit msn.com anyway?

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!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[critter_hunter]

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)

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[ratamacue]

Why would anyone want to visit msn.com anyway?

Maybe they don't want to. But Internet Explorer certainly does.

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[SquadBoy]

I'm not sure how to start but I'm not going to start with the obvious insult. A few months ago in a bid to get some docs out of MS for a thing I needed to do I was forced to sign up for a Passport. So yes indeed I got a hotmail account with it. Now how in the hell does that force me to use the thing? Answer it does not. If you need free email use http://www.hushmail.com instead. Now what is your excuse?

Re:No fear of prosecurion, no problem!

[pnatural]

[...] what choice does the user have?

fdisk

'nuff said.

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.

[u38cg]

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.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[Enahs]

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.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[questionlp]

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.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[lodge]

...but they have no choice but to do things this way unless you want a very drab looking site.

This may or may not be true; I've seen some quite impressive standards compliant sites that seem to work in many of the major browsers. But does that excuse feeding a deliberately broken style-sheet to a competitor's browser, and only to that browser? I would say not.

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.

[Fembot]

Actualy thats an interesting point. Should I bother to make a special version of my page for older browsers (Like NS4 and IE4) which have frankly awful CSS and DHTML support? Especicaly give how few people still use those two browsers. Or should I maybe have one primitive version which runs in even mosaic etc, and one which works with all the more common browsers which conform to the latest standards? And why cant there be some nice easy javascript way to determine if browsers support CSS2 and other fancy standards?

Re:Standards schmandards.

[spongman]

Yeah but the stylesheet for opera is designed to work with Opera v6. The bug in the stylesheet was hidden by a bug in v6 which was only last week fixed in v7. sure, there's a bug in the stylesheet, but that doesn't mean it's new or that it was placed there specifically to break Opera v7.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[governorx]

The original point was very valid and you are the one that is missing the point. The argument that it should be standardized is very valid because the content you recieve from a website should not depend on your browser type. Hence the goal of a global standard is to ensure compatibility across multiple platforms (in this case a software platform).

Also, by addressing this area of concern, no flawed values would be present due to a difference in browser types - merely by other errors.

OTOH (On the other hand) remember that programmers make mistakes, and someone who has to write web pages using different syntax and markups can make mistakes if they are more comfortable writing for a different browser (i.e. I.E.). They are working for MS after all.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[spectecjr]

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.

Hmmm... although the thing is, the item in the stylesheet which they claim is broken (ul tag style) is the same in the Nav6 stylesheet.

Mozilla renders the page perfectly, and it gets the nav6 stylesheet with that very same ul {} declaration... here's all three listed together:

Opera: ul {list-style-position: outside; margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px; list-style-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/8/bullet-black.gif);}

Nav 6: ul {list-style-position: outside; margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px; list-style-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/8/bullet-black.gif);}

IE6: ul {list-style-position: outside; margin: -2px 0px 0px 8px; list-style-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/8/bullet-black.gif);}

Looks like human error to me.

Simon

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.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[Bob(TM)]

My browser is set to send nonsense ...

Coincidentally, so are most web servers.

Re:Standards schmandards.

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

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:

<style type="text/css" media="all">@import url(main.css);</style>

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.

Opera should respond

[pubjames]

Opera should respond by automatically translating any page on the Microsoft web site into German and back again with Babelfish.

Re:Opera should respond

[evilviper]

"Welcommen to SmallDelicate.com"

Re:Opera should respond

[realkiwi]

Shouldn't that be Norwegian?

Re:Opera should respond

[Anonymous Coward]

Pornoliz it http://www.pornolize.com/

Identify As

[OneBarG]

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.

We need browser masking.

[Angelwrath]

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.

Re:We need browser masking.

[sweetooth]

Opera already can masquerade as any browser you want it to. That's been a feature of Opera for as long as I can remember.

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

Aww, come on...

[cybermace5]

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?

Re:Aww, come on...

