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Opera to Stop Spoofing User Agent as IE
Anonymous reader writes "The Opera browser will stop spoofing its User Agent (UA) as Internet Explorer. Currently Opera, by default, spoofs its UA to identify itself as Internet Explorer. This is seen, by some, as a move that will bring up Opera's usage stats a bit higher, and will hopefully make webmasters, who develop IE centric sites, more aware of Opera."
They're dammed if they do (users getting blocked from sites they would otherwise be perfectly able to access with Opera) and dammed if they don't (on the usage stats).
Can't they just stick the word "Opera" somewhere in the user agent string, but still make like they're IE?
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Cheating? About what??
n speed [howtocreate.co.uk]
:)
Trying to compete against something given away FREELY as FireFox is (which is incredibly TOUGH to compete with)???
Some facts anyone here is welcome to dispute about FireFox vs. Opera (& vice-a-versa):
Opera: It's THE "good stuff"!
IMO, but also solely based on facts, for a triumvirate of VERY SOLID reasons vs. IE, &/or FireFox:
----
1.) It wins in speed, everytime, in the online tests/analysis I have seen out there for years now at numerous sites in most ALL categories run in said tests!
E.G.-> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#wi
SUMMARY:
"So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice. However, it is still not as fast as Opera, and Opera also offers a high level of standards support, security and features.
On Linux, Konqueror is the fastest for starting and viewing basic pages on KDE, but as soon as script or images are involved, or you want to use the back or forward buttons, or if you use Gnome, Opera is a faster choice, even though on KDE it will take a few seconds longer to start. Mozilla and Firefox give an overall good performance, but their script, cache handling and image-based page speed still cannot compare with Opera.
On Mac OS X, Opera and Safari are both very fast, with Safari 2 being faster at starting and rendering CSS, but with Opera still being distinguishably faster for rendering tables, scripting and history (especially compared with the much slower Safari 1.2). Camino is fast to start, but then it joins its sisters Mozilla and Firefox further down the list. Neither Mozilla, Firefox nor IE perform very well on Mac, being generally slower than on other operating systems"
(On the Windows Platform, in THAT test alone, it took 4 of 7 total categories... nuff said on that account! Considering 90% of the world's computers run Windows based Os' (hopefully Windows NT-based ones by now)? That's saying a HELL of a LOT!)
Opera (as you may read for yourselves above) even did great on the OTHER platforms too!
----
2.) Opera is definitely the "least attacked/most secure" of the "big 3" browers'-wise (IE, FireFox/Mozilla/Opera) out there...
----
3.) It is MASSSIVELY "multi-platform" & afaik? NOT just restricted to PC's either - there is a large body of handhelds out there which use Opera as their browser tool such as the Symbian 60 series handphone & most all OS' (including FreeBSD, Linux, etc. & more + Windows).
*
So, unless somebody can show us otherwise here, I will stick by those statements!
(They ARE why I like Opera better than the others in the "big 3" of web-browsers & I am mostly a "Pro-Win32" guy & admit it... though I like & finally respect Linux 2.6x core with KDE on the desktop, & really do respect what MacOS X has become as well!)
APK
P.S.=> The ONLY thing FireFox has (and don't get me wrong, I like FireFox, & FAR better than IE 6.x) over Opera?
Is that FireFox is FREEBIE-WARE!
However, some of its freeware model unfortunately (as evidenced by the recent XUL 3rd party addons like GreaseMonkey having to be fixed for security holes) may jeopardize it as did ActiveX DLL extensions to IE!
(E.G.-> ActiveX DLL extensions to IE were initially meant to be for "the good", but one bad apple(s) were all it took to make this featureset for IE a detriment rather than an asset)...
BOTTOM-LINE - Compared head-to-head/mano-a-mano, you see the results above as proofs, Opera's just the best! apk
I would think a better way to combat the "sites that target opera users" problem would be to have a big button next to "refresh" that says "if the page looks weird click here!"
In that case, the page would refresh and the browser would lie to the webserver about what browser it is for the remainder of that session on that domain.
Best of luck to Opera though. Hopefully there aren't so many sites that will screw the browser over.
Our stats package can supposedly detect Opera's spoofed UA, and I'm still seeing numbers like 0.2%.
