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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."
What happens when they hit 11?
Could someone explain when this ballot actually comes up? is it only for new installs of Windows or at some later moment, too? I already use Opera so it wouldnt make any difference to me but at least during the odd times I had to use IE for something it didn't ask me anything.
Opera Software did great work lobbying against software patents in the campaigns on the EU software patents directive. Thanks Opera!.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
These numbers don't mean too much, because at the time the ballot screen was introduced Opera introduced a new version of their browser as well. Probably at least part of the increase is caused by this new version, and not by the ballot screen.
However, still nice to see people trying something different.
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.
I can assure you that they do not act this way out of sympathy for IE. They do so because they know that the user base not using IE/Firefox/Safari is too small to care for.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Hence the "Dramatic" in the headline!
Spinal Tap will start streaming through all 11 copies of Opera simultaneously.
I doubt it. Testing in IE takes longer than in all other major browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome) combined. Besides IE, all major browsers are reasonably standards compliant. IE is the only browser with enough market share to make it the developers problem if they aren't standards compliant. Only really crappy developers will have any major issues and lets face it - they deserve it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
We code for, and test against, IE 6+, FireFox 2+, Safari 3+, Chrome 4+ and Opera 9+. And it sucks.
With all the supposedly intelligent and future thinking people pushing the Internet forward, I am stunned at their inability to comply with W3C standards. Yeah, yeah, W3C documents are the 'drying paint' of the internet, but they are what all browser developers are supposed to be aiming for. I think they all need new glasses.
When will Opera go after Nintendo for only allowing one "3rd-party" browser on the Wii?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_rule
Statistics can be misleading.
Links can be misleading, too. That link had absolutely nothing to do with the Simpsons.
Hopefully, this will signal the end of the monopoly of the proprietary, non-standards compliant browsers like ie enjoyed for many years and force everybody to comply with reasonable standards. At the beginning of the internet, being non-standards compliant seemed ok at first, but now we are wiser and non-compliant browsers are looked down upon, instead of being a skewed standard.
Why do some websites look okay? Because I, the actual engineer on the project use Opera.. and therefore I make sure the page looks alright. We're tasked with supporting FireFox, IE 7, we force compatibility mode in 8 because of third party controls that we use and can't influence.
I know right, a version with 10 revisions is more stable than a remake that just came out. hmm!
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
I find it amusing that everyone rails against IE (rightfully so in many ways) for not following standards, but every web developer I know (and being one in a lively local web development community, I am exposed to a fair number) still has to check sites in IE plus a multitude of other browsers . When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.
how many non-slashdot-readers do you think know that ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
What's this got to do with Link?
I still find it a little strange that Microsoft is being required to "promote the competition" in their own product.
Microsoft isn't required to do anything by anyone. The Browser Ballot Screen is entirely thought up and implemented by Microsoft themselves.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
And to get multiple Firefox versions you have to do a bit of user profile dickery
Or you use the "portable" versions, designed to be installed to removable media, that do this dickery for you.
As long as we're spreading the Opera love...
I've tried but never really have gotten into Opera on the desktop. However on mobile devices -- dumbphones and smartphones and PDAs -- it's pretty much the only game in town.
http://m.opera.com/
The interface is quite fast, even on my crappy old Samsung. Difficult to believe it's a Java midp, given the responsiveness with which you can scroll around the page, zoom in/out, and slide back. It's much better than the built-in browsers that I've used on Samsung, Blackberry, older Palm devices, etc. and I even use it sometimes on my wife's Android phone. And it has some sort of bookmark sync thing tied to your account.
Anyway, if it wasn't for opera mini, I wouldn't have been able to get by with my dumb phone on a cheap wap plan for so long. Also with my Blackberry and Palm it allowed me to hit some javascript-heavy pages when I didn't have access to a computer (airline check-ins, etc.) and the built-in browsers just wouldn't hack it. So it's an essential piece to have on your mobile device.
Downsides:
* sometimes I lose my bookmarks, I think when I exit out of it too fast and my device kills java before it's finished cleaning up.