[Shalda]

I remember back to about '97 or so, at the height of the browser wars, every time I went to the Microsoft web site with Navigator 3.0, Navigator would GPF. Of course, the same thing would happen if I went to the Netscape site with IE 3.0. Which was ironic, because I was going there to download Navigator.

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

[program21]

It's one thing to follow standards (which IE does a little better as of late), it's another to intentionally sabatoge the display of a page in a competitor's browser.
The IE6 stylesheet for msn.com works fine with Opera, it's a special stylesheet MS is sending to Opera (when identifying as itself) that causes the page to render horribly, not due to extensions, but to general crappy things to do (setting child elements 30 pixels left of the parent).
If anything, MS is playing off Opera's adherance to standards here.

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

[curtisk]

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.

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.

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

[eddy]

..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)

Oddity to me

[unterderbrucke]

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

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.

Re:Oddity to me

[rworne]

They picked Safari too.

Hotmail worked fine with Safari just after Safari was released, then Microsoft changed something later in the day and all Safari users now get odd Javascript error messages when attempting to log on to Hotmail.

Clicking on the "help" link brings you into your account, and once in, everything works just fine (and faster than IE on the Mac as well).

Re:Oddity to me

[djrogers]

Actually, MS (used to?) do this with support.micrsoft.com and Mozilla - they'd send broken difficult to read pages, however if you changed your user agent string, Voila - rendered exactly the way it did in IE. Like the story said, this ain't the first time...

Won't help!!

[Baki]

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.

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....

[geekoid]

NO, it's intentional. If you read the article, you see how it is only Opera that gets the error, even thoght opera works fine with the page that is sent for IE.

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?

Not Just opera broken

[cluge]

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.

You browse with style sheets turned on?

[hcobb]

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.

Re:You browse with style sheets turned on?

[RokaMoka]

Okay, it's fun to be an iconoclast, but here's something to ponder:

Stylesheets, scripting, and lots more where they came from, make the web pretty. And if we ever want free software products to gain acceptance with Joe Sixpack, we've gotta move beyond elitism and embrace these technologies.

Let's face it, most users use IE and have msn.com as their homepage. Assuming we get one of them to install an alternate browser, what page do you think they'll check first? Let's make sure it works for them, and then show them better places to go.

BTW, for an impressive example of stylesheets, java, and scripting, check out www.klat.com. Works with Mozilla too!

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.

MSDN didn't work with Mozilla UA for a while

[Malc]

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.

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 :D The whole time though, I had no problem with the MSDN subscriber downloads site, which even had a message for Netscape users.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not broken anymore?

[s.d.]

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"...

Actually

[hafree]

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...

Re:Actually

[Isofarro]

Try a 2 celled Excel spreadsheet, the left cell with a picture, and the right with a short bit of text. That's horrendous.

Although, believe it or not, not as bad as MSPublisher.

Re:Actually

[poot_rootbeer]

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...

While MS Office's "save as HTML" feature does not create compact or attractive code, it does not diverge from any HTML or CSS standards that I'm aware of. It just adds MORE tags and attributes to the standards, things for precise formatting control that aren't possible through simple HTML code and that the user agent is expected to ignore if it doesn't understand them.

"Clean" code and "Standards-compliant" code are not the same thing...

It is pretty easy to do

[MetalShard]

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.

Re:Who uses Opera

[Blimey85]

Umm... since Netscape is derived from Mozilla, shouldn't they be considered the same? I use Mozilla because Netscape is always a bit behind on the updates but I consider them to be about the same. I think the last version of Netscape released had all of the Mozilla features... but I may be wrong.

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.

www.wannabrowser.com

[KalvinB]

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

Same old stuff

[__aafkqj3628]

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.

What is the alternative?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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.

Re:What is the alternative?

[brettlbecker]

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.

