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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.
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!
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."
That is simply not true. From a customer perspective, I would rather have one good proprietary solution that serves my needs than a dozen mediocre but interoperable ones. I only need one at once!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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 ^_^
"thats why proprietary software is bad. there is no way for the consumer to benefit from the software."
It's also why ambiguous standards are bad. Anybody else read the little blurb a few years ago about how no browser (Netscape, IE, etc....) passed the standards test completely?
"Derp de derp."
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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...
Lucida Grande is the new Verdana.
Right... until one day your favourite proprietor goes out of business or simply decides there's not enough money to be made on your piece of software. Soon after you're going to need to move your data to some other piece of software because it has this new killer feature. That day you will start wishing you opted for something just a little more interoperable.
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...
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.
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?
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 - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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.
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.
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...)
Any generalization is simply not true.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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 ?
>From a customer perspective, I would rather have one good proprietary solution that serves my needs than a dozen mediocre but interoperable ones.
:)
Ah, but what you'd REALLY prefer (as would we all) is one good solution that serves my needs, but can interoperate with a dozen mediocre ones in case the good solution becomes mediocre or a mediocre solution becomes great in the future. Standards, baby.
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?
fact that it runs in more platform any other browser to date?
You've got to be kidding.
Since when is it "dirty" to tell the truth?
Bill? Is that you?
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.
Well MSN definitely has poor interOPERAbility. Remember the Swedish Chef browser?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
One word:
diversify.
(now apply it to countries, sectors....)
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Any reason to worry yet?
/., which means your judgement is seriously impaired. You are as likely to get sound financial advice here as you are to be told to invest your money in an initiative to "Open Source" Star Trek Enterprise so it can be owned by the community. Just think of the returns! You'll have that beowulf cluster in no time.
Yes, there is a huge reason to be concerned. You're asking for financial advice on
Yes, would *prefer*. However, you'll have to ignore the short (and probably the mid) term cost/benefits - interoperability is going to require the (at least) partial implementation of an irrelevent feature set. This goes, in short or medium terms, against the needs of the market as that market becomes more vertical.
I'm admin at a *very* niche company, and our software needs are quite complex. In the US, there are exactly 56 companies that do what we do, typically one per state (sometimes two or three per state, and in a couple cases, 3 to 5 states per company). 56 customers, how many software vendors will that market support? Currently, the answer is five. The sofware we use is extremely customized to suit the various state and regional laws, and "interoperability" with other vendors, or even other states who share our vendor, would be a bloated nightmare.
It may seem like an irrelevent example, but it is one boundary of the general case. Interoperability is nice, but as the market becomes more vertical, interop becomes less relevent and a helluvalot more expensive. For bullshit cookie-cutter apps? Sure. But not for real stuff, it isn't worth the development costs, and it sure as hell isn't worth the lifecycle costs. I'll never need (I hope) the firmware in my car to "interoperate" with the firmware in my dishwasher, nor do I want to need to maintain that interoperability.
Then again, for bullshit apps, "prefer" is generally correct. The more bullshit the application, interop becomes less of a perference, and more of a demand - after all, the software becomes more of an expendable/replaceable commodity as the bullshit factor increases.
Have fun,
SBB
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
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.
Assuming the proprietary software I chose was good (as I specified in my original statement) why is this a problem at all? If there was one good piece of proprietary software in the market and everything else was mediocre, how did the good software proprietor just die out and one of the mediocre ones suddenly become better than what I've already got?
Of course we'd all like a choice of perfectly inter-operable good software in a competitive market in an ideal world; that's obvious. However, in the real world, having something that actually does the job you need well is better than having many things that only do a mediocre version, no matter how interoperable they may be.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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
I didn't say having only one solution will be best, I said having one good solution was better than a choice between many mediocre ones. You are attacking a straw man.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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
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
You know, there are people for whom interoperability doesn't exactly mean Wibdows working well (to an extent) with another Windows. Interoperability would mean being able to handle widely used file formats (others than theirs that is), widely used file systems, etc. Almost every and each OS out there can show levels of interoperability which is superior to Windows' one way or the other.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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.
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?
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!
Clever signature text goes here.
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