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Opera Claims Microsoft Has Poor Interoperability
Noksagt writes "Opera CTO Hakon Lie has countered the claims that Bill Gates made regarding Microsoft's superior interoperability last week. He points out their invalid webpages, MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format, and more." From the article: "You say you believe in interoperability. Why then, did you terminate the Web Core Fonts initiative you started in 1996? You deserve credit for starting it, but why close down a project which could have given you yet much good will? (Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!)"
After .Net sucks and Solaris, JVM suck too, I believe we're entering a new era in 2005, where litigation is a past tense.
It's just so much easier, and more importantly cheaper, to attack competitors like this.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I'm not much into the fine arts, but someone's written an opera about Microsoft's poor interoperability?!
I can't wait to hear the fat lady sing in this one!
I'm a big tall mofo.
Let's PRAISE Microsoft instead.
;-)
Wouldn't that be off topic if done as comments to this article?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers
:-)
Well I can vouch for that: there is just no way I can access my Hotmail account with Mozilla, and it seems a dicey affair with Konq. However, for some reason (ahem...), it works just great with IE
Oh well, nothing new here. Remember the DRDOS case against Microsoft? They claimed Windows couldn't interoperate without MSDOS 7 too, yet it could. It's a classic case of Microsoft trying to maintain its monopolies by messing with standards to its advantage.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Verdana rocks
Sunny Dubey
(not a technical font person etc etc)
(Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!
Actually verdana is the better font, and georgia is weak & problematic.
thats why proprietary software is bad. there is no way for the consumer to benefit from the software.
They're the best spin doctors in town, you have to admit that much...
Verdana does suck. Especially on paper - it should never, ever, be seen off the screen.
you had me at #!
Now you can only get them with Windows. Just like a drug pusher... the first one's free, then you pay, and only from them.
Georgia is beautiful? Ick!
Because Microsoft is out to make money first, establish standards for its own purposes second and do acts of good deeds somewhere down the line... if they feel like it. Quit barking up the money tree. There are movie stars, politicians, and other millionares who practice the same type of anti-competition methods. I can hardly see how this news 'matters'.
sure, if you want to see mandatory use of windows and office ( insert other microsoft products here ) written into law :)
oh , and of course it would be illegal not to *buy* it at some outrageously bloated price
Maybe verdana does suck, but reading serif fonts on a computer screen causes a lot more eye strain than reading sans serif fonts. Of course, serif fonts like Georgia look good on paper, but on a computer screen, I think sans-serif fonts are much better.
Dave Hyatt, who writes a blog about his development on Apple's Safari, has an amusing anecdote about developing CSS2 support in Safari, and how IE's piss-poor support of standards forced him to remove it in Safari.
From the blog:
"Sometimes trying to support the standards can be a real pain.
While trying to improve our CSS2 compliance, I recently did a big cleanup of our block layout code, including the code for handling floats. I made what I believed to be a fairly innocuous correction to follow the CSS2 specification. Here's the scenario.
Lets say you have a div that is set to 300 pixels in CSS. You then put a 250 pixel wide float inside that div. Immediately after that you have a 100 pixel wide overflow:hidden div. All sizes have been specified in CSS.
Now here's the pop quiz. What do you think the layout should be? Should the overflow div:
(a) Be on the same line with the float and spill out of the enclosing 300 pixel div
(b) Be placed underneath the float, automatically clearing it because there is insufficient space for
the overflow div next to the float
Before I give an answer, lets see what the CSS specification has to say on this issue. Section 9.5 on floats, fifth paragraph.
'The margin box of a table or an element in the normal flow that establishes a new block formatting context (such as an element with 'overflow' other than 'visible') must not overlap any floats in the same block formatting context as the element itself. If necessary, implementations should clear the said element by placing it below any preceding floats, but may place it adjacent to such floats if there is sufficient space.'
My interpretation of this language is that there must be sufficient space for the table or overflow:hidden element to fit within the containing block. If not, you should clear. That's what I implemented. So in my opinion the correct answer to the question above is (b).
I decided to see what other browsers did. I started with Gecko. Gecko chose (a). Gecko always does (a). It is at least consistent if - in my humble opinion - incorrect. Gecko chooses (a) regardless of whether you pick strict, almost strict or quirks mode.
Next I tried WinIE, and this is the part that blew my mind. Depending on whether the float was an image or a table, the float was left or right aligned, the table specified that it floated via the align attribute or the float CSS property, and on whether or not the normal flow element was declared as a sibling or not of the float, I could get completely different results! The level of inconsistency was astonishing.