Despite my username, right now IE5/Macintosh is the bane of my existance as it is still over the magic 1.0% line.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
This is seen, by some, as a move that will bring up Opera's usage stats a bit higher
...will hopefully make webmasters, who develop IE centric sites, more aware of Opera. :P
Bring up the usage stats, or maybe, thanks to the websites that don't even serve you if you're not using IE, bring down the usage itself? (Hopefully not the latter!)
More aware of the standards, you mean.
Anyway, Opera has much fewer users than Firefox, so I think any difference that Opera makes will be much less than what Firefox would.... still, it's a good thing; I wonder if Opera users weren't ashamed all this while to be identified as IE users?
Opera has the option to identify itself as Opera, Mozilla, and IE. IE is by default, for some reason which I don't know (anyone care to explain?) why. Anyone using Opera would probably already be savvy enough to change those settings if they wanted too. But some people are just too lazy, and since there's no real benefit to it, they just leave it as is. :-) Not significantly though, but it's a step in the right direction.
Expect IE's market share to drop a bit, and for Opera's to go up.
It's useful, but there's no reason why someone else's browser should be set by default. Don't know, I just never really understood why they did that to begin with.
All-in-all, my point was, that although this is a good thing for the numbers, it's not something largely significant.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Its about time in fairness, when people argue that some sites don't work when its set to Opera surely the same argument can be made for Firefox.
Its important that sites see realistic stats of what people are using.
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
I tried to read the linked article with the new Opera release, but it said it only supports IE ...
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
Opera has a quick-change menu; hit F12 and you can select between opera/mozilla/IE - Although afaik it shows as IE/opera with the opera stats. It'll be nice to see what the usage stats turn out like though; personally opera does everything I want better than any of the others. Firefox is clunky by comparison, and I love the complete customisation of opera. Not to mention decent tabbed browsing (firefox tabbed browsing is horrible)
I'm guessing that first anon. coward in this thread is the exception?
Spoofing user agent was lame to begin with. There's no standard called MSIE.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
It doesn't. It does have an Ad-bar on the free version. But it's well worth the money. And it goes away as soon as you register. It's a lot more low-in-fat than most other browsers around. Even more so than Firefox.
*ducks*
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
It's about time that Opera starts showing up in the stats instead of inflating Internet Explorer's market share. If MSIE's share drops enough, people will start making sites that take other browsers into account.
With MS warning everyone to update the browser sniffing libs for the IE7 release, now is the time to make changes for those who are trying to do something where the client browser gets funky with specific HTML coding.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As a test Eric disabled the Opera-validation code, changed Opera to properly identify itself and ran the default S5 slideshow...
So is it possible that Opera took this as a slap in the face and maybe are starting to change their opinion of their place in the world, i.e. "if I can't easily detect your browser I can't begin to fix my code"? Are they trying to stand up against the PR machine that Firefox has behind it to say that they're still in the running, and maybe also make life easier for web developers who'll finally be able to easily identify their browser?
No matter what the reasons, its a good decision IMHO.
Damien
I haven't touched Opera since I switched to Firefox a year ago, but one feature I miss is Opera's ability to advertise itself as IE 5!
I thought Opera could render IE-only code properly, for the sake of convenience, but at the same time be standards compliant? I don't know, not sure. I just thought that was the case. Anyone care to share some knowledge? :-)
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
The browser name in the browser should be configurable. You end up with browser nazi sites like this one run by an anti-IE-nazi that put up nasty messages based on your browser. The ability to change the browser name could help get around this type of bad web site design.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
All you have to do is press 'F12' to see the menu with the options to change between Mozilla/Opera/Internet Explorer. Anyone that uses a new browser would most-likely play around with all the options to get accustomed to the interface. It's not a menu that would go undetected. "Quick Preferences" is a bit attention grabbing as well. ;-)
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
IE usage statistics will be down by two.
This would be important if everyone had slow computers. I remember using Opera way back on when I had a computer that needed a speed bost over IE/Netscape. That was five years ago. But Firefox's performance is more than adequate on every system I used, e.g. Firefox and IE can load pages faster than they can downloads them. Opera may, however, provide a benefit on an old 266MHz system I have, so I plan on trying it out.
