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Microsoft Sends Broken Stylesheets to Opera
An anonymous reader writes "The Register has a story that the MSN homepage serves a different style sheet to the Opera web browser that makes Opera appear to be broken. Is this deliberate or a mistake? Who can possibly say? Opera's own take on the situation can be found here." This is not the first time.
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Opera should respond by automatically translating any page on the Microsoft web site into German and back again with Babelfish.
Why did they pick Opera, and not Mozilla or Netscape, not to mention Safari?
Older version of IE were also purposely broken in the same way; forced obelesence? As a regular Opera user I notice the same problem on some portions of the Microsoft web site as well (not just MSN).
To me this just proves that the remedy isn't working, that MS as a company prefers dirty tricks to competition and that the states that have not agreed to settlement had better press MS hard. (Wow holy run on sentence batman). It's sad that a company as successful and as full of talented people as MS has to resort to this type of behavior when a competitor comes out with a good product.
I'm reminded of a famous quote "Can't we just all get a long". I guess if your MS and you can't or won't compete the answer is no.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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...
My browser is set to send nonsense as its id strings; it doesn't seem to do my surfing experience much harm.
[FUCK BETA]
I used to have different style sheets for different browsers in an effort to make my websites look good for all of them. More than once I updated some of the html and only tested the pages in IE where they looked fine (I know, I know, but programmers are naturally lazy.) It turns out the style sheets for the other browsers totally made the pages look broken. I'm not defending MS. It would not surprise me if they did it on purpose, but I am saying it is easy to do. Now I just have one style sheet and I made sure to use simpler html that would look good on all browsers. Sometimes simple is better.
Pocket PC Games
You can see how webpages react to various browsers at www.wannabrowser.com
I'm not going to bother posting the results here but it's easy enough to see for yourself what the differences are.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
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.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
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.
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
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
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.
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...
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.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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...
My biggest complaint about the .NET framework:
.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.
the
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.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
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:
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.