I was able to watch WinIE do clipping in one case, to wrap in a second case, to not wrap in a third case, to overwrite content in a fourth case, all by just tweaking the parameters outlined above. It's no wonder Web designers have no idea how to code a page to standards when they have to deal with a layout engine that is so horribly inconsistent and buggy.
Naively I opted to implement (b) and to hope for the best. Unfortunately the bugs immediately started pouring in. finance.yahoo.com was broken for example because it used an old-style align table and relied on it not wrapping underneath the float. Undaunted, I simply added a strict mode/quirks mode check and opted to do (a) in quirks mode and (b) in strict mode.
The bugs kept coming in though. Next was versiontracker.com, a page that is actually in strict mode and relies on an overflow:hidden div to spill out of a containing block rather than wrapping.
So now I really have no choice. This is an example of where the CSS2 standard simply can't be followed because buggy layout engines have set a bad precedent that the rest of us have no choice but to follow.
It's a shame that Gecko does not do the right thing in strict mode at least, but I suppose they had no choice in the matter either."
LMAO
I have to say, i really wasn't expecting that hostel of a letter to be put out by opera, but its funny as hell.
This is almost as bad as when Microsoft made IE part of your operating system. before (in win98 ) you could remove IE and get it to still work, now, if you remove it you virtually kiss your OS goodbye.
Its all part of their strategy, like donating computers to schools, your not being nice, your getting kids hooked on MS word at age 8! I have to say, Microsoft is one of the best companies ever if you just look at what they do as a business, but their products are crap.
unfortunetly, its the only crap that will play half life 2 ^_^
I would like to see some compatibility of Opera with the standards of new sites like gmail. I use Opera myself and the browser is known for its great compatibility. I am still waiting for MS to release the NTFS format for those who do Dual Booting.
Darn right, buddy. I should have done the same last week already and my broker called me promptly AFTER(!) closing time yesterday. You surely know what's the first thing I am doing on Monday morning.
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what makes fonts easy to read. The reason both Verdana and Georgia are easier for most people to read on a screen has more to do with being well-hinted, being designed to avoid warts at the relatively low resolutions in use, and having a large x-height. None of these is particularly true of obvious alternatives like Times Roman and Helvetica/Arial on most of today's systems. The presence or absence of serifs has relatively little to do with it.
More surprisingly, some research has suggested that serifs don't actually help much on paper either, at least for shorter works. They do seem to boost reading ease in long, blocky works like novels, but for something like a magazine article or a short paper, reading ease isn't much of an indicator one way or the other.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What's funny is that this is the same company that released a 'Bork' version of their browser.
"Derp de derp."
mods on slashdot have gone downmarket as of late, same with the editors and quality of the comments. its become quite frankly little more then a " we hate ms " club , caring very little about anything else. its like 12 yr olds have taken over and are very very angry with the world
"Let's PRAISE Microsoft instead."
I'm so glad Microsoft brought Opera to my attention! Go Microsoft!!
"Derp de derp."
The author obviously has never been to Atlanta.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
It looks like MSN's markup is more valid then Slashdot's is.
It's just Opera's dirty marketing tactics. Even when it's against a company you hate, it's still a dirty marketing tactic.
I am becoming increasinly concerned about one of the two investment funds I got last year. The larger one has a fair share of Microsoft stocks in the fund portfolio. Any reason to worry yet?
How about we stop trying to attach Microsoft to every Slashdot article? Dear god this is getting old. It is a form of flattery to need to mention that company all the time.
i remember the good old days. opera died after firefox showed up - but whenever you used opera, you could just tell by the feel of it, that Windows had bad interoperability... Netscape and early mozilla had the same feel. it felt like it just didnt belong, as if it was a tresspasser compared to IE. Microsoft has 'McInteroperability'. Thats like interoperability only it only goes one way. Eg: -DirectX ONLY runs on Windows (TM), and is the industry standard. -NTFS _was_ only useable by windows. -MS Office only runs on windows -MS programs inherently run 5x faster than any competitors programs (something to do with APIs) Overall, microsoft doesnt really understand what interoperability means in the first place - they probably think it means "capability to run under MS Windows(TM)" - like Apache, PHP, Mysql, Firefox, Openoffice, etc.
I think the Slashdot IT section's caption should be "Whats IT? IT is it!" as a most excellent homage to Faith No More.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
It was previously commented that Microsoft is going down the tubes because of several factors, like IE not being updated in years (except for security patches), and Longhorn being way late. This is just another example. The smell of rot from the direction of Redmond is getting stronger.