2.) Opera is definitely the "least attacked/most secure" of the "big 3" browers'-wise (IE, FireFox/Mozilla/Opera) out there...
I don't see this as an issue. With Firefox, and what I've seen of IE6 SP2, it's not easy to install addons (ActiveX, XPIs.) Furthermore, the additional functionality that most extensions provide is worth the possible (yet unlikely) security issues.
3.) It is MASSSIVELY "multi-platform" & afaik? NOT just restricted to PC's either - there is a large body of handhelds out there which use Opera as their browser tool such as the Symbian 60 series handphone & most all OS' (including FreeBSD, Linux, etc. & more + Windows).
Firefox is available on FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows. Windows and Palm OS handhelds both can have NetFront, an excellent mobile browser, and Windows also has Pocket Internet Explorer. Opera is basically the best choice for Symbian.
However, some of its freeware model unfortunately (as evidenced by the recent XUL 3rd party addons like GreaseMonkey having to be fixed for security holes) may jeopardize it as did ActiveX DLL extensions to IE!
No. These are third party addons that have security holes. I think the additional functionality provided by extensions outweighs by far the *possible* security issues. Opera has no such functionality.
(E.G.-> ActiveX DLL extensions to IE were initially meant to be for "the good", but one bad apple(s) were all it took to make this featureset for IE a detriment rather than an asset)...
The biggest problem with ActiveX is that it became extremely easy for the addons to be installed. Users were easily tricked into installing them, and in some cases, extensions were installed without any user intervention. Both the latest versions of IE and Firefox make installing extensions much more difficult, and, as I said before, the benefit of extensions is well worth the risk.
Designing sites compatible for both major(widely used) browsers (IE and FF) is a pain. And heck AFAIK Opera snubs some css syntax, sheez.
bollocks, one of the reasons I stopped using opera was its propensity to sit there saying something like "request queued
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
I'm assuming you were going for a (Score: +5, Funny), since I just tried it and it did work. :-P And I'm not spoofing as IE, either! Hurray for intercompatible websites! Standards rock!
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
This was kind of silly. About time.
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
by *default* Opera set it's UA to be IE, but any selfware Opera user will change it to be Opera anyway. (I've been using Opera since 4.xx, and I always set mine to Opera). it's not something obscure to set, it's in the quick menu (F12, then set the Identify as Opera/Mozilla/IE)
I personally like Opera a lot more then Mozilla/Firefox, because it's gesture command is much faster and useful then what's availible so far in Mozilla.
... with a wizard to explain why it's a stupid idea that just leads to continued stupidity of web admins ...
i am a soviet space shuttle
"...Why buy the cow when you can get the sex for free? Or something like that, she was all senile and sh*t" - Jason Mewes, Mallrats. Why pay for Opera when, on a modern system, Firefox or a properly configured IE is just as good?
-everphilski-
Thing is, while Opera can render pages "designed for IE" just fine, a lot of sites still refuse to load if the browser's not IE. Nevermind sites like Hotmail, which deliver purposedly broken CSS if the browser detected is Opera - making the page look funny or disabling functionality like purging of the spam mail folder.
Opera makes it easy to change the browser identification (via "Quick preferences"), but still, it can be annoying. Specially for non-technical users.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In what way is pointing out the fact that sites often fail to detect Opera because it spoofs as IE by default whining?
What do you mean by "whining" anyway?
Is it whining if your browser is being discriminated against, and you make a point of that? Were the black slaves in the US "whining" when they wanted freedom? Were those who wanted to abolish slavery "whining"? Yeah, I'm purposedly exaggerating slightly, but surely you get my point.
I don't get the hostility towards Opera. The company pays several people to work with web standards in the W3C. The guy who invented CSS works for the company. Even as tiny as Opera is it has still defined what a modern browser is supposed to do. A lot of the "innovations" in Firefox and IE7 were introduced by Opera. Heck, the company even officially opposes software patents, so it's not even trying to prevent free software from just doing whatever Opera can do (or at least trying). Stuff Mozilla representatives are bragging about in Minimo, such as Small Screen Rendering, spatial navigation, and other things Minimo is supposedly going to revolutionize the mobile browser market with, were invented by Opera, and have been available to users of mobile phones with Opera on them for ages.