* My phone puts java apps in a really annoying place without a quick shortcut to it (Tools | My Files | Games).
* It disables my phone's standby for some reason.
* Opera Mini 5 beta doesn't work, but Opera Mini 4 works great. YMMV
* java nags to grant the app network access every time I launch a new session.
But it's awesome enough that I put up with those inconveniences to use it :P
Goes to show that Microsoft IE has a large market share not because it is a great product, but because it locking competitors out.
He didn't say Link, he said Links.
Circumcision is child abuse.
It's a Big Red O! There's no stopping the Big Red O once it gets rolling. It'll roll right over your lowercase blue e. It'll roll right over your rat clinging to the blue egg. It won't even acknowledge Safari, because it doesn't remember what its icon is. Beware the Big Red O! It's the Future!
Well, the standards do suck ass.
I mean, CSS (IMO at least) was completely useless for serious website development until version 3, when it finally gained columns. *Columns!!* One of the most fundamental page layout concepts, and CSS didn't get it until version 3.0! Sure, you could make a box with a dotted top border and a dashed bottom border, but you can't make two fucking columns without workarounds. It still doesn't have math, making simple constructs like "5px + 3em" impossible. (You can't do the math at design-time because you don't know what an "em" is until run-time.)
Frankly, I have no problems with browser makers extending the standards when the standards suck... especially DOM.
For example, I've written a Javascript tag that does cool things to a webpage and can be either included on the page HTML itself, or can be loaded through a bookmarklet. The problem is, IE is the *only* browser that lets this script ask if the page is fully loaded if the script is dropped on the page after the page is loaded. All the more W3C-compliant browsers only let you install a handler on the Load or Pageshow event... if that event's already fired, you're fucked, since it never fires twice. The (completely retarded) work-around is to have my JS actually search the DOM tree to find a script tag including itself for non-IE browsers.
This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.
Also: would it kill the W3C-compliant browsers to add "innerText" to DOM? Just alias it to "textContent." Or to alias attachEvent to addEventListener? You'd get massive compatibility wins for adding it and it would take like 10 minutes of work. If the W3C were smart, they'd just add those into the standards anyway since so many sites already use them. (Whoever came up with textContent when innerHTML already existed should be smacked.)
Comment of the year
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.
Windows is Microsoft's own product, which holds market power over home PC operating systems. The browser ballot is Microsoft's way of avoiding the appearance of anticompetitive tying to EU regulators.
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
Because if only Opera is seeing an increase due to this, it seems likely it is either because people like the name or people like the icon better. Not liking either of those options if true.
Right now, you're still lucky if they test on IE 6-8, Firefox 2-3 and Safari 2-4... I'd guess 90% of web developers don't even do that, and that's what I (personally) consider the bare minimum.
I count that as eight different platforms (assuming we only count integer-valued version numbers). How many desktop OSes are in use, discounting those used by less than 0.1% of the market? Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone OS, and uhm... yeah?
So when you think about creating an application and you worry about porting it between different clients, the decision "let's make it a web app! We'll have to test fewer platforms" runs counter to your purpose, right? In other words: people have turned the web into something it wasn't meant to be---a portability nightmare.
Yeah, writing desktop apps exposes you to differences between OSes. Okay, but all OSes have files, can count time, probably can make you some random numbers, TCP sockets and so forth: they do the same things but in slightly different ways. Wrap the differences in libportability and get over it.
Maybe my attitude betrays my lack of coffee, but isn't it basically right? You don't have worse portability for desktop applications than you do for web applications.
Opera was the first browser to implement mouse gestures. I only switched to FF, when a mouse gestures plugin was made for it.
Because you can't use a monopoly in one area (OS) to gain a monopoly in another area (browers).
Giving IE with every version of Windows breaks that law, because most people won't install another browser. The browser ballot screen is a solution that the European Parliament (?) and Microsoft both agreed to.