Nah ... it's free advertising. Why else do you think Microsoft has let Slashdot live?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...in a state of suspended animation here
:).
I prefer Bitstream Vera myself.
For terminals though, I *love* non-smoothed Lucida Typewriter 9 point. Not the Xfree version though (the 'm' and 'w' look wierd), I like the one which comes with Solaris (the standard font used by OpenWindow's cmdtool).
Mmm, functional
I'm quite frustrated when people hardcode in fonts - even linuxsites code in font's that really look awful on a (my, at least :p) linux system. Use the css attribute font-family: sans-serif instead of font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif! Then we (who actually browse the pages) can choose our favourite fonts. I like Bitstream Vera Sans for sans-serif fonts.
My dog's better than your dog...
I happen to LIKE Verdana, thankyouveddymuch! I agree that Georgia is gorgeous though.
Lucida Grande is the new Verdana.
This is Opera abusing its position as a market leader to try to lock poor Microsoft into those evil open standards!
RMN
~~~
but that's understandable. He still has a lot of valid points, and does a *fine* job of raking Bill G. over the coals :-)
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
it's not over until the fat nerd passes out from frustration...
Seems like it isn't about putting an easy-to-use computer on every mans desk anymore. No no, now it's about putting _his_ windows computer on every mans desk, in every mans hand, mobile phone, game, and god knows what's coming up the abyss next. Can't you all see? The man's gone completely mad!
With the increasing popularity of Firefox, Opera needed to do something to try to reverse its shrinking marketshare of the browser market. It is good to see Opera getting a little of the publicity it so desparately needs.
Comparsion
Last time i checked maps.google.com doesn't work in opera. I don't see the guys from opera or anyone else complaining about this.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Actually, if a page is properly coded, it will render almost exactly the same on any standards-compliant browser (this means pretty much every browser _except_ MSIE). Of course, a lot of "professional web developers" wouldn't know legal XHTML / CSS if it shot up their ass.
then stop reading slashdot... geez, what easier solution do you need?
try to validate the www.msn.co.il (it's the israeli portal),
... and... you'll get 1338 errors (on 1 page!!!)
I think it tells a lot about this 1337 (+1) company
Then again, my Mozilla's minimum font size is usually set to 16 or 18. If I'd let websites have their way, I'd end up with on-screen text that's even smaller than printed text. Then those "clean" sans-serif fonts might indeed work better thanks to greater clarity at microscopic sizes. Seems absurd to me, though - shouldn't the medium you're farther away from and that has the lower resolution use larger fonts? Ohwell.
What a great answer from this Opera Software's executive. I think we all know enough about this subject, but replies like this, from important executives, are helping everybody realize what Microsoft is doing.
Robert Scoble, Microsoft's chief humanising officer has posted a response to Hakon's letter.
Apparently, they are working hard to fix it in IIS 7.0 and the next version of ASP.NET.
Apparently.
Ziga
Thing about Word 97 is that it was unwilling to save in word 5/95 format. This is something that MS refused to fix for the better part of a year.
In the meantime, any company that bought a new PC was only offered word 97 for the new machine. This meant that, the first time they saved a document that needed to be read anywhere else in the company, all recipients needed to buy the '97 version to read it (much less to edit it). You could save your document in RTF format, but the '97 RTF format was sadly broken.... Back to plan A.
MS did, in time, release an official plugin that allowed you to save in word'95 format (as long as you were willing to work your way thru the warning messages), but I don't believe that it was possible to set '95 as the default save format, so -- sooner or later you'd accidently just 'save', and the next thing you know, your recipients can't read your document.
The end result of this is that MS raked in Billions of dollars in spurious sales by forcing people to abandon all older versions of their word processors. This is part of the way that they cemented their monopoly on the office software market.
_____
Then of course, there's the NT filesystem that is sorely short on public documentation, and almost impossible to figure out. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is entirely uninterested in letting others interoperate with it. In fact, I'm guessing that they put in some strange land-mines just to piss off people trying to use it other than from inside of the most recent versions of Windows.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
it appears they misspelt "points out" as "claims"
While I wouldn't know about the 5x speed boost claim, there is a book on the undocumented NT/2000 native API.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Supports Windows NT/XP/2K/Pocket PC. Now that's interoperability! NOT!
It's like C# being multiplatform... multiple windows platforms...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
What are you doing?