Well, then, let's just say that MS decides that not only msn.com but all other subsidiary msn sites (hotmail, espn, what have you) will only correctly display in IE. Or maybe they'll go a little further and say that the sites will only load at all in IE. Your argument would allow that course of action as well. Now, I've got this hotmail account which I began free and multiple-browser compliant a few years ago. Now, to see my email or to forward any of it so that I don't have to use their shoddy service, I need a version of IE. That is coercion. And since I run on gnu/linux, I'm shit out of luck. That is abuse of power.

As long as you claim to be providing a public service (like free email or online news), it ought to be available to the public. If it's not going to be made available to everyone, then you should say what is changing and why. But MS does not now, nor indeed have not ever, cared about what is fair.

B

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:What is the alternative?

[An Onerous Coward]

There's the literal way of looking at it, and then there's the abstract way. You're asking, "Why shouldn't Microsoft be allowed to serve up whatever HTML they like?"

But in doing so, MSN is making a very specific, very pointed, very inaccurate statement about the Opera web browser. That statement is, "Opera doesn't render web pages correctly."

Since Opera's success relies on public perception of the quality of their product, this amounts to slander. Since this is a Microsoft portal making the statement about a company that competes with Microsoft, it also raises antitrust issues.

I would also like to know how you got it in your head that, if we don't have legal recourse, the only alternative is to shut up and take it. People have a right to complain. People should complain. Opera users, specifically, should complain.

On a related note, I just spent twenty minutes on MSN.com, trying to find some sort of contact address. No dice.

Maybe, but...

[Domingos Neto]

Perhaps MSN is doing that on purpose. But i'd rather think that what is really going on is what happens with every webmaster that needs to keep track of the one billion different browsers out there. You just can't do it, and sometimes it will break up.

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)

Re:Maybe, but...

[arkanes]

Well, if you'd read the links, you'd know that this isn't a case of a rare browser not being allowed for (excusable behavior), but a specific fix targeted directly toward Opera - which doesn't need an extra stylesheet because it renders the IE specific one fine.

Re:Clearly This Sucks but....

[wrenkin]

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.

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.p ng

This is sabotage.

Read the original report here:

http://deb.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/

Re:Clearly This Sucks but....

[joebp]

am I mistaken or can't opera report itself as MSIE?

Yes, it can.

But why should it? It just encouranges the stupidity of most 'web designers' who look at logs and say 'Oh, 98% of visitors use MSIE5/6, no need to write correct code, just kludge some MS-only code together'. Lather, rinse, repeat.

User-Agent string fascism and spoofing is a classic chicken and egg situation. Except the chicken in this case is an MCSE armed with MS Frontpage.

Re:Who uses Opera

[carlos_benj]

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?

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.

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

[bhamm]

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

if microsoft had been even remotely honest about something, anything, in the past.. maybe folks would be less likey to jump all over their ass for something like this.. myslef included. I don't trust that company to do anything other than what's in the interest of preserving their (albeit fading) grip on the industry. For all their recent blabbing about better security and better standards support, i've seen nothing of the kind.

Re:i dunno

[hkmwbz]

Oh yeah...

"To test this, the User-Agent filed was changed slightly -- from "Opera" to "Oprah". Since there is no "Oprah" browser on the market, one assumes that MSN has not created special versions for it.
...
Looking into this 37k file, we find a reference to the same style sheet as MSIE6 receives. Just to make sure the server does not modify this style sheet before sending it to the browsers, we fetch the style sheet with the "Oprah" browser:
...
The resulting file is identical to the one MSIE6 receives. Therefore, MSN looks for "Opera" in the User-Agent string and on purpose send Opera7 a style sheet which distort pages."

So it would seem that Opera was specifically targeted.

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

[Anonvmous Coward]

"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.

Re:i dunno

[John Whitley]

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.

Let's get to the heart of the matter here: the real bugaboo is pathetic web standards compliance, industry wide. I'd love to see the W3C start using the time-honored tactic of creating trademarked certification names and logos usable only by browser versions that pass a rigorous and public compliance suite. Then web developers could start a) targetting standards as they should and b) righteously flaming sites that do stupid non-standards based things (like serving up different content for different browsers as a workaround for standards non-compliance).

