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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.
I'm a fan of the 3/3 rule: If it has less than 3% market share or the version is over three years old, strongly consider what your effort is worth before changing code to support it.
The baby Bells, for the most part, have reached the size I like to call the "fuck the customer" stage; the stage in which the company is large enough that the business will continue to generate enough profit even if they piss off a fifth of their customers, usually because the customers have few alternatives. I'm convinced that once a business gets above a certain size it's very difficult to stop it from getting to this stage.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This isn't about Free Software, this is about Web Standards and freedom of choice.
As a developer, I can tell you that I don't have to go out of my way to support modern browsers. I have to go very far out of my way to support Internet Explorer which can't be considerd a modern browser (even IE7), whose standards support is abysmal compared to everything else on the market today. This is a side effect of my knowing how to do my job well.
Once again, an innocent suffers in the name of one of MS' shitty products.
Making a business decision is one thing, but telling your customers to fuck off because your business decision doesn't jive with their personal choices is downright rude.
As for games, it is a more similar issue than you probably realize, because the same people are meddling with the market. If game studios would stop developing against DirectX and start using OpenGL instead, it would be much easier for them to support platforms other than Windows.
I'm an Opera fanboy, but I don't think this is always a problem of coding specifically for IE. Opera works quite well on 98% of the sites I visit. Occassionally I bump into one that doesn't work in Opera, but works just fine in Firefox. Maybe Opera does 'support all the standards' and FF has a few IE-like nicities, as opposed to failing to implement an obscure feature that some sites use. I cannot really say I know. I do know that Google Maps works better in FF than Opera. Don't get me wrong, it's quite usable and useful in Opera, but in FF it's a little more interactive with the mouse. I don't think this is due to a lack of effort on Google's part to support Opera.
It's easy to make sites that work with both FF and Opera, but there are niggling issues here and there that still bring up a bit of trouble. I love Opera, but I cannot personally say it's as good at reaching all the sites on the web as FF is. It would be fair for me to say, though, that this is a problem I so rarely come across anymore that I agree with you that this is silliness on the side of the web developer. Getting their site to work with Opera would probably just require a couple of little tweaks. That is, of course, assuming that Opera 9 didn't already solve the problem. (I haven't exhaustively tested this yet, but a couple of sites I had trouble with in O8 worked beautifully in 9.)
I agree with the GP poster that it should make economic sense for them before they support Opera. I agree with you that better coding standards on their site would alleviate this problem with the added benefit of supporting other browsers like Safari. There's a happy medium in there somewhere. Honestly, I think the "have Opera and FF both installed" solution is that happy medium. That's what keeps me from sending nasty-grams twice a year when I hit a site Opera can't open.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I note from your W3C validator link that several bits of what look like code are commented out, notably items 16 and 18 on the W3C page. It seems possible that the problem lies there.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Regardless of the validity of the guy's point (and it has some validity), is anyone else struck by how inured we've become to borderline-irrational rants from whiny little bitches?
First of all, how ridiculous is it to get emotionally engaged in some website's browser support policies? They may be stupid, counterproductive, outdated, or arbitrary and inane... but this guy acts like they're some kind of religious dogma and he's from an opposing sect.
Second, whatever happened to voting with one's wallet, or eyeballs in this case? I mean, he acts like they are obligated to make their content available to him, and that their apparent refusal to support his browser somehow impinges on his human rights. What the hell?
Finally, you have to wonder if this guy has ever gotten his way in any dispute. Because no matter how right he might be, he comes across like an 8 year old whose parents won't buy him the vibrating Harry Potter broom.
All of which is unremarkable in itself, but what *is* remarkable to me is that this seems to be par for the course these days. It's like people have lost interest in actually getting what they want (better browser support in this case), and are enjoying masturbatory tirades instead.
-b
And yeah, you can call me kettle, but I'm coming at this from sadness, not anger, so that's got to be worth something.
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
My question is.. if it doesn't work in Opera then how did it pass Section 508? It is required of any governmental agency or government funded organization.
I agree that specifically working on Opera support is meaningless (and I've been using Opera as my primary browser for the last 5 years). However, the web developer is only in the position to dismiss it like that if and only if his pages are otherwise fully standard-compliant. Then he can point finger at the browser and say, "we done everything alright, it's that thing doing it wrong".
I have been an opera fan, nay, fanatic since the 6.x days. I even paid for it, no joke. An integrated mail client plus browser plus rss reader AND it works on Windows and Linux!? These reasons kept me going up until this week, more or less. I realized that for years I've been making excuses and bitching about the way people write webpages (and me a web developer) and generally being irritated at -them- when I am forced to open up IE or Firefox to view a page. This very week, I snapped. It is ridiculous for a page to work in IE and Firefox and not Opera. And it's OPERAS FAULT. I know their excuses. I've used them myself time and time again and it just doesn't fly. As a application user I DON'T CARE. I should be able to go to a website and view it. If I can't then that browser is broken and needs a patch. It was easier to blame MS back in the day sites worked with it but not Mozilla or Opera. These days, I'm not sure I've ever seen something that works in IE only that Firefox can't handle. I've had it up to my eyebrows and as soon as I figure out how which rss reader to use, hopefuly something cross-platform for both Linux and Windows, I'm giving up.
Jesus may love you, but I still think you're an asshole -BVB
Without more information about what exactly goes wrong, this discussion is pointless. In my experience however, there is a good chance that Opera is at fault. The first usable Opera version, from a web compatibility point of view, is 9.0. Versions before that had serious bugs in the DHTML and CSS departments. DOM was supported at all as late as Opera 8.0! Granted, IE is even buggier, but it is reasonable to pick up after Microsoft, because most people still use their piece of shit browsers (yep, browsers, IE7 is a little less broken, but still holds the red lantern). Not so with Opera. Very few people use their desktop browsers and PDA users usually need a page tailored to mobile use anyway.
My own way of developing websites is to code to standards, test with Gecko, create an IE compatibility layer of conditional code afterwards and that's it. I test with other browsers (Konqueror, Safari, Opera), but if bugs remain, they better be fixable by minor CSS tweaks, because that's all I'm willing to tweak. Anything more would mean another cycle of IE fixing, and that's just not going to happen unless specifically asked and paid for.
Of course, we're not asking to have Google Maps working on Lynx, evidently.
No, but it would be pretty cool if somebody would mashup Google Maps with an ASCII converter.
This guy's the limit!
Political order, not religious so much in our sense. The problem with Christians (and Jews; they had a hard time distinguishing) for the Romans was that they refused to acknowledge the divinities who had political status - either deified emperors or various kinds of deities who were believed to serve important roles in protecting the people. Actually, the Romans would probably have been far more tolerant of the claims of miracles than most moderns.
Keep in mind, though, that many of the writers of the New Testament never met Jesus: certainly Paul never did. The Gospels, too, have been demonstrated to clearly be derived from earlier accounts (three of them, the synoptic Gospels, are largely dependent upon the same account, "Q").