Why the constant derogatory comments about Opera on Slashdot? I mean, the first paragraph you wrote was informative, but then you just had to add that second paragraph to make sure that you showed everyone how you really think Opera is lame, "so please don't mod me down for saying something remotely positive about Opera"?
Clever signature text goes here.
There are no binaries for x86_64 of Opera, while I can perfectly run Firefox natively 64 bit. And Gecko will probably become very popular on handhelds too, thanks to Nokia and Minimo.
I must agree, Opera is faster.
/direct/ response to the parent:
/too/ rich a browser. (But I'm amazed that they actually keep it a small download, still)
I am a webdeveloper, and I could never do without firefox with the DOM Inspector and web developer extension, but people tend to say firefox is faster than IE, which to my experience isn't right. Firefox is as slow as IE to start, and often even slower. It's horrifyingly slow at rendering >~50 input elements (which makes it bad for industrial web-based systems, that i develop - that's gecko, not FF), and even on a fast machine, I can see how a window is slowly being build up when a javascript alert appears - first the WM kicks in (same on Windows), then the background is drawn and then the controls, and lastly the focus is drawn on whatever button is default. This is the same for "Save/Open file" dialogs in FF, so basicly this needs optimizing.
But! Apart from that, I love FF. It's simple, it's very configurable and _highly_ extendable, it's open source, and it's free. The developers' philosophy for FF is "I wonder what feature we can do without in the next release?", which is great, since browsers tend to get bloated very fast.
I am so close to going on about features of browsers and what belongs and what doesn't, but i'm already too off-topic...
And in
GreaseMonkey is a great tool. It's so great and so flexible it's beyond limits, which means security is an issue. I disagree that it will ever become a problem the way ActiveX is, since it's not default, and users of greasemonkey are likely to know what they are plunging into when they get the extension.
To summarize:
- IE is an awful browser by all means that hurts progress of the internet
- Opera is a great browser for both speed and standards. However it lacks simplicity and is
- Firefox is a great browser for standards and speed is not a problem. With FF 1.5 we'll get "fast forward" + gecko 1.8 which will help a bit on speed. It's simple, extendable and just works without getting in the way. But it needs some work on the edges, and it's still a very young browser.
There. I said it.
Plus all other goodies, like easy mouse gestures, keeping all open tabs when you open it again, reopening accidentaly closed tabs, and now voice.
I like it myself, but anyone is entitled to their opinion.
Exactly. Only really really braindead software actually misidentifies Opera, so its usage stats will likely not shoot up any significant amount. What will happen though is webpages from 1998 will have to be updated to stop checking for IE vs NS4 with silly useragent checks and start using object existance checks.
Morphing Software
Ok, browsers have User Agent strings. Not all browsers are compatible with every web standard. Websites are becoming more complex (google maps etc.) and taking advantage of newer browsers. So, the question is, do we limit ourselves to the lowest common denominator (among browsers above a certain market share threshold at least), or do we make sites that can change depending on the browser?
If yes, then should the site do browser detection and serve up different pages? If not (and I think if certainly should be "not"), then how do we go about supporting an ever widening gap in browser features? Simply wait for all browsers above our threshold market share to catch up? I suppose that's what we do now, but it's quite annoying to not be able to use some nice features because of that.
Another thought: web apps (vs. installed apps) have the great advantage of being upgradeable with no user action. But eventually we get to the point where upgrades require the user to take action and upgrade her browser... So the web app just serves as a buffer to user action.
Maybe Firefox or IE aren't "just as good" for everyone. Maybe people have different needs. Maybe some people just want a small, fast, feature-rich browser which is secure, and which doesn't require tons of confusing extensions to do various things.
Clever signature text goes here.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.54 [en]
The interesting part is, that if read the HTTP specification, and then interpret accordingly, this string contains three product tokens and one comment. The product tokens are "Mozilla/4.0", "Opera", and "7.54". So actually it does not identify itself as MSIE, neither does IE. The [en] part is syntactically wrong, and really should have been part of a comment. Another mistake is that "Opera" and "7.54" are given as two different product names. Adjusting according to the specification, the user agent string should have been "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera/7.54 (en)"
I'm sure if you count what browsers really identify themselves as, Mozilla will be a clear winner. Mozilla, IE, and FireFox all identify themselves as Mozilla.
