Slashdot Mirror
Boston Globe to Blogger — "Stop Using Opera"
PetManimal writes "Mac Daniels of the Boston Globe weighed in on a prickly debate involving the updated local mass transit website. The Globe's advice to one complainer named 'derspatchel': Stop using Opera. Derspatchel's response is to go medieval on Daniels' ass, and ask the question: Why should Opera users give up their browser? Quoting: 'I don't give two whoops about the "percentage of the Internet population" or whatever. I don't care if a website works on someone else's choice of browser; I care if it works or not on my choice of browser. It's a modern browser, it's in active development, and it's free. Once dev stops on the Opera browser and the last version becomes outdated and unable to support newer Web innovations, then I'll "stop using it." How's that, Chuckles?'" After a day the transit authority took the new site offline to "improve performance," reverting to the old version.
These arguments always piss me off. Why is it that everyone in the free software community has this automatic assumption that the rest of the world should go out of their way to support them? So this guy is using Opera. That's nice. He says he doesn't care about anything as unimportant as "percentage of the Internet population" that uses the browser. He has chosen to use it and as such it is his god given right to have all the sites he wants to use support it.
/END RANT
Get a life.
Two sides to this. First, yes if a business wants to reach people using the most modern hardware and software then they are going to have to go out of their way to support a wide variety of standards and browsers.
On the other hand, if your browser isn't worth supporting from a dollars and cents point of view that is your problem, not theirs. If it would cost a business X amount of money to add support for a piece of software and the total amount of cash that will be brought in by new customers because of that software is less than X, it is never going to happen. NEVER.
You see the same thing in the Linux community (and oh god am I going to get modded down/flamed for this), but every time a discussion of Linux adoption comes up and the games laugh someone always says something along the lines of "if only the developers would get their heads on strait and release the games for Linux...". Games don't get released on OS's where it is physically imposable to recoup the cost of development from the install base. Large commercial websites don't support browsers that don't have enough users to pay for it. This base assumption of deserving support is arrogant and counter productive.
Why is it that everyone in the free software community has this automatic assumption that the rest of the world should go out of their way to support them?
Why are you bringing "the free software community" into this? Opera isn't free software*, and XP isn't free software, so what does this have to do with the free software community?!
(* Opera is free to download, but it is not Free Software in the sense of the phrase "free software community").
Now, that's still no justification or reason for saying "don't use Opera,"
Really? 0.6% marketshare? Can I complain because it doesn't render properly in Lynx?
Take my comment as flamebait if you want to. But I have much bigger things to complain about on the web. Like webpages that won't work without Javascript. Or webpages that use stupid flash interfaces. Or how about webpages that aren't dialup friendly? I suspect there's more dialup users out there then Opera users. Don't see anybody on /. jumping up to defend them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
He's clearly ranting, and it doesn't all make sense.
If he doesn't care if pages work in someone else choice of browser why would anyone care if they work in his?
Personally, I do care that data which is presented as being a 'web page' should, in fact, be a web page. Web pages work in any browser, barring browser bugs.
So the question for me is, does this page not work in opera because the page is wrong, or because of a bug in Opera? I haven't used Opera in a long time, but it used to be a very solid browser with very few bugs when I used it, and I suspect it still is. Nonetheless, generalities don't solve the problem, specifics do. Is Opera correctly displaying a broken page, or is it displaying a good page improperly?
The page in question is far from a good web page, which reïnforces my suspicion, but still, does anyone know exactly the issue in question here?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It is real simple answer to why. Opera supports publish standards. Those standards should be supported FIRST.
From a business point of view it is real simple do you want someone to not buy your product?
For Firefox that runs about 10% If you can support them you should.
finally this is a PUBLIC site run by as in run by the government! The government shouldn't require one to use a certain browser without a really good reason.
Unless you are doing a lot of Ajax it isn't hard to support Opera.
The only reason is because you are lazy.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yes, Firefox can be plugged up to do everything Opera does
Whenever the subject of Opera's functionality comes up:
"Install 20 extensions to make Firefox mimic the functionality."
Whenever the subject of Firefox instability comes up:
"Firefox doesn't crash for me. It's probably those 20 extensions you have installed."
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
1) Some government site changed their webpages
2) Guy A can't load it and assumes he's being blocked because he's using an oddball browser
3) Guy A complains and is told by Guy B to stop using his oddball browser and get over it
4) Guy A goes ballistic on his blog
5) Guys C, D and E respond to Guy A's blog and say "we're using opera and it works fine for us, must be something on your end"
6) Because it's blog drama, one man's fucked-up configuration problems ends up on slashdot
Do I have that right?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
This isn't just any business. It is a government-subsidized organization set up to serve the public interest. They have an obligation to serve all people, not just the majority. If they decided to not allow wheelchairs on their vehicles because only 0.001% of the population uses them, the leaders of that organization would be testifying in front of congress within days.
If the site doesn't work with Opera there is a 99% chance it doesn't work with tools for the visually impaired either. Frankly, any government site should be required to use open, published standards.