Opera has always been the low-resource browser. Are there any Free browsers that run well in 64 MB of RAM and no swap, ready for a port to the WiiBrew environment? Fennec for Nokia N810 requires twice that much.
I find it a little strange that USA prosecuted Microsoft as an illegal leverager of a monopoly - this should have happened sooner. Maybe the IE team wouldn't have been disbanded.
Microsoft put out a crappy browser and then stopped developing it, thinking people would just give up on standards and write for IE. I find that strange as well.
I'm sure there are other aspects which qualify as strange.
When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.
Each browser developer seems to interpret the standard differently ... or only implement it partially (or rather, incompletely). When the five largest browser developers (among others) don't implement the standard properly or completely it's the developers and not the standard.
At least nobody thought he was talking about links... you know, the ones that require you coding an <a href=>.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Yes, of course. But they did this out of free will, not because they were required to do anything. The investigation into Internet Explorer was still underway when MS introducted the ballot screen.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
So how is this different from the iPhone not allowing any other browsers? If Microsoft had locked down Windows so that only Microsoft approved applications from the Microsoft app store could run on Windows, then they wouldn't be facing any of this right now (because they would have presumably denied Opera for "similar features" or "feature already available in Windows" etc.)?
For example, I've written a Javascript tag that does cool things to a webpage and can be either included on the page HTML itself, or can be loaded through a bookmarklet. The problem is, IE is the *only* browser that lets this script ask if the page is fully loaded if the script is dropped on the page after the page is loaded. All the more W3C-compliant browsers only let you install a handler on the Load or Pageshow event... if that event's already fired, you're fucked, since it never fires twice. The (completely retarded) work-around is to have my JS actually search the DOM tree to find a script tag including itself for non-IE browsers.
I’m betting there’s a better way. But without knowing what your script does, I can’t be positive.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?
What a fucked up world we live in.
So how is this different from the iPhone not allowing any other browsers?
Because the iPhone doesn't have a monopoly in the phonemarket.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Your comparison makes no sense. First of all, Starbucks doesn't have a monopoly in the coffeemarket. But even more obvious, they aren't using their influence in the coffeemarket to gain a monopoly in the sandwichmarket.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Well, nowadays, Chrome has been taking over that front a bit more, but they're still doing a good job (and the best job on mobile devices).
I am not devoid of humor.
Opera must be doing something right, that all the other browsers are missing. Go ahead, look at market share in eastern Europe, and especially among people who use the Cyrillic alphabet. It seems that a LOT of people take Opera seriously.
I've tested it, in several incarnations now. I'll bet I could still find my license file somewhere, if I tried hard enough. It has some pretty neat features, no matter what language you speak. That sharing thing, for instance - any idiot can share files, photos, whatever with their family, in a reasonably secure manner, without jumping through a lot of hoops.
You should drive it, before you dump on it.
I'm not switching, because Firefox suits my needs and wants, but if I were to switch, Opera would be a good browser to consider. In fact, it comes in side by side with Chrome, in my books.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Microsoft is being treated specially because they have a near monopoly on the desktop operating system market, and they have been abusing this monopoly to promote their own products, such as their web browser, their search engine, and their Office suite. Other companies do not have a monopoly in these areas, and therefore they face an uphill battle in attempting to compete against Microsoft. By promoting other browsers, they're trying to level the playing field to allow more competition, which should result in better products.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It won't even acknowledge Safari, because it doesn't remember what its icon is.
It's a compass. A typical icon to indicate "navigation", in contrast to big red O's, foxes and swirly colory... things...
I am not devoid of humor.
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.
So you mean this?
I am not devoid of humor.
Care to show us some of the pages you’ve designed?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I've been using Opera for ages. For a long time, it was really the only choice for power users. Every other browser would crash or slow to a crawl when you had more than a few dozen pages open. Back in my Pentium II 200MHz days, I needed 200 pages open to inconvenience Opera. It's still one of the browsers with the smallest memory footprint, although it's not leading by as much as it used to.
Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
For a minute there I thought you were referring to the this "The Big O". I watch too much anime...