If the article had been named "Opera to Stop Spoofing User Agent as Mozilla", it would have been technically correct.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
As for mouse guestures and tab functionality, they can all be provided via extensions. While Opera does do all of that without any additional software -- Opera isn't free. Firefox is. If voice control is an important feature to someone, then maybe Opera would work well for them.
Or are you saying that if a journalist contacts you to ask you a question, your answer to the journalist is automatically "bitching" if it isn't totally positive?
Clever signature text goes here.
So in reality, it's Opera spoofing Mozilla 4.0 spoofing MSIE 6.0 spoofing Opera...
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
If you really can't go for the lcd (which you should try, there's rarely the need for javascript and never, IMHO, for flash. Use server-side scripts to be independent) then check for technology support instead of browser brand. .* - [T=application/xhtml+xml]
for example (as .htaccess on an Apache server) serves xhtml pages (called html no matter what) as application/xhtml+xml to browsers who understand and as text/html (the default) to all others (IE only, AFAIK, but that's not important). You can easily adapt this to your needs, simply check for HTTP_ACCEPT and be done with it.
RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/xhtml\+xml RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml\s*;\s*q=0 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.html$ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} HTTP/1\.1 RewriteRule
On the one mind, I agree it's ghastly that Opera (or Safari, or Firefox, or whatever) has to pretend to be MSIE just to get served certain web pages. Changing the string might inconvenience some users in the short term, but it'll encourage web authors to better support other browsers, which is a Good Thing(tm) in the longer term.
But on the other, aside from stats, why should it have to identify itself at all? What's wrong with something like
or similar? Groucho Marx is quoted as saying that he wouldn't want to belong to any club that'd have him as a member; I feel the same about web sites; if a site has to customise its pages for my browser, whatever that browser is, then I'm suspicious of it.Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
If you fill out a lot of forms, say for buying stuff on the Internet, or for whatever reason, the feature of opera where by it stores your name, and another piece of information you want it to store, and makes it accessible with a simple right click is indispensable. That being said I still use firefox.
What will happen though is webpages from 1998 will have to be updated to stop checking for IE vs NS4 with silly useragent checks
Fat Chance. Anyone who is still doing NS4 detection is probably using a library script that they don't understand. If they aren't checking for Opera now, this change alone won't cause them to start.
and start using object existance checks
I tested a script-heavy site with an old version of Opera. It turns out the DOM objects and methods existed, but didn't do anything. I guess Opera just put them there so that scripts wouldn't error out in a manner that allowed users to see why the site didn't work. I don't know if Opera still does this, I hope not.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Clever signature text goes here.
why not just leave it as IE but change the version number something unique like IE, Blah blah, Version 6.969 .. obviously that was never released by microsoft, so anybody looking for opera stats can find it in their server logs... or does changing the version number screw things up ?
http://www.kuvaton.com/kuvei/ff.jpg
-Palal
Stating facts isn't bitching. Trying to make yourself look good and at the same time blaming others for your problems is bitching, however.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Fwiw, I use Firefox because I can change the UA to whatever I like ... not just three preselected options as with Opera. At the moment I'm using Googlebot's UA just to be a [censored]. But I have about 40 different ones based on my own personal moods. Try that with Opera - oh, you can't. Nevermind.
If website authors would just stick to the standards and web browser authors would stick to the standards these submoronic browser issues would fade faster than a fart in a stiff wind.
https://www.cotse.net/ - which, btw, is functional with EVERY browser including Lynx!
Think of me when you shave your legs...
Just trawling roughly through our logs, we have:
/. :) Let's all pretend it's Konqueror!
0.2% Opera
6.5% Firefox
88.1% IE
Dunno what the other 6% is, and I ain't about to trawl through and investigate for
I know that Mozilla loves to pretend that they came up with all these new things, while most of it was introduced by Opera ages ago. I also know that Mozilla fans love to put down Opera even though Mozilla has relied heavily on Opera for most of its nice features. What's so sad is that Mozilla fans such as yourself are desperate to put down Opera when the fact is that you owe it a lot.
Heck, how many people are paid by MoFo to work at the W3C? Opera has several.
Clever signature text goes here.