Re:i dunno

[Elwood P Dowd]

MSIE stylesheet:

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

Opera stylesheet:

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

That is a great point:

Perhaps an old version of the document read:

margin: -2px 0px 0px -3px;

But they tried to change the last value to a zero?

My question is what stylesheet does it send to Opera6? Opera's argument begins to hint at my question:

Q: Isn't this just a problem with the newly released Opera7?

A: 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. Here is a screenshot: [snip]

Ok, Opera6 handles the page sent to MSIE6 perfectly... but does Opera6 also display the messed up stylesheet correctly? Does MSN send the same stylesheet to both Opera versions? There are all kinds of semi-reasonable explanations due to the version differences that have not been ruled out.

Of course, I don't doubt that MS is being malicious, but I'm not sure.

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:Realplayer

[Domingos Neto]

MSN should be able to block non-IE browsers if they want. It's a free country.

No, it shouldn't. Not when they have 90% of the market share. This is monopolium, not free competition, and the same rules don't apply in this case.

M$ claims W3C compat...mistakenly?

[horatio]

From the old article, one of Microsoft's marketing directors should get his facts straight:

"We supported the latest W3C standards when developing the content and services delivered from MSN," ... He added that Microsoft wants users to visit the Web site "regardless of the browser they choose."
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.

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.

In fairness

[Espen]

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.

Slashdot and w3.org...

[jonr]

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.

Re:Slashdot and w3.org...

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict a mysterious but sudden moderation to -1 Offtopic in your future...

Re:Slashdot and w3.org...

[Nicopa]

Dialog:

Slashdot: Microsoft Sends Broken Stylesheets to Opera.
The people: So what, you send broken HTML to everybody!

Another article on ZDNET this time

[Blademan007]

Opera: Microsoft is hurting our style

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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?

OTOH, I have MSN Blocked

[Fringe]

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!

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:Gimme a break

[Weird_Hock]

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.

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.

I can't believe its not Micro$oft

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

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?

Ctrl-G

[Tux2000]

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

Re:What is the alternative? Thats not the point.

[Average Joe]

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.

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:Microsoft destroys Netscape, Opera must be next

[Jondor]

sure, but Opera is also available for iTv, Smartphone, symbian and verticals and those are markets MS would love to enter and konquer...

People have to stop thinking that the PC is all there is on the net...

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')

No problems with Mozilla as Opera

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

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!

Re:No problems with Mozilla as Opera

[zxSpectrum]

This is because the Mozilla quirks mode seems to mimic Netscape 4.x rather than IE4/5. This is not because Mozilla is a better quirks renderer than Opera.

As I've said in another reply and on my personal site, Microsoft seems to be specifically targetting Opera for a non-accessible version.

Re:Not necessarily saying this story isn't true, b

[spongman]

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).

opera vs. msdn

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Re:Bad autodetection

[An Onerous Coward]

1) No, it's not faulty autodetection. It's correctly determining which browser is making the request. It's correctly sending different stylesheets based on the user-agent string. The problem is, the stylesheet itself is written in an incomprehensibly stupid way.

The fact that it only sends the broken sheets to Opera 7 would indicate that someone at MSN wants to hurt the reputation of Opera's latest offering.

2) No. Nobody should have to browse with a false user-agent string. Period. The fact is, as much as we like standards, every browser has its own quirks and problems that must be worked around if you want to give all browsers the same experience.

A good webmaster can use the agent string to greatly improve the browsing experience for everyone. But bad ones use the information to mess with users of specific browsers[*], or to deny them access altogether, even though the vast majority of websites I've entered under false pretenses worked just fine.

The whole issue is about respect. Microsoft is not respecting my decision to use a non-IE browser. Coding to standards and ensuring cross-browser correctness shows respect to everyone who views your site. Locking out users of browsers you don't like shows disrespect for those who don't share your browser preferences.