If there isnt 2-3 main browsers, but a lot having roughly the same market share, things could evolve in some ways:
- There isnt so many engines. A lot of browsers are based on webkit or could be based on it (like with the chrome plugin for IE). Actually the main engines are gecko, webkit, and the ones in opera and IE, but could be a run to standarize in i.e. webkit for some ofthe browsers that don't use it now (would be an interesting move for Opera, and the others could do it gradually... IE already have a "compatibility mode", so it could end being webkit based in some moment).
- Convergence, having as measure things like the Acid3 test, to score compatibility of browsers on one common standard
- Webmasters entering into reason. Maybe could have some sense to code for the browser that have 80% of market share, but if all browsers/engines have 25% market share or they code for all, or they code for none, keeping into common ground zone, or at least a zone where are most of them (that probably will put IE out, that is the one that ever had been far fromt he rest in standards compliance)
this is like Apple hand-picking which apps are allowed in the app store, except on a much bigger scale
And there you have the answer to your own question. Governments regulate how monopolists are allowed to leverage their monopolies. This question comes up in every discussion of this nature. You're either new here or you have a learning disability.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.
What's wrong with W3C standards is that there's never been a reference implementation, which means there's a lot of room for interpretation, and interpretations can vary a lot. And after they've been implemented, people start discussing which implementations are closest to what the standard intended, after which people need to fix their browser, and in the mean time, we've got a big bloody mess.
Reference implementations are important.
Microsoft is a *convicted monopoly abuser*. They are being forced to provide a fair alternative to Internet Explorer on installation to make sure they cannot continue unfairly leveraging the monopoly they have (as decided by a court) to make IE the dominant browser.
Hmm, you must have been living in a cave the past 20 years. You should come out for air a little more often.... ;)
MS is a convicted monopolist. They have been fined more than $2,000,000,000 over the years for illegal business practices. The ballot thing is merely the latest remedy imposed by the EU.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Your perception is based on the flawed assumption that Microsoft is a common competitor in the browser market. MS has been found by the European Commission to be a monopoly abusing its position to stifle competition. They were fined over 1.6 billion Euro and the "promotion of the competition" is nothing but MS's own strategy to reduce that penalty.
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.
Have you by any chance been living in a cave for the last few years?
Basic EU competition law: *If* Opera was distributed along with 'Opera OS', *and* 'Opera OS' had a 90% market share, then Opera might well be required to include such a ballot screen or other equivalent requirement.
As 'Opera OS' does not even exist, they can do what they like. Same for Firefox etc.
Simple eh?
And (preemptively) don't bring Apple into it just because they *do* have an OS. It has less than 10% of the relevant market, so again they are free to do what they like.
NB US competition laws are very similar but don't seem to be enforced as much.
The standard might not be wrong, just difficult to implement. Though that may be a flaw in itself.
I am not devoid of humor.
The iPhone has no monopoly in telephones. THAT's how it's different.
As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's like a Volkswagen Fox. It, uh....
Okay, I suck at car analogies.
I am not devoid of humor.
That'd probably be funnier if I didn't spend so much time out on the links...
Somebody should tell Steve Jobs that Microsoft has a monopoly in the personal computer market.
Actually it's the desktop OS market. MS doesn't even sell a computer of their own. Steve Jobs, being a bright guy, already knows this fact and knows that his company bears some responsibility since they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market. Of course the fact that MS's monopoly power would make that a crazy business move probably figures in.
Doing something while under investigation by one of the most powerful political organizations in the world, to avoid having that organization levy hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of fines, is a strange definition of free will.
So Starbucks are being anti-competitive when they sell sandwiches ?
Nope. If, however, Starbucks doubled their market share and qualified as a monopoly and then gave away a free sandwich with each coffee (while rolling their costs into the price of coffee, usually called bundling) then they would be guilty of violating competition laws.
Isn't that Amaya?
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
That's because Opera is heavy duty.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
No, he said Lynx!
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.
