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Opera Sees "Dramatic" Rise From Microsoft's Ballot
TheReal_sabret00the notes a TechRadar piece reporting that Opera Software has seen a doubling from normal download numbers on average since Microsoft's browser-choice screen lit up in Europe. The UK saw an 85% increase and for other countries it was larger still: Poland 328%, Spain 215%, and Italy 202%. Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, said "A multitude of browsers will make the web more standardised and easier to browse."
Presumably it will also raise web development testing costs in the short term, as organisations feel less happy to test "just on the big three" but might not be any happier to assume that browsers all produce the same output than they are today? The long-term outlook might be more standards compliant pages, but the short term outlook might well be "Panic!"
You must be lonely, or only know idiots. Opera has been at the forefront of web technologies and open standards for years. PS. Check market share in Russia.
You're right in that it sucks that you can be standards compliant and still render things differently from another standards compliant browser, but it's important to note that the differences between Gecko, WebKit and Opera's rendering engine are generally quite small and can often easily be worked around in the last day or two of a large project, but when it comes to Trident it's like entering non-euclidiean space, menus disappear or appear on the wrong side of a page, other elements magically ignore that you just told them their size and none of this ever has a simple "oh, we'll just tweak it a little" solution, it always seems to involve moving stuff around a lot and writing mangled IE-specific non-standards compliant CSS just to trick Trident into rendering things the right way.
So yeah, there is a problem with ambiguity in the standards but Trident rendering standards compliant sites so wrong they're not even usable is a much bigger issue which will hopefully be solved if we can get IE to no longer have a majority share of the browser market.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
To make things worse, each version of IE sucks in its distinctive way.
That's a real pain. I used to do some Web developing part-time and I know that. When I was doing the job I had Firefox as the main testing browser and voila, my site automagicaly looked and worked the same in Firefox, Opera and Chrome/Safari without tweaking the standard-compliant code (extensively validated using W3C's tools). For each version of IE I had to maintain different hacks, test them, and make it couldn't break in the standard-compliant browsers, AND still pass the validation, AND keep the hacks as maintainable as possible.
I learned a lot trying to do it and I was glad I made it. I'm doubly glad that I probably don't have to do it again.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I'm not a fan of IE or anything but I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
I'm not a fan of strangling women or anything but I still find it a little strange that Gary Leon Ridgway is being required to "promote the safety of women" in his own housing choices, by living in a small cell away from society.
Perhaps Opera and every browser should be required to have a popup ballot that appears the first time you open the browser telling you about all of the other browsers you could be using.
Perhaps Anthony Hopkins and every man should be required to live in a cell.
Let's start the insanity...
I think your insanity is in assuming people convicted of a crime should not be punished and forced to make reparations to society because non-criminals are not punished. That's pretty fucking nuts dude.
Because they are expressions of ideas, more like mathematical proofs than real, mechanical, inventions - and neither ideas nor mathematical theories are patentable. The "expressions of ideas" bit is why programmes are copyrightable -- as literary works. And if they're literary works, protected by copyright, how can the be patentable too?
And remember, in Europe you can't patent business methods or processes, either.
Okay, let me give you the reality of web development. You build it on firefox because it is simply the fucking best development browser. Then you give a brief test to Chrome/Opera, both of which have high quality dev environments as well (but firebug is just in a class of its own) and are typically fairly easy to debug. If you followed standards, then I rarely run into problems. Then, if you got a Mac, you test Safari. No problem there either usually.
And then, having spend 1% of you project time so far, you go to IE. IE6, IE7, IE8. All three are different.
And where real human beings upgrade their real browsers, the degenerates that use IE never ever upgrade but expect everything to work perfectly on decade old software.
Oh and guess which browser is the least likely to work EVEN if you follow its own "standards"? And then there are the version differences...
So no. Opera doesn't add any significant amount of testing. All of the 4 big other browsers (Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera) put together don't take a fraction of the time to debug that IE does.
Why do you think web developers celebrated when Google recently decided that IE6 was no longer going to be directly supported?
If Google were to put IE on a complete ban, then they could officially for ever change their motto to "do good".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.