[*] Not always to IE users' benefit. I remember one slashdotter who rigged his site so that anyone using IE ended up listening to the musical stylings of William Shatner.

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:Clearly This Sucks but....

[Okojo]

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 uses a bad disguise

[Rui del-Negro]

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
~~~

Re:Quite the contrary

[Aquitaine]

I disagree with your disagreement completely. :)

I suspect you can write a page that works in every browser that looks decent. I also suspect that, in doing so, you are violating W3C WAI guidelines, or at least being shortsighted in your compliance with them.

(I could be wrong about that, I have no idea who you are or what work you do. This is simply my general experience and please pardon me for jumping on you!)

The biggest problem with supporting every browser is that you're mixing up content with layout. You are most likely using tables for layout; if you know how to make a page look good in NS4 without doing that, let me know. The problem with this is that assistive devices try to comprehend your page by seperating content from layout, and tables are supposed to be used for content, and CSS for layout. But NS4 doesn't even begin to support that properly. This is an issue right now for WAI people and those of us who have to make our sites 508 compliant, but it's going to be more of an issue in the future as all browsers will need to clearly differentiate between layout and content.

We made the decision to simply stop supporting NS4 and comply with HTML 4.0 and CSS2. These are no longer cutting edge standards, and it does give our designers a lot more freedom in how a site looks. Yes, they -could- design something to work in every browser (and we did, until recently) but it is a whole lot of extra work to design something with tables and deal with all of the stuff that entails. So it's not a 'we're too dumb' thing, it's a 'we'd rather devote our creative energies to something that complies with standards that are now a couple years old than support a browser > 3% of people still use.'

And if we get someone who complains that they can't access our stuff with NS4, we mail them a CD with Mozilla or Phoenix. Your tax dollars at work.

Cheers,
Aquitaine
Program on Employment and Disability
Cornell University

Its not about free choice

[xenocide2]

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

illogically speaking....

[branchstudios]

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?

Re:illogically speaking....

[PetWolverine]

Now, what's the W3C compliant way to get my [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] tags to display properly?

Use angle brackets, making them display properly with this syntax, thus:

&lt;sarcasm&gt;
[insert sarcastic comment here]
&lt;/sarcasm&gt;

Once parsed by a browser, that should display as:

<sarcasm>
[insert sarcastic comment here]
</sarcasm>

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.

Truly unrecognized browsers are treated similarly

[Noel]

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...

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:Who uses Opera

[SacredNaCl]

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.

Re:pornolizing it

[tomhudson]

Funny AND useful. I've never before actually had the misfortune to go to msn.com, but it was really worth it after it was pornolized.

a quote:

MSNBC News

• * Powell titty fucks his case to Congress

pretty accurate, too.

Re:Not necessarily saying this story isn't true, b

[spongman]

actually their assessment of 'just fine' is incorrect.

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.

I think they are being stupid not evil.

[gurps_npc]

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.

Doubtful.

[RatBastard]

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.

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:omission from opera's explanation

[spongman]

d) the -38px adjustment is in there to overcome a non-standard +38px adjustment that Opera v6 adds to lists.

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.

Ummm....

[cratchit]

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.

Breaking my own sites.

[JWSmythe]

Honestly, this is not an effort against Opera. If I choose to break my own site, so be it..

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 /. story on that.

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 .0004% of our hits, I'd have to say "Do the change, ignore Opera".

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 .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..

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:Bad autodetection

[Mitreya]

The fact that it only sends the broken sheets to Opera 7 would indicate that someone at MSN wants to hurt the reputation of Opera's latest offering.

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.

READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE

[chefmonkey]

It's not that MS didn't make provisions for Opera. It's intentionally sending a broken style sheet. If you tweak the user-agent string (change Opera to, say, Oprea), it sends the "normal" style sheet, and Opera can render it just fine.