":first-child" is not some new CSS3 thing and it doesn't work in IE6. There's at least 10 such css selectors or properties I use in IE7 that don't work in IE6 that have been around for years. Also, have you never heard of a child selector?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
It really came in handy for me way back in the day when I was constantly using Dial up on the road. Toggling off loading images was a great feature and I could work on multiple pages at once while waiting for background pages to load.
As it went on though, It just ended up getting more and more bloated. Just tried out the newest version though and I have to say I am very impressed with the facelift but its just not fast enough to edge out chrome for the sites I browse. I might dump it on my laptop when the 10.50 version is available for linux though.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
I was just reading about that via Lynx.
they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market
You lost me there.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Since Opera is the only commercial browser from the alternatives, it has the most to gain/lose by this battle.
Apple doesn't give a shit about Safari downloads and Google just wants people to use a modern browser, any browser as long as it isn't IE. And firefox, in europe which is the area we are talking about, is already pretty big. If FF doubled their downloads, there would be no more IE.
Aaah... that is a nice thought.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's a Soviet Russia joke here somewheres. Maybe I'll come back after my coffee.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Links can be misleading? Are you calling him a liar?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Say it as you like, the fact of the matter is that not the EU but MS themselves came up with the browser ballot screen and they implemented it before the EU's investigation reached any conclusions, nor did the EU do any suggestions towards Microsoft on how to handle this situation.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Roadkill.
All that's relevant is, it does stuff that requires the DOM to be fully-loaded. The only "better way" I can think of is adding a flag to the bookmarklet that says, "hey, you're on an already loaded page!" But that doesn't work because the bookmarklet could be run before the page is done loading.
All the experts I've talked to have basically said, "hm, yeah no browsers but IE support that." Maybe true.
If you know of a better way, please let me know.
Comment of the year
When checking statistics (http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-weekly-200827-201011) I can not se that people are choosing different browser because of this ballot. Probably it is only causing that everybody is reinstalling whatever browser they have choosen.
Note to self: Make a sig
Ya, but it's got a Big Bottom!
I read it via Lynx on Linux whilst cruising down the Link, listening to Link and watching Link....but then the Link went down.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
they refuse to license their OS to OEMs thus creating more competition (not enough to matter legally) in the desktop OS market
You lost me there.
Okay I'll simplify. A "market" is a group of sellers and buyers where the buyers choose among those sellers when looking to make a purchase. The sellers in this case are people supplying the desktop OS component for pre-installation on home computers. The buyers in this case are OEMs like Dell, HP, and Asus. They can't buy OS X to preinstall on their machines, so it is not part of the market when the courts examine how much power Microsoft has over them. If Apple were to license OS X to Dell to preinstall, there would be more choices in the market and MS's monopoly power would be lessened. Given Apple and MS's relative sales now, however, that would not seem to lessen MS's power over OEMs enough to make bundling laws not apply in this case.
While technically true, it's a little less misleading if you put it like this:
The EU told MS that IE bundled with Windows was a problem. If MS didn't do anything the EU would probably require that IE be removed, which would be a major undertaking. MS suggested a ballot screen as an option and the EU decided that was an acceptable compromise.
Yes, MS suggested the solution. No, they wouldn't have done it except to avoid a far worse solution being imposed by the EU. I'm not sure exactly what the point of your post is, but if it was to suggest that MS invented the ballot screen out of the kindness of their hearts or as some kind of strategic move unconnected with the EU, you're wrong. Your statement that "Microsoft isn't required to do anything by anyone" is also wrong. The EU required Microsoft to do something, they just didn't specify precisely what "something" was.
"I think the Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry — both the system and the applications software and the potential third sector that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box sector — is going to pose the greatest threat to Americas dominance in the software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever think of." -- Steve Jobs
Every week I see cool new features demonstrated [zurb.com]. But they're all tied to disclaimers such as Demo works best in Safari 4.x and pretty well in Firefox 3.5. and use css properties like "-webkit-text-stroke". That is the opposite of a standard.