Wrong. This is my useragent and I'm using Opera 8.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041110
In Opera 8, you can change ua.ini to make the Opera x.x disappear. Then the site won't be able to detect Opera at all. Look up ua.ini. It's understandable that you don't know this since it's a new feature in Opera 8.
Now that is a great idea. And I'll bet Google wouldn't mind doing it in the least, considering recent history.
--MarkusQ
I don't put Opera down. I in fact use it and find it to be a good browser, although I prefer Mozilla. The problem is that Opera fanatics can't stand criticism, and any time someone makes noises like their browser isn't the best in the world, or the company's employees don't walk on water, they get all defensive and claiming to be unfairly treated by others. That doesn't come across well to people not clearly in the Opera camp.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
We need a new borg icon for the Firefox fanboys. Just like the Billy-G worshippers, any time anyone mentions the virtues of a non-Firefox browser they shit their pants, whip out their willies, and start jacking off at the altar of free software.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: ANY monoculture is a bad monoculture. It doesn't matter what the dominate monoculture is, it's always a bad thing to have a market overwhelmed by a single product. If the fanboys had any brains at all they'd welcome every non-IE browser into the market and encourage the whole passle to compete against one another, rather than blasting everything that might take market share from their precious One True Browswer(TM).
I sincerely hope that Opera and Firefox continue to take IE down a peg. I also sincerely hope that neither Opera nor Firefox ever reaches a dominant market position. It's better for everyone involved if the market for browsers remains in contention among as many products as possible.
Well, better for everyone except the fanatics, of course. But it's about time we stopped listening to their ilk anyway.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I use Opera, I like Opera, and I want to continue using it. It always made me a bit irritated that I HAD to pretend to be using IE to get into certain sites, even though many of them worked fine with Opera. My bank's site included in that list.
I think it's odd that so many people posted on this topic with the attitude "who cares about Opera anyway". This isn't about Opera. It's about standards.
In the IT world, we commit to standards for interoperability. We've all seen the benefits of this, whether we know it or not; open technologies, which are revolutionizing IT, and the internet itself in fact are possible only when the IT community adheres to standards.
Technology improves and consumers win when we follow standards. There are only two reasons I can think of not to: Greediness of the big players to keep hold of marketshare and the laziness of developers.
http://ob-la-blog.blogspot.com/
Look, the difference between Opera and Mozilla is pretty simple. Ready?
Opera = Vi. Mozilla = Emacs. Got it?
Opera = small download, very small memory footprint, a lot of attention paid to making it fast.
Mozilla = as intelligently designed as Opera, but with a different philosophy. Make it flexible as hell by adding a powerful extension language (emacs gets lisp, mozilla gets javascript). Everybody adds interpretted code to it, and eventually it becomes a mail reader, web browser, operating system, and kitchen sink...
So it's really different strokes for different folks. You like minimalism, and have a growing collection of 80's-era hardware? Use Opera. You like lots of features, and maybe enjoy hacking bits of your favorate app-becomes-OS? Use Mozilla.
I get 0.9 % Opera on my tech-oriented site (50K hits per month).
Stop spoofing as Netscape 4?
I'm looking at you Internet Explorer, you Safari and you Konqueror (they don't even tell you the default, but on Ubuntu it spoofs as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;" as well as "(like Gecko)" ).
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
n/t
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Yeah, about five years ago. Then this thing called "Firefox" came along, and somewhere in the last couple versions Opera decided that they were going to out-compete the old Mozilla suite on features and preferences.
Yeah, I believe Opera 5 or 6 didn't really support DOM all that well. That's one of the main reasons the company did a complete rewrite of the rendering engine for version 7.
Opera 7 and 8 are much better with complex sites. The worst part though, is that presto (the new engine) has been out for something approaching 3 years. And people both still talk about Opera's lacking DOM support and use scripts that are either 3 + years old or operate on those assumptions.
Believe me, it's as bad as the people who still put down Windows XP like it crashed like Windows 98.
I can understand if something just came out, but jeezus - 3 years? Get with the program...
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
News at 11:00!!!!
/. and that's saying something.
This is probably the lamest most non-news worthy post I've even encountered on
remember.. its CVS the pharmacie, not the software
I will give them props for at least supporting Firefox and Safari, but not supporting Opera specifically is just...wrong. Has anyone got Opera to render the page anyways? Does it look horrible? Looked fine in Firefox...