I would love it if my GF could check her Hotmail through Firefox rather than me firing up IE.
I do the same thing. (force every site to use Georgia)
Georgia rules!
Tit for tat dept ?
Try the "no shit sherlock" dept.
Slightly different. Opera distributes-at their cost- a free version that is ad supported, no cost to the end user other than a small bar at the top with some ads, and the end user also has a couple of choices on how to deal with the ads,it's up to them. Microsoft does not offer a similar set of choices, they have paid for versions, and paid for versions, either the end user directly buys their software, or indirectly as part of a bundle when they purchase a computer. Either way the end users pay money for it.
Picky point, sure it is, but it's still there. Yes, both companies want to make money, just one is willing to cut their customers serious slack on how that happens, and in many cases the end users never transfer funds to Opera, yet still get the product.
What does Opera know about operability?
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/12/1 740202
What are you guys whining about? Microsoft is totally interoperable!
Microsoft Windows XP is compatible with a huge number of OSes: it will play nice almost 90% of the time with any Microsoft Windows 2000 installation and even works with some Microsoft Windows NT, ME, 98 and 95 installations if you are very careful about your configuration.
And who's complaining about Microsoft's Office suite compatibility? Heck, documents written in Microsoft Office 2003 can be read (on a good day) with versions of Microsoft Office running back at least 3 years. If you are extremely careful it can even be made to work with most text editors.
I agree with the OP that it's a shame Microsoft stopped pushing its embedded fonts technology (though it does still work). I also think it's a shame that the W3 didn't approve the standard.
But what is stopping Opera or Mozilla from implementing its own truetype embedded font technology? I just don't understand it at all. Fonts already have a protection bit for copyright enforcement. It's not like it will install a virus on your computer -- it's more akin to a cookie.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people turning to Flash alternatives just to get the friggin' right fonts to display on their computer.
my cock every night. You do you think I'm going to want around? Georgia can jump off a cliff as far as I'm concerned.
Remind me not to hire you to design a website
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I'm working on my first .Net project at work, where I have to provide compatible HTML. We spent three hours figuring out all the oddball stuff .Net does to HTML, then I spent a day writing up documentation on it. During the documentation review, we opened a demo page in Mozilla instead of IE, and all the Panel-control-created div tags were replaced with table sets. Imagine our surprise.
As we started digging, we started finding lots more stuff like this; for example, tables get a style of "border-collapse: collapsed" by default in IE, which is a tag that IE uses to tighen up table structures (into non-standard measurements) while other browsers ignore the tag. There's no reason for this tag to be there, except to guarantee that tables will look different in IE as compared to other browsers.
The punch line, of course, is that this "feature" can't be turned off. So now we either have to burn a lot of extra effort to validate multiple sets of rendered HTML, or we have to give up alternative-browser compatibility -- which I am sure was the point in the first place.
(few things microsoftie make me seethe, but this one does...)
Despite any "warnings" from either hotmail or gmail, Netscape 6.23 works like a charm in both. I keep it handy for this very reason. Can't say the same about Netscape 7.0x for some odd reason, though.
Chuck Bigelow deserves a medal for crafting Lucida and making it freely available.
Verdana sort of looks ok and Georgia is damn ugly IMO, I find myself using "Lucida Sans Unicode, Ludica Grande" these days as they work on both Windoze and Macs out of the box and look better than anything else.
Course if it iwas up to me I'd use Arnold Bocklin everywhere. Now you know why it's not up to me.
Need Mercedes parts ?
At least on all versions of Windows prior to XP, IE can be removed for free. The pay version can get rid of it on XP. Not that I'd ever want to pay for XP just to pay again to get rid of their poor excuse for a "browser."
Yeah, I remember the Office 95/97 landmine. Got hit by the PPT format cutover about that point to. While revising slides. At the conference. And found I couldn't open my presentation any more.....
Microsoft also created a set of read-only tools for Word, PPT, and Excel. Except....
Under Linux, if you've got a document reader, spurious typing is generally ignored. Microsoft's solution? A fscking popup window telling you "Sorry, you can't edit this document" (or words to the effect). For someone trained to use the spacebar to scroll through docs, absolutely maddening.
less with LESSPIPE is my preferred viewer today. In fact, there's cool hacks to support Word and Excel within mutt -- all in cosole. Hrm. Not sure about PPT, but strings works remarkably well (no kidding).
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I can't sign in in firefox until I open IExplorer and attempt to sign in. It rejects me, and then when I try again in firefox its already 'half-signed ' in: I just need to supply the password in the re-login page. Weird.