The difference is those are features still being developed and in the process of being standardized. Your basic failure of understanding is motivation. A monopolist who can push their browser without working on its merits has little or no incentive to be interoperable with competitors. Every other company, however, has direct financial incentive to make their browser interoperable in order to gain market share. With no one party dominant, standards compliance becomes the lifeblood of every browser.
As for the idea of a Microsoft app store - to bad they didn't do that 15 years ago. Malware probably wouldn't be so prevalant today. The idea of secure repositories should have occured to MS by the time Windows 3.1 was being replaced by Win95.
Given how much antitrust trouble MS got in as-is, I'm sure that would have gone over really well.
The point of my posts is that people keep saying Microsoft was forced to create the Browser Ballot Screen, which is simply not true.
Yes, Microsoft was informed they were under investigion by the EU because of their bundling of IE with Windows. But that is it. How MS decided to handle this situation was entirely their own choice. So there's no "poor Microsoft, being forced to offer products by their competitors", because apparently MS thinks the browser ballot screen is the best solution for the problem.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I'm kind of partial to chrome, but then again I'm a minimalist. Opera is blazing fast tho, got to give them that.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Well - you'll note the time frame I am referring to. If MS had taken responsibility for making applications available to their customers way back then, in the name of security, then a whole lot of OTHER things would necessarily have happened differently. In my opinion, anyway. Of course, it's awfully hard to prove the existence of an alternate reality - we all know the road that MS actually chose. ;^)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Why not,
(W3C says that readyState is unsupported by Firefox, but I’m using it and it seems to work fine...)
Note that I supported all browsers (I think); if you’re using a bookmarklet only in particular browsers you may not need to support all of them.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Given how much antitrust trouble MS got in as-is, I'm sure that would have gone over really well.
How would offering a secure repository get them into antitrust problems?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
They used to have 4 users, now that have 10. That's one dramatic rise.
Most of the features you're using in your current browser are carbon copies of what Opera brought to the market. Opera affects you no matter what you think of its userbase.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Apple is an OEM. The market isn’t just “Dell”, and Apple doesn’t have to license OSX to Dell for Apple to be a competitor in the personal computing marketplace.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The buyers in this case are OEMs like Dell, HP, and Asus. They can't buy OS X to preinstall on their machines, so it is not part of the market when the courts examine how much power Microsoft has over them.
But they can buy a desktop GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora, which have a "Wine" toolkit that can run many applications designed for Windows. In fact, Dell sells a few token Linux boxes in some markets. How does Linux fail to break Microsoft's market power?
That might work in IE and Firefox and probably Opera (although I'm pretty sure I tried readyState in Firefox before and it didn't work... maybe I should go back and re-test that-- might depend on which rendering mode the browser's in, too.) But that still leaves Safari and Chrome out in the cold.
If that works, the *only* reason it works in Firefox is because readyState is something they swallowed their pride on and implemented due to its usefulness, not its presence in the W3C standards. There's no standards-compliant way to do what I need. If Firefox (and other W3C-strict browsers) would swallow their pride on a few other IE-isms, it would make my job a lot easier.
The reason this came up is that I was adapting some old IE-only Javascript, and I came across this and thought to myself, "huh, I wonder what the standards-compliant way of finding the page's load status is" only to find out... there is none!
Comment of the year
How would offering a secure repository get them into antitrust problems?
If Microsoft had implemented an exclusive secure repository, much like Apple's exclusive secure repository for iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad apps and Microsoft's exclusive secure repository for Xbox 360 games, that might have got Microsoft in trouble.
Only if you use Opera Mini. It's a special setting on Opera Mobile. I turn it on or off when it's convenient.
I am not devoid of humor.
One of those W3C standards is that an element id or name cannot begin with a digit. It can contain digits mind you, it just can't begin with one.
Most browsers wisely ignored this ridiculous stipulation(It's a string field) and sites could happily use numeric element ids and link to them with impunity. This is still the case in Firefox, Opera, etc, and all the IEs up to 7. However, IE 8, choosing the most ridiculous standard on which to comply, now no longer recognises links with numeric ids, e.g. "page.html#01" no longer works. I have personally had to recode the link across and entire site as a result of this decision.