Excluding pirated versions, you either paid for it or are running ads. Opera should have a list of paying customers and an accurate log from their ad server. They should be able to publish some realistic numbers, not just downloads.
Yes, this post is a dupe
I'm sawing to bring down the chand.... no I can't do it!
// series. After visiting Xerox, Jobs had new ideas on how to make changes to the Macintosh and Lisa projects.
Opera is like Xerox, and IE is like Microsoft, and Mozilla/Netscape is like Apple. Xerox had it first, Apple made theirs like Xerox but a bit different, and then Microsoft came in and monopolized the market.
For those who say that Apple had it first, the original Macintosh resembled the Cannon Cat and was based on the Apple
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The thing that makes Opera so much faster is the way the back button works. Opera stores pages you visited in memory already rendered, so whenever I go back, it's instant. All the other browsers re-render the page from cache (or worse, fetch stuff off of the server) which is much much slower. This makes a huge difference on both slow and fast computers. However, this has the disadvantage of eating up tons of ram, which is why Opera is considered a memory hog by some. (Firefox also likes to use up a lot of memory, though I don't know what for).
When it comes to rendering a page that hasn't been cached yet, I find most browsers to be about the same when on a fast computer. Opera is fast, Firefox is fast. Heck, even MSIE is fast.
He hasn't updated that site in ages.
I just glanced at the site, and he lists Opera 8.00, which has only been out a few months. So it isn't that old.
So when is IE going to stop identifying itself with a string that starts with "Mozilla"?
I've also sorta wondered: Isn't "Mozilla" a registered trademark? Is it actually legal for IE to identify itself this way? Not that any of us would really want to take Microsoft to court, y'know, but this does seem to be a somewhat dubious practice.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Would it not be possible for the browser to detect it is rendering badly or getting duff stuff from the server and say, "ho hum, I'm dealing with a M$ borganism, lets do that again but this time say I'm IE7"?
threadeds blog
There's still a philosophical difference. Firefox is designed to be endlessly enhanceable by end users. Firefox has shrunk a little bit, but still a large portion of its stock functionality is implemented in javascript (so that its functionality is more easily morphed by add-on user code).
Opera is designed to be a small, solid, fast implementation of most things you need, but it's not inherently designed to be able to morph into an operating system or a kitchen sink. Opera is fundamentally slower moving, because it's implemented in C/assembly, but once Opera catches up with Firefox, its new features are more streamlined.
(no, I'm not confusing Gecko and Firefox. You can bolt a kitchen sink on top of Firefox, so it's a browser + sink)
1. There's value in brevity. If you can get your points across with a minimum of words, you save your reader time.
2. There's value in distilling your thoughts into two or three bullet points. People don't want to work hard to try to figure out what you're saying. People are more likely to read and understrand your viewpoint if you do a little work to make it short and coherent first.
3. You claim to be intelligent. If so, great. You write like you're from the PR department or fromt upper management, like you need to hype up your writing to make it more impressive. If you you have good ideas, express them clearly, and people will recognize that. They'll recognize that a lot better if you don't have a bunch of hyper formatting.
4. Write less. People don't want to respond to your logical points if a) they have to comb through your first post to make sure they didn't misunderstand it, and b) if you're going to respond with many more pages that they will have to take a lot more of their personal time to try to completely understand.
So in reality, it's Opera spoofing Mozilla 4.0 spoofing MSIE 6.0 spoofing Opera...
Not exactly, but close. In reality it is Opera spoofing MSIE/6.0 spoofing Mozilla/4.0.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Whereas Opera now doesn't need any bolting on, because it picked up everything and the kitchen sink. I used Opera for several years because it was simply the best browser available for Linux, but at this point it's in need of a lot of streamlining and pruning if it wants to get back to where it was.
> No, it's highly standards compatible.
Are you sure about the "No"? I know Firefox have some rather elaborate hacks in order to be able to render non-standard pages designed for MSIE. I'd expect Opera to do the same.
For me it doesn't matter what the useragent is. When I do up my websites, I make sure it looks the same on all of them. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera. If it don't then I fix it.