I'm getting rid of the account because its not even worth using for an internet forum signup account.
You've got to be kidding.
Since when is it "dirty" to tell the truth?
Bill? Is that you?
... at a previous job in the late 90s, Office 95 was our standard. That was, until one of the managers "leaked" a copy of Office 97 without IT's approval. Sure enough, any spreadsheet he edited on the shared drives on the network were suddenly inaccessible to everyone else in the company. Yep, you guessed it. We eventually had to "upgrade" everyone to 97. However, some of our clients still used 95 as their standard. So we had to set up a dedicated PC with Office 95 for everyone to use to mail docs and spreadsheets to the clients. Boy, was that a mess....
Zapf Dingbats rulez!
Verdana is a very wide font. It is also bigger than other fonts at the same font size.
h tml
For the problems resulting, see http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.
Yeah, the site above looks quite "oldstyle", but is right nevertheless.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I really like the habit people have of specifying Windows-only (or only available by special download) fonts in web pages. It greatly improves the legibility of the page for me, because it means that the browser ignores it entirely and uses the default font, rather than picking a font that only looks good on some web designer's screen. The page about what's wrong with Verdana pleased me greatly, because all of the samples were rendered beautifully in Lucidux Serif. The samples of what happens if you use 85% size and the font isn't available were a bit smaller, but still perfectly legible. The only thing that looked ugly was the screenshot clip of what the named fonts looked like to the author of the page.
I still prefer X's "misc-fixed" for terminal windows at the particular size I use, but for non-terminal things, Lucidux has everything that ever gets specified by name on the web beat.
This is surprising? It no shock that Microsoft has poor interoperability, if this wasn't the case their competitors probably would have superceeded them along time ago with cheaper, more secure, and completely compatable software.
Opera is the only company I know that is still trying to charge for their browser or make people look at ads.
Heh...I can almost believe it. You hear "Microsoft" on Slashdot like you hear "Bush" or "the president said today..." on the damn news.
Well MSN definitely has poor interOPERAbility. Remember the Swedish Chef browser?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The parts of an HTML document that describe structure are called elements. Not tags. Tags are simply the bits at the beginning (and usually end) of elements.
Hearing you refer to them as "tags" is like somebody saying that they have a Person curly brace in their Java source code when they mean they have a Person class.
border-collapse is not a tag either. It's a property. CSS doesn't have tags. What you said was like somebody talking about the "wheels" on a boat when they meant "propeller".
Please, to avoid looking stupid and annoying people in the process, just learn that not everything remotely associated with the WWW is called a "tag", and use the right terminology.
While proclaiming your aesthetic wisdom, you committed some elementary sins yourself. You mixed and matched CAPS, bold, BOLDCAPS, and triple exlamation marks (!!!) with no clear underlying reason.
You tempt me to ignore your other style advice if you can't even choose and use a simple emphasis style consistently.
You claim to support interoperability. Why then, on many of your web pages, is the text approximately 1 mm tall?
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
"Oprah Claims Microsoft Has Poor Interoperability..."
Honestly, I was confused for a second there.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Only old people in Korea bash Microsoft.
Look, I'm a big fan of the concept behind CSS, but it completely fucking sucks and IE has done everyone a service by allowing people to make web pages that look the way they want them to, rather than tying them to a standard that's been written with contradictory ideals in mind. Microsoft picked one: make it possible to make things that look however you want on their specific browser. There's nothing evil about letting people make pages that look good, even if it does shut out people who choose to work for openness and ease of implimentation instead of actually trying to let people display what they want.
I expect CSS will be truely wonderful by the time version 4 or 5 comes around, but in the mean time, you dont get to complain when the big companies refuse to impliment that thing you made up. If MS thought 100% correct CSS implimentation would make their product work better, they would do it. I expect they will do it in the future, but simply making something "open" doesnt mean "and everyone who doesnt think it's the best way to do something is evil and being anti-competative"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Great claim Opera! What's next, you going to claim cigarettes cause lung canser?
"emerge corefonts" works fine for me.
/usr/share/fonts/corefonts is in your xorg.conf FontPath and you're good to go ... whether Microsoft likes it or not.
Just make sure
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Let's make a web browser and say that other web browsers are better so don't use ours!
this is not news, this is standard practice for every project ever. including ones without a profit inscentive.