Sometimes, not every word of gospel that comes out of W3C is worth following.
May the Maths Be with you!
By Gundam mechs.
Somehow...I don't give a crap about whether the iPhone has a monopoly or not. Why? Because I'm more concerned about my using things than I am about well this phantom of a monopoly and a market. That's your bogeyman not mine.
It does matter if a company holds a monopoly with it's product, because that's what antitrust laws are all about. There is nothing wrong with bundling two products together, it's only wrong when you abuse your monopoly in one market to get one in another market. You can't put the whole monopoly thing aside, because it is at the heart of the issue.
See, I think it's more fair to treat things equally than single one out. Sure, you can break thing down with an analogy that just seems appropriate, but really misses the point, but eh, I don't care. I see things how I see it.
You can't treat monopolists equally, because they are not equal. That's the whole point: it's about creating fairness on the market by making sure there are no big boy bullies around who can prevent smaller boys from having success.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Special or default setting? There's a huge difference.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You're right and the statement you reference is obviously wrong. Multiple implementations will of course diverge no matter what a standard says. IE may suck, but back in the day most web sites could be designed without worrying about other browsers. Sure, it only supported Windows and the Mac, but that was good enough to reach the vast majority of users.
Today, most sites support browsers that run on Linux and that's a good thing, but it's made the web developers job harder.
+1
Thank god someone else out there will acknowledge this. Many of the "new" features (Gestures, Tabs, Sessions, popup-blocking, advanced cookie management) all the other browsers are waving at each other were first implemented by Opera, often years earlier. Opera rocks.
And there is NO requirement to use unite.
Special. It's off by default. The option is known as Opera Turbo.
I am not devoid of humor.
Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Done.
Why wouldn’t it work in Safari/Chrome? W3Cschools says it’s supported in all major browsers except Firefox (which is no longer true; Firefox supports it as of version 3.6).
Anyway, I think the standards-compliant way of doing what you need is probably one of the following:
a) Call the function to process the objects that have been laid out, and call it again in the window onload event to pick up the objects that were missed the first time (if the page was loaded the first time, onload won’t fire and call it again).
b) If you’re looking for particular DOM elements, process immediately if they exist, otherwise register the onload event.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Why wouldn't it work in Safari/Chrome? W3Cschools says it's supported in all major browsers except Firefox (which is no longer true; Firefox supports it as of version 3.6).
At the time I was puzzling over this, nothing supported it but IE. It's great that other browsers are finally starting to say, "hey, wait, I guess some of the stuff Microsoft did isn't so bad after-all!"
But the fact that this fucking useful readyState still has a "No" in the W3C column pisses me off to no end... what is the W3C even *for*, other than getting in the way of useful features propagating to all browsers?
A) is actually a good idea, and could work... it would require some modifications, but it'd work.
Thanks for the tip.
Comment of the year
It's a Big Red O! There's no stopping the Big Red O once it gets rolling. It'll roll right over your lowercase blue e. It'll roll right over your rat clinging to the blue egg. It won't even acknowledge Safari, because it doesn't remember what its icon is. Beware the Big Red O! It's the Future!
That just made me think of a great idea for ad campaign for Opera: Morpheus opens his hands to Neo with the Red 'O' in one hand and the Blue 'e' in the other.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
You forgot to mention Google Chrome's Simon Says knockoff icon...
Huh?
That would explain why I'm always pressing it on my iPhone and expecting to get the GPS app.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
You're right and the statement you reference is obviously wrong. Multiple implementations will of course diverge no matter what a standard says. IE may suck, but back in the day most web sites could be designed without worrying about other browsers. Sure, it only supported Windows and the Mac, but that was good enough to reach the vast majority of users.
Today, most sites support browsers that run on Linux and that's a good thing, but it's made the web developers job harder.