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.

I'm just the type of person that'd rather look at all the details than try to find details to support a bias.

Then why the hell didn't you?

Opera is Microsoft's greatest threat

[zxSpectrum]

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.

Re:Clearly This Sucks but....

[Fweeky]

Actually, it looks suspiciously like someone setting margin in a misguided attempt to work around a "problem" with padding; in the CSS box model, each box has two measurements to define how things flow around it; padding, which is inside the box but outside the content, and margin, which is outside the box.

The problem is not all browsers apply margin and padding the same to elements; for example, Mozilla and IE give the body tag a margin, Opera gives it padding (as recommended by the W3C and common sense). Web weenies often try to remove this by setting margin: 0; while neglecting to set padding. A naive way to fix this would be to serve a stylesheet specifically to Opera setting margin to a *negitive* value of whatever padding happens to be set to, thus pulling the padding outside the viewport; the correct solution is obviously to just set padding: 0;.

Lists are similar; if you don't set margin *and* padding, you're liable to have things like this happen, because you've not defined what you want fully. This is especially true of lists, which are often built up quite differently in different browsers.

So, no need to go overboard on the conspiracy theories; this looks more like a web weenie who doesn't quite know what he's doing. I guess this is what happens when you hire graduates straight out of college ;)

Hotmail does this everytime : using Opera

[ramzak2k]

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.

READ THIS FOR EVIDENCE AS TO WHY IT HAPPENS

[spectecjr]

Microsoft didn't do anything of the kind.

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/~simoncooke /ns47.png

Whereas here is Netscape Navigator 4.7 using the unmodified stylesheet (the same one passed to Opera):

http://home.earthlink.net/~simoncooke/ns47orig.p ng

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_sep02 /l astmonth_07_b.htm

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

Re:READ THIS FOR EVIDENCE AS TO WHY IT HAPPENS

[zcat_NZ]

Did you read the fucking article?

If you download the page and style-sheet (using wget) while identifying yourself as IE or any other browser than Opera, you set sent a web page and style sheet that renders properly in IE, and in Netscape, and in Opera.

If you download the page (using wget) identifying yourself as Opera7, you get a page that looks broken not just in Opera, but in every other browser too, including IE because the style sheet says to render it in a way that looks 'broken'.

Re:READ THIS FOR EVIDENCE AS TO WHY IT HAPPENS

[van_grieg]

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).
True. But since the page has no DOCTYPE declaration, Mozilla goes into the quirks mode, emulating Netscape 4.x bugs.

Re:READ THIS FOR EVIDENCE AS TO WHY IT HAPPENS

[pnot]

and actually perform your own tests (which it's quite plain you didn't, because if you had, you'd have seen exactly what I did).

One thing, though: it may have been changed between the time Opera did their tests and you did yours. this post seems to suggest so, anyway.

Re:READ THIS FOR EVIDENCE AS TO WHY IT HAPPENS

[zcat_NZ]

OK. I read the article again, and I admit that I got some of it wrong. I'm still not totally convinced however.

Am I correct in my understanding that the style sheet being returned for Opera and Mozilla is technically 'broken' as far as standards goes, and only works/worked because Opera didn't and Netscape still doesn't properly handle
"margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;" ? Properly, it should move the text outside the frame the way this version currently renders in IE and Opera 7 ?

I'll also accept your word that MSN is -currently- returning a page that refers to 'site.css' for unidentified browsers. The opera.com article is quite specific that at the time they tested, it was referring to the IE version for unidentified browsers and it's possible that MSN changed it recently.

I stand behind the rest of my inflamatory rant. I can't see any reason why they'd send a special version when (I'm trusting opera.com's screenshots here) opera7 and opera 6 both render the "IE" version perfectly well. That's the entire POINT of CSS.

Conclusion; I accept that I grossly oversimplified, but I'm still left with the very strong feeling that MSN are sending different versions of CSS to try and break browsers, rather than to try and compensate for them.

Strange

[ink]

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.

Re:Clearly This Sucks but....

[howcome]

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.

Re:Only on /.

[nagora]

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)

I've coded against Opera for a long time now and never encountered this. Is that astroturf I smell?

TWW

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.