I think the useragent thing needs to be thrown out and these lazy assed web developers need to start really earning the titles of developers.
Sorry if I sound cranky, but it's Monday and I still ain't won the lotter.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Opera may have something to brag about, or they may not. Current wisdom suggests even they don't necessarily know (though the download count on their site might give them a rough estimate).
Thus far they've been hiding behind the veiled argument that "you can't say we're not successful because nobody, including us, knows how successful we are!"
And they're not *really* throwing away that argument. The new user statistics will still be an underestimate of the total userbase, because it won't factor in people who are still spoofing as IE with an older version of the software.
And there's a lot of good reasons not to upgrade.
Opera doesn't have any auto-update feature and, at least in my experience, has a tendency to forget settings and sessions when you upgrade versions, so I imagine many users don't upgrade until there's a newer version with a feature they want enough to bother with the whole process.
And, an obvious and more relevant argument here, the ability to identify your browser as IE is a FEATURE. In older versions, you can still CHOOSE to identify yourself as Opera, if you want to help boost the stats of your browser of choice. But I, like many I'm sure, leave it as IE or Mozilla because it's more convenient than switching everytime I go to a site that doesn't let in Opera. So if you take away that feature in a future version, thus breaking compatibility with many sites, this may lead to more webmasters fixing their sites for Opera, but the more likely and more immediate result will be users either abandoning Opera or, more notably, NOT UPGRADING. Version 8.0 works fine, so why upgrade and lose the FEATURE that lets me view my favorite sites?
And, of course, the significant number of people who choose not to upgrade in the near future, and Opera's inability to estimate what percentage of the userbase these people comprise, means they get to have their cake and eat it too. If the browser statistics in the near future show Opera with a huge boost (and it's actually a 2-for-1 gain since every user they gain in the statistics is a user IE/Firefox loses), they can say "I told you so" and brag about their larger userbase.
And if the new statistics aren't particularly impressive, they can STILL say the stats are not accurate because some "unknowable" percentage of Opera users are still using the older version of the browser.
So, smart strategy I suppose. I have a hunch that the percentage of Opera users who set their browsers to identify as IE may be an overwhelming majority, so the impact this move might have on the browser stats *might* be pretty staggering. Then again, it might not be. Opera is my browser of choice and I think it beats the stuffing out of both IE *AND* Firefox, so I wish the company well. But the bottom line is we're stll a long ways away from having browser stats that accurately represent Opera's userbase.
CVS replies with canned answers as long as it's less work for them than fixing the problem. Answering e-mails with canned answers is easy. But they will do something if you guys call them and people have to sit in the phone explaining it over and over again.
Make sure to tell long and pointless ramblings instead of technical details.
Opera hits are 0.53% of the hits to my sites. So, as far as I'm concerned, Opera making any changes won't help. Opera does indeed include "opera" in the user-agent, even if pretending to be MSIE.
Here's other stats for fun:
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
end of discussion
The real APK & yourself had a chuckle over this eh? Boy, you are in for one heck of a surprise soon is all I can say.
APK
P.S.=> You'll be hearing from my attorneys shortly... DO NOT EMAIL ME AGAIN! apk
How could I forget? Here in the Southeastern US there is one on every frickin' corner (across from a Baptist Church).
SETI's an awesome effort & concept! A truly noble effort, in a world that is powered TOO much of the time on greed & corruption as well as pursuit of the "Holy Dollar"... Hope it helps find "E.T", & not the borg, you know?
What did you study when you were in college? Did you go for the minor in CS, or/and were there other things you studied?
I can be cool to you, but my perception is that the discussion goes downhill quickly if anything is said that you don't agree with (eg. the Memory-Optimization Hoax thread that seems like it will continue to go on until one of you two don't have the physical strength to type any more). But I'll give technical conversation a try anyway.
Regarding your comments about ActiveX vs XUL, I don't think that XUL is going to create many holes. Javascript is heavily sandboxed, and ActiveX is not. There are a few ways to easily create holes in those sandboxes, and that's what's accidentally happened with Greasemonkey. But I don't think that it will be a common occurance for accidental holes to be created, because there are only a handful of ways to create such holes.
forums (fori?) just acknowledge the problem;
"forum" is a second declension neuter noun. The Latin plural is "fora".
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.