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Opera Releases "Bork" Edition
David Arnesen writes "Two weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft's MSN portal targeted Opera users, by purposely providing them with a broken page. As a reply to MSN's treatment of its users, Opera Software today released a very special Bork edition of its Opera 7 for Windows browser. The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork!
Here you can find the press release and download link!"
I wish far more companies would respond like this, instead of instantly suing each other until one of them dies a bitter death.
Maybe instead of doing something silly, They could have tried a special version that reports to MSN that it is MS Exploiter. A interesting feature could be that you could have a setting that tells the web server what ever you set it to (IE Exploiter or netscape). Might solve the broken style sheet version problem.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
From the artice
/. and I am not an apologist for Microsoft but IIRC the source of the problem was a single incorrect figure in the style sheet. NO possiblity whatsoever of a typo there then.
The MSN site is sending Opera users what appear to be intentionally distorted pages. The Bork edition illustrates how browsers could also distort content, as the Bork edition does. The real point here is that the success of the Web depends on software and Web site developers behaving well and rising above corporate rivalry The Opera acticle is a little less direct with it's acusations. I realise this is
Can any opera users confirm if the style sheets are still messed up ? If they are they I might start subscribing to the conspiracy theory, but really his smacks of a childish attempt to grab attention. I would guess the Netscape, Moz and Phoenix share of the market is of much more concern to MS than Opera
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
This would be cool, having translation skins, kind of like the look-n-feel skins. Sure, it would be useful say if you wanted to automatically translate whatever language you're viewing into your own language. But then you would have the ability to use fun language skins, like the Bork, or the Miguel Web Filter found at fatchicksinpartyhats.com
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Opera 7 has very sophisticated rendering functions for small screens. For example Nokia uses Opera on its communicator and it's press releases like this one, which provides the Redmond paranoiacs with the willies.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Isn't that a risky step to take? After all (I guess) they have a copyright on the content of msn.com, and Opera is actively defacing their site.
Won't they (i.e. MS) sue?
my
Moderation is retarded. Welcome to /.
Strike that. Moderation is not retarded. It is a good idea. Unfortunately, the people doing the moderating are often retarded (or careless).
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Here we go again. It's pretty sad that this story has gotten so much attention, because it would seem that it's more a case of Microsoft not caring than it is malevolence on their part. Hey, great publicity for Opera, though.
MSN does not send out an Opera-specific stylesheet. It doesn't! Actually, it sends Opera the generic site.css sheet, which will also be sent to browsers that return nothing but a load of garbage (NOT the Oprah test) for their user-agent strings. Oh, and don't forget corky browsers like Netscape 4.7, which still have a creepy amount of market share. It should be noted that MSN looks perfectly fine in NS 4.7, which leads me to believe that the negative right margin that flakes out in O7 is actually meant to account for one of NS 4.7's numerous, unsightly bugs. Other posters have said that this is to account for a bug in Opera 6's rendering, but I haven't tested this myself. Oh, and this same style appears in the Netscape 6 specific stylesheet with no ill effects. Figure that one out.
Why does the "Oprah" test allow Opera to receive the IE 6 stylesheet? Because the words "MSIE 6" are in there, and the word "Opera" is not. MSN most likely does test for the word "Opera" first, but sends that browser the generic site.css sheet, because the MSN developers, probably having relegated Opera to that bin of browsers they couldn't care less about, figured the generic sheet would be good enough.
Sloppy, yes. Vindictive? C'mon. What's their motive? I would hardly call Opera--a closed-source browser that people actually have to pay for if they don't want to be annoyed--a threat to Microsoft's market share.
I am proud and privileged to have been a part of this. I got an email from Hakon just a few days ago, asking if they could use my JavaScript encheferizer (ported from someone else's Java version) on "one of their pages". I had no idea what they intended to do with it, but nevertheless said sure! No problem.
I'm rolling on the floor laughing my ass off now! Haha! You're my heroes!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I've seen this news reported on several fairly mainstream sites (at least far more mainstream than /.) You see "Opera and Microsoft arguing over CSS sheet" is a lot less interesting to most people than "Opera borks MSN homepage. See the screenshots here!" More people will know of it, and why, this way...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Exactly. And with a stunt like this, I would be very surprised if it doesn't find it's way to some of the larger "mainline" media sites.
Also, I have a feeling that Microsoft itself will react pretty quickly. The technical "trick" they played was pretty simple-minded, not unlike the "Swicher" add that was mentioned in another article here. Microsoft caught some major flack for that one, after some Slashdot folks discovered that the anonymous switcher was really an employee of the advertising company that was doing the add. I have a feeling some people got canned for that little stunt. Besides, there probably are some Opera users who reakky do need to get to stuff on MSN, and hopefully, now their pages won't be broken.
In the end, it's another black eye for Microsoft. It won't make much difference in the short run, but who knows what effect this will have in the long term?
(Well, for one, I just downloaded the latest free version of Opera on my Linux box, and may end up paying for the commercial version if I like it better than Galeon. I'm probably not the only one who did this because of this article...)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Kudos to the Opera team for handling this situation with humour and grace, while still managing to make a valuable message in a manner where it will grab attention. It's nice to see fights addressed with humour and rhetoric rather than lawsuits.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Quote:
"The ability to create ways to preprocess pages before they display would be a welcome addition to Mozilla's capabilities."
"TS is based on the idea of a very simple, open API, and the use of various modules which users may install and configure through the preferences panels. These modules would receive the webpage before it is fully parsed, and transform it as they are programmed, passing the transformed webpage either to the next module (they may be chained), or to the rendering/parsing engine. Naturally, users may want to run more than one module at a time, perhaps one that acts as a HTML filter to remove hostile tags (like BLINK and EMBED), and another as a simple lingual translation engine. Similarly, users may wish for modules to be applied to only some webpages, perhaps those in a foreign language or with a hostile PICS rating, and not other. "
http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/extension/199805/p reprocess.html
Mozilla team seems reluctant to implement this, do they fear something from sites hosting advertizing ? ... with no more ads, popup, useless side columns or top rows. Oops: unsubscribed user has the ads gone on slashdot! )
I can already imagine my favorite pages customized on the fly by Mozilla with my preferences, or even colaborative preferences.
( cnn, zdnet,