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Opera Lays Down Acid2 Challenge
sebFlyte writes "The CTO of Opera has proposed a new version of the acid test for browser compatibility, and has challenged Microsoft to make IE7 a browser worth having that will do the Web good. He's asked to help from Web designers the world over to build a new page for Microsoft to test IE7 with to make sure it does everything Web designers want it to. "
Has anyone (even Opera) managed to create a browser that does what all the web designers want it to do? Does the web designer community have a consensus of what they want the browsers to do?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
MS has never shown the initiative to make things compliant why should any developers waste precious time coding a page for MS to balk at when there are other browsers out there? Firefox is slowly but surely gaining market share. I say Good Riddance to IE and make room for the new guys. Why HELP MS strenthen their hold?
Standards compliance is for companies that don't have 90% or more of a market.
Next!
This is brilliant!! Appear to be helpful, but really just point out shortcomings and bugs in your competitor's product, all the while gaining visibility and recognition in the community. I really must remember to do this sometime.
Is anybody actually caring about IE at this point?
Why would anyone care about the experience of 90% (or whatever) of the site's users?
Microsoft would more than likely simply ignore the challenge completely. What do they have to gain (at this point) from actually producing a standards-compliant browser?
Now, perhaps if FireFox continues to chew up the percentages of web browser usage, they might try it for PR purposes, but that's hardly an issue at the moment. Microsoft is more of an in-the-moment company (unless you're speaking of up-and-coming products, where they announce competing programs years before they actually plan to implement the changes).
Question: Is Opera looking for market? Basing your business model on selling a web browser is not going to make it. Note to Opera: Application Platform. Or die.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Correct. However, Opera is falling behind in mindshare now that FireFox has all the buzz. So the best thing for Opera to do is to put up a standards challenge to Microsoft.
That accomplishes two things: (1) some free PR for Opera, and (2) if anyone really follows through with it, it is far easier for Opera to adapt to the results than Microsoft. Opera has only a miniscule installed base that it needs to stay compatible with.
And let's not be smug about everyone but Microsoft following standards. The company I used to work for had a file-upload javascript that worked with Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and IE, but it didn't work with Safari and we had to specially recode the script just to accomodate that Safari quirk.
It would be nice if every page rendered the same way on every browser, but let's be real. There will still be millions and millions of people who are slow to upgrade. Even if the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, Safari, and IE join hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya, you're still going to have to test your sites on Netscape 4.7, IE 5, etc. or you're going to have issues with the 30-40% of the market who hasn't upgraded yet.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Open Source geeks challenged M$ to make windows the most secure OS.
US challenged China to be most democratic country
blah blah
Mod me down as troll, but what makes anyone think M$ cares about a challenge from a competitor?!
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
Ha, I was thinking the exact same thing.
Plus it crashes all the time and costs twice what it should ($40 for a freakin web browser?! what's next, a $40 terminal emulator?).
Opera is an increasingly marginalized player in the browser market. The only thing Opera can expect to get out of this is a little PR that only delays the inevitable for them (non-player).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
FWIW last time I checked Opera was pretty much tied with Firefox for being standards complaint. Among browsers that normal human use that's saying a lot.
Based on that I don't see what's laughable.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Most people are not web designers.
Most people are not familiar with the nuances of CSS2.
Most people are not aware of the various published spec's from W3.
Most people are users.
Most users use IE.
Most people percieve "what the web can do" to be what they've experienced as "what IE can do."
Most people don't know what they're missing.
"What Microsoft provides" is already the de facto standard for the web. And most designers are resigned to living with this--nobody puts out CSS2 elements that IE does NOT support on production pages.
There's zero pressure on Microsoft for standards compliance. Most people can barely comprehend the technical nuance of what the weberati say is "noncompliant," let alone be up in arms about it.
Even though it sounds a little tinfoil-hattish, the fact that a non-standards compliant web browser dominates the market might have a whole heck of a lot to do with all those web pages that don't follow standards, and rather choose to be compatible with IE.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Nothing dumb about it. Micrsoft has thumbed their nose at standards for the past 10 years, and the mess that is web standards is due mostly in part to the way IE (with > 90% marketshare) fails to adhere to those standards. Oh, and btw, if you haven't forgotten: Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in more than one continent. That means it's illegal for them to do shit like engineered lack of interoperability.