This is why it is important that browsers do their best to adhere to standards and be functionally equivalent when it comes to rendering standards compliant content. If your favourite is not adhering to an accepted test case, then it is important, IMHO, that you open up a ticket for the developers to fix it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
PS. Check market share in Russia.
In Soviet Russia, the market shares Czechs. No, wait...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"forefront of web technologies and open standards"
"Russia"
Something doesn't fit here.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I'm always curious as to what the hell people do on their websites that is so hard for them to get to work on all browsers. I've never run into such problems.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Even without platform exclusivity, how long would it have been from when MS rejected some application for sort of grey-area reasons (is spyware the user "agrees" to malware or not?) until the offended party cried antitrust?
(Without doing some filtering, an app store doesn't really buy you anything.)
Wow, you got all of them except the most obvious
Well at least Hyrule's safe.
Have you ever read any W3C standards? There are a lot of parts that are left to the discretion of the implementation.
And there are a lot of parts that are written in sufficiently ambiguous English that the developers have to decide which possible interpretation to use.
This is, of course, mainly the fault of the English language. When writing specs, it's easy to read a passage with the meaning that you intend, and not notice that the wording is ambiguous. This is a general problem in all human languages, but since English lost most of its inflectional endings some centuries back, it has somewhat worse problems than most other languages. (Iff you want to see a real winner in this category, take a look at Mandarin. You wouldn't believe that a language so fraught with homophones could ever be used to communicate anything at all. ;-)
There was a really cute example of this at the Language Log blog recently. The article's title is self-referential, in the sense that it commits the error that is the article's topic. The word "slander" in the title is not a verb; it's a noun. You need to read the discussion to understand what it's talking about. To fully understand it, you should also google the phrase "crash blossom", which comes from an especially spectacular failure at news headline writing due to English ambiguity.
Anyway, it's nearly impossible to write standards that don't have ambiguities. About the best that can be done is what the POSIX group did: They asked for submissions of what they termed "weirdnix", which was a POSIX-compliant implementation of a feature that was technically compliant with the wording of the standard, but did something in a way that would be surprising to programmers and would make the code non-portable. They used such submissions to rephrase the standards to eliminate the ambiguities that allowed such bad implementations. They didn't totally succeed, of course. Success isn't possible when written in a language like English.
(Many people have suggested that Microsoft consciously implemented "weirdnix" in their POSIX library. It's fairly easy to write code that works the same on all POSIX-compliant libraries except Windows. It's very difficult to write POSIX code that works both on MS Windows and on other POSIX-compliant systems. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I can assure you that they do not act this way out of sympathy for IE. They do so because they know that the user base not using IE/Firefox/Safari is too small to care for.
Chrome now has larger market share than Safari according to four out of the five reports here. And the one exception is drastically different from the other four on all counts, while the other four largely agree with each other, so I'd neglect it. Of course, individual sites will differ, but still.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Sure, there's always the possibility of language that ends up being ambiguous. I was referring specifically to items in the W3C standard that are intentionally left as a decision for the implementation.
What's wrong with W3C standards is that there's never been a reference implementation, which means there's a lot of room for interpretation, and interpretations can vary a lot. And after they've been implemented, people start discussing which implementations are closest to what the standard intended, after which people need to fix their browser, and in the mean time, we've got a big bloody mess.
Reference implementations are important.
The W3C publishes standards too rapidly for a reference implementation to be feasible, unless you just arbitrarily pick a major browser and declare it such. The work to maintain a reasonable reference implementation is probably beyond the W3C's budget.
In practice, if uncertainty arises, a browser developer can just ask on the relevant mailing list and an official conclusion can usually be reached in a week or less. So I don't think a reference implementation is really necessary here. Detailed behavior descriptions, extensive test cases, and a quick way to resolve uncertainty suffice.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
As they say on Wikipedia, citation needed, sir.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I find it amusing that everyone rails against IE (rightfully so in many ways) for not following standards, but every web developer I know (and being one in a lively local web development community, I am exposed to a fair number) still has to check sites in IE plus a multitude of other browsers . When there are differences between standards compliant browsers, theres something wrong with the standard imho.