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Dvorak Says MS Should Buy Opera

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the why-does-everybody-want-it-suddenly-huh dept.

patro writes "Should MS beef up cranky old Internet Explorer for today's standards? Dvorak thinks buying Opera would be a smarter move. It works on all the major platforms including the Mac which IE won't support anymore and $400 million for it is pocket money for Microsoft."

1 of 521 comments (clear)

  1. So many errors... by Kelson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Shall I start with the bit about how Microsoft has no reason to develop Mac programs anymore becuse they can just use the Intel-based versions? He seems to have forgotten that fact that the platform is more than just a processer archtecture, there's the OS API as well. It takes a lot of glue code to get an x86 Windows app to run on x86 Linux (and even then it's rarely perfect), and the same would be true on x86 Mac.

    Then he goes off on the whole "Opera identifies itself as IE so we don't know how many people use it" bull that's been debunked over and over and over again. Opera IDs itself as IE in the same way that IE identifies itself as Netscape -- and for the same reason. If you're paying any attention at all, you can tell the difference.

    Some examples:
    Netscape 4: "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; U)"
    IE 6: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
    Opera 7: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.50 [en]"

    You'll note that IE spoofs Netscape, that Opera spoofs IE (including the Netscape spoof), and that all three are easily distinguishable if you're looking in the right place.

    Does this guy have a clue what he's talking about?