But some people keep apologizing for them (sigh).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Microsoft is constantly competing with itself, not others. It needs people to buy the latest versions of its OS and applications (office) to keep revenues coming in.
:)
As a result, it chooses to do things like release the XP2 firewall but not offer it for win2k - to push people towards newer versions, despite win2k being in mainstream support.
Recently, they've been forced by the HUGE number of corporate customers to offer WinFS as an option for XP as well as future versions of the OS. Why? Because corporate customers don't run bleeding edge software.
So what they need is a huge, wonderful carrot that will lead customers to the latest version. We arent talking about Dear Old Aunt Sally - she doesn't buy new versions of OS's. She buys a computer, and it comes with it.
We are talking about corporate customers. They didn't buy the concept that WinFS couldn't work on XP, but Microsoft has been shouting (even swearing in court) that the browser is part of the OS.
As a result, MS could very easily make IE7 only available on longhorn. As such, it's an opportunity for them to make it a selling point - a carrot.
To make the carrot more attractive, they need to make it do as many things RIGHT as possible. If IE7 truly supported css2, png transparency, javascript, and so on, WEBDESIGNERS would start drawing the line at older versions of IE - doing Microsoft's selling for them!
Businesses, portals, and the list goes on - anywhere that wants to make a truly compelling site without a million css box model hacks would start suggesting users use IE7, and before long, REQUIRING IE7.
Microsoft has every reason in the world to kick major standards-ass with IE7, but unfortunately, they have a track record of not doing it.
Here's hoping that their business savy is more powerful than their laziness.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Browsers shouldn't render broken HTML.
Compilers shouldn't compile broken code.
If, as a programmer, you think that a compiler is better because it will compile buggy code without errors then god help you.
The same applies to web design. Buggy HTML might render OK as just HTML, but once you start adding CSS into the equation (and IE has its OWN little array of bugs here) then it can start causing severely bizarre behavior.
> Frankly, if IE handled the 'Box Model' correctly, for css....it would be a HUGE improvement
It does, IF you use the strict DTD. Anything else goes into "quirks" (i.e. broken) mode. The parts that are still broken are the parts that are pretty ambiguous to begin with.
In short, no.
Even if someone makes a browser that does everything designers AND developers want it to, it still won't do any good to those of us stuck supporting browsers that DON'T do all of it. The entire world is unlikely to switch instantly to the new wonder browser, leaving us to support legacy products.
Where I work our top tier browser/OS matrix is:
Win 98 - XP; IE5>, Mozilla 1.3>, Firefox 1>, Netscape 6.2>
Linux; Mozilla 1.3>, Firefox 1>, Netscape 6.2>
Mac OSX; Safari, IE 5.3>, Mozilla 1.3>, Firefox 1>, Netscape 6.2>
This is a nightmare to build, even worse to QA. Opera, ironically enough, is not in our top tier BECAUSE it rendered pages differently enough from the other browsers- even though we were authoring XHTML 1.0 trans and CSS2 compliant- that it got shunted to a lower tier of support.
If you pick any of those, IE would be the worst example, you can get different implementations between versions of how a page is supposed to render.
I think this is why a large portion of the pages on the Web are authored they way they are- the broadest reach for the narrowest buck.
Mac isn't the only brand with a cult. Build the world's best browser and you'll still have legions of people SWEARING that their choice in browser is the best, and pages that look like shit in it are due to the page not being written correctly rather than the browser's render engine using its own interpretation of WHAT the page is SUPPOSED to look like
On the cynical side, I think a browser that did everything that Web designers wanted might come out something like Homer's car.
Or Opera.
R(k)
The thing I don't get is why not use CSS? I'd have thought the bandwidth saving alone would be reason enough, let alone cleaning up all the drunken formatting.
I see it all the time with FF1.0.1 (with or without extensions). And when it happens, you CANT ignore it because the page is unreadable... But the fix is quick... change text size. I just hold CTRL and bounce my scroll-whell forward and back.. It has gotten to the point that I don't even think about it, it is just reflex.
/. story about bad programming, take a second and do a view source.. :)
Next time you are reading a
Jorgie
I sense a chicken-and-egg coming along here.
The solution is obviously starting to show here, write sites to the standard and browsers will follow.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?