This browser-customized TRASH, you find on many websites is the root of the problem. Opera routinely beast other browsers in conformity tests. If defeloppers stopped trying to cater to broken browsers a) the browsers would get fixed and b) testing would get far, far easier. After all, that is what standards are for...
Side note: The 0.6% figure is highly doubtful. Because of broken websites that work fine in Opera, but that refuse to load if they detect anything other than IE or FireFix, many Opera users set their Browser to pretend to be IE. Broken statistics tools cannot see through this.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Sorry but any web developer can tell you that the 'if it follows standards it should work' myth has been dead for a long time.
A 'good' webpage can be written in xhtml and include every scrap of CSS defined in the 2.0 standard. Unfortunately, the standards in question (including the older CSS specs) are ambiguous in some places and even if they weren't there is no browser that fully implements them. You can write a 100% standard and validated webpage that doesn't rendered properly (read according to standard) in any modern browser.
This is further complicated because the implementations are not just incomplete, but no two browsers implement the same parts. And if the browsers all implement a function, the ambiguity of the standard comes into play and you will often seen something rendered differently in each to a small or large degree. Depending on how critical the visual element in question is to your design, an unexpected difference in behavior can make a page unworkable or at least broken.
The result is that a web developer who is doing everything right (the site in question is obviously not, but I am not defending them, just setting the record straight) must do what he always has. He must test the page in an assortment of browsers and then work out the kinks for them. He must then hope that the resolution to those kinks will result in an implementation that will generally work in the browsers he has not tested.
Such is life. Even among those who do design according to standards and validate properly, there are those who only actually test and resolve issues in one browser. They know this will make most of the market work and following standards means that nobody can claim broken functionality is their fault.
Of course, accessibility standards for any government type site (city, county, state, federal, etc) should be required to work in all modern browsers. After all, I suspect that the blind do not constitute 0.6% of the browser market but those sites are required to be accessible to them. Are the blind somehow better than Opera users?
"If he doesn't care if pages work in someone else choice of browser why would anyone care if they work in his?"
Because Opera has support for features and technologies that rival any browser on the market (meaning it is as easy to support as any other browser) and 6 out of every thousand web users are using Opera. Considering that there are roughly 1,086,250,903 Internet users (per http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm) that means Opera's 0.6% of the browser market is about 6.5 million people. Using percentages immediately favors the biggest players and belittles the mid-sized and smaller players when you are referencing a sample the size of the browser market. When you are talking about nine zeros, reducing your figures to two zeros doesn't magically make for a clearer picture, it only serves to mask reality.
``Really? 0.6% marketshare?''
I don't know why people keep saying this is a market share issue. There are published, freely available standards that describe the languages used for creating web sites, and the way browsers should interpret these languages. Now, if a page doesn't work in a browser, there are two possibilities:
1. The website is doing something wrong
2. The browser is doing something wrong
In the first case, the website is broken, and people should complain to the webmaster, regardless of the market share of their browsers. In the second case, the browser is broken, and people should complain to the browser vendor, no matter the market share of their browsers.
``Can I complain because it doesn't render properly in Lynx?''
Yes, as long as you use the right definition of properly. Most importantly, rendering a page "properly" does not have anything to do with rendering it the same way another browser does. HTML and CSS were designed to be forward compatible: browsers are supposed to treat elements they don't understand in a specific way, which ensures that the elements are, at least, made available to users. JavaScript doesn't work that way, but, in the forward compatibility philosophy, scripts on pages should themselves be something that can be ignored, without rendering the page useless. Together, all these mean that Lynx, or any other browser, should at least render the basic elements like paragraphs, headings, and links in some way useful to the user. This could be anything from full support for a custom scripting language and lots of multimedia content embedded in the page, full support for the latest versions of CSS and HTML, etc. to speaking out the text on the page with some indication of which parts are links and how to activate them. As far as I can tell, Lynx does a good job at this, except when web pages are made in such a way as to not be compatible with all but a few chosen browsers.
You can argue market share all you want, but, in the end, it's not usually about the users of one specific browser being discriminated against, but about blatantly shutting out _all_ browsers, except a chosen few. That's ok; after all, if it's your own webpage, you can decide what you put on it and who can view it and what software they need, etc. (at least, as far as my sense of morals is concerned; US law disagrees) However, everybody who doesn't like that has the right to complain about it. And I will say the complaints have merit. Not that you have to care about the complaints, or about my opinion, of course. Still, you could make your page in such a way that it works in all (compliant) browsers; it's not hard. In fact, it's what you get if you don't do anything against it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
His argument could be improved, but he is correct. W3C should be the fallback default for websites, not some IE variant. Too many websites default to IE if they don't recognize the browser id string, and that frells even W3C compliant browsers.
The other thing the bozo in transit forgets is that Opera is one of the most popular microbrowsers built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable devices -- the very customer base that is most likely to need mobile access to information about the transit system.