The only things that I have received from microsoft that are of any benefit? Their informative advertisements I constantly get spammed for big tits and big cocks in my paid for hotmail account.WOOHOO!!!!! . /me strokes 12 inches and pinches nipples on new 44dd chi-chi's
I now have more to play with. Thanx AOL
Oooops, I meant microsoft.
By default,
For rendering pages, tou have some good amount of control over what
There are plenty of examples of this on the web (including this one at 4Guys). I've gotten the same code to be generated for all modern browsers (IE, Safari, Mozilla, Firefox, etc) with just a little bit of work.
Border-Collapse is part of the CSS2 spec. You can't easily get rid of
Also, avoid the built-in form-validation controls like the plauge as they only work acceptably with IE. Fortunately, there are many options out there that are much, much better and compatible with all modern browsers (such as Paul Glavich's awesome, free, OS, DOM Validators). And, as with other controls, you also have the ability to roll your own.
With a strict doctype and, a modified web.config file and replacement form validators, you can do a lot to making your
Essentially what you're saying is..
.NET isn't much worse than hand-rolling HTML. Cool huh?"
"If you're willing to do a lot of extra work,
You have to admit that they're pretty good at some things
Like making money, getting away with breaking the law, and software installs are a breeze in windows, just browse the web for a while and software just installs itself without any help.
It looks like MSN's markup is more valid then Slashdot's is.
Very good point. And notice that you are validating MSN as XHTML 1.0 Strict, a strict XML format, and Slashdot as HTML 3.2 the most forgiving and liberal version there is... I have written about it countless times. Slashdot is constantly pro-standards and it can't even get right the only standard that it needs to respect -- HTML. In effect Firefox had to add non-standard tweaks specifically to render Slashdot correctly! Result? Standard HTML don't look like it should in Firefox any more... I wrote about it many times, asked editors to fix it, offered my help for free. And they fixed it. Their solution was blocking the W3C validator!
CSS Property Compatibility Chart
I'm hooked on phonics. Any font will do.
Fuck you, Verdana Rules
What a great name for a CEO.
Did you read my post? I said with a little bit of work. It isn't a lot of extra work by a longshot
This was the best thing I've read here all day
when win2000 came out I thought cool, I could authenticate everything against an 'free' product, even active directory. "sorry... we at ms believe in interoperability with only ourselves... who else is there?"
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
Opera is a cool browser, but the company is completely lame. I first installed Opera when it was in the 3.x range. I started using it full time when it reached 5.11. Opera had a chance back in 2002 to be the browser du jour that Firefox is today. The completely blew it!
.7 when Opera 7.5 and Gmail came out. I very rarely user Opera since Firefox .7.
I installed Phoenix and Firebird during the early days, and then installed FireFox
Opera doesn't give a damn about their customers. Opera is VERY DIFFICULT to upgrade. You have to uninstall and reinstall. Every new release they tweak the UI. Fine, great, they want to make it better. But most users are already familiar with the old UI and the do NOT want to learn a new UI. I gave up on Opera 7.5 because of the down arrows on the Personal Bar! They take up space and are annoying and completely useless. I don't think Opera has ANY users who don't already know that clicking on a folder icon on the Personal Bar drops down a list of bookmarks!
It can take hours to get Opera to work like the previous version used to. You have to locate a custom skin that mimics the old behavior. Opera refuses to provide this in their downloads. This is a perfect example of their lack of marketing and their indifference to the customer. It is funny/sad that while FireFox has NO real marketing they do a better job than Opera. What a wasted opportunity. The other shame is that nobody inside Opera will ever see this rant.
Opera is a better browser and I should use it but for the reasons above I refuse. Opera IS faster than FireFox! In Opera when you press the back button the browser just goes back without touching the Internet. To date I have not figured out what extension to download to mimic this feature in FireFox, but I am sure it will come along eventually. With broadband I will put up with FireFox's nasty habit of hindering the back button.
The other Achilles heal of Opera is their lack of support for DHTML. Opera should needs to work with Gmail or it will die and Google Maps or it will die. Aside from DHTML, Opera does a pretty good job, and they even work on some sites where FireFox will not work. But those are few and far between. FireFox feels more like IE8. Opera feels like something else completely.
I have never used IE. I only use it to check my own web page designs. Microsoft is rotten to the core and IE is nothing more than a huge security hole.
Hey, thanks for this -- I'm forwarding your suggestions to the development team. I know that, at the very least, they weren't aware of the Machine.Config options for Browsercaps.
:)
Imagine that -- getting a useful and prompt answer to a legitimate question on SlashDot!