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.
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!
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
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!