The whole series of "browser wars" arguments are bull IMNSHO. W3C HTML first, W3C approved standards next (e.g. XHTML, XML documents), vendor-specific variants LAST. If developers would stop working around that godawful mess, Microsoft would be forced to fix IE by a deluge of customer complaints. Our own policy of appeasement in search of market share is what forces the entire web community to keep working around the incompatible platform-specific enhancements, costing the entire planet money.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
So says a witness who, conveniently, can't be questioned.
http://outcampaign.org/
The question shouldn't be "does it work with Opera", the question should be "is it standards compliant".
The user should simply send a bug report to both the browser and the site developer. Both developers should then determine whether the problem is with standards compliance of the browser or of the site, and whatever is broken should get fixed. "Don't use Opera" and "every site must work with Opera" are both unreasonable principles.
Ick. What disease is it that makes people want to stick those funky menus on web pages in the first place? They are usability nightmares, and just generally annoying.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
They don't "consume" more, but they do, by definition, benefit more financially from the existing government -- banking regulations, military protection, police enforcement, trade negotiations, etc. As they are benefiting more in a material way from the existing government, they should be expected to contribute more in a material way to maintaining that government.
Poor people, by definition, are not benefiting as much and shouldn't be expected to want to maintain or support the existing system very much.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
And that is generally because the broken HTML is written in a broken manner specifically in order to work in IE.
The myth would be "if it follows standards, then it will work."
Given that it is unlikely that rich Americans would be as rich as they are without a healthy and educated workforce, of course, a more reasonable definition of "justice" does lead us to progressive taxation as a means of ensuring that all potential workers are healthy and educated, thus feeding back to society some of the disproportionate benefit that the ultra-rich have received from participating in that society. (The alternative would be to raise the minimum wage to a level that would permit workers to pay for education and healthcare at the market rate, but it's not obvious whether that would actually benefit the rich at all.)
Can we not lose sight of the issue? (Insert obligatory slashdot culture joke here).
Whether or not the site is busted or Opera is busted, while obviously quite relevant, is secondary. What's sticking in this guy's craw is that this Mac Daniel troll didn't even have a clue where the problem was, he just went into his go-get-a-real-browser routine right out of the box.
Believe me, "It's your browser's fault, not ours" is a perfectly valid answer once you can back it up.
Someone points out that just because you code to standard doesn't mean it'll work in all browsers. True. But that's why you code to standards. So when this happens, you take a frigging second to trace down the problem, and if it's because Opera isn't executing the standard properly, you can assert that with confidence and tell them to take it up with the browser dev team.
If everytime someone breaks a standard we just stop coding to it all together, we may as well get rid of standards, becuase someone is always going to break them. At least until we nuke Redmond from space.
But again, I doubt that's even the primary issue here, because I seriously doubt by his tone that Mac Daniels even thought about this. He simply heard Opera and reacted like your standard forum jackhole, and this guy smacked that garbage off the playground. Good for him.
Let's say you have 2 people, one with $50K and the other with $10K, and you take away $20K from the first person to give to the second person so that they both have the same amount. Now, taking into consideration human nature, what will be the motivation for the person who only has $10K to work any harder when they know they will get more money by doing nothing? And what will be the motivation for the one making $50k to CONTINUE working when they know any extra money they make from their work will simply be taken away and given to somebody else?
This is an inherent FAILURE of most communist systems. They don't take into account that the majority of the population is NOT filled with self-sacrificing ascetics eager to contribute all their dough to the great commune.
The U.S. has it's problems, but one of it's most endearing qualities, and why so many poor immigrants WANT to come here, is the availability of class mobility. They CAN make it just off their hard work. If you need examples, please see:
Chris Gardner
Oprah Winfrey
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Anna - some Mexican chic I knew through my dad who made it over here, worked by cleaning houses and selling ice cream and STILL managed send $1000 month back to her family in Mexico after her own expenses. She is now married, with kids, still working. Luckily, she got smart and stopped sending money to her ingrate family back home who would berate her when she didn't send MORE money to them.
So, please, PLEASE, don't tell me how helpless and unfortunate "poor" people are, when the biggest obstacle standing in their way is often their own lack of motivation and mistaken belief in their own inadequacy.
Most of the time, it's because the "creators" of the page only tested in in MSIE, and the page therefore renders well in MSIE because the designers only happen to use broken code that somehow renders well in MSIE.
It's not that MSIE is good at rendering broken html (it's not really), it's that people are creating broken HTML that renders well in the mess of misbehaviour, bugs and other hellspawns that live in the MSIE code.
On the other hand, it's dead easy to create perfectly good HTML/CSS that render perfectly well in any browser but MSIE. You don't even have to try hard, just use a few floated elements here and there, a piece of position: fixed and some min/max heights and widths, and you're done.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Enthusiasm doesn't equate with truth. It might indicate a particular set of beliefs, but people have been and continue to be mistaken in their beliefs. See James Randi's website for numerous examples. If you don't like those, there's always Google.
http://outcampaign.org/
This thing didn't work that well in Firefox either. And there's no need to quote
"improve performance", they really did need to improve it. I happened to hit the
site yesterday for directions and it was dog slow for no improvement in usability
(just aesthetics). Worse, they were using an invalid Google Maps API key from the
test server in production.
Were that I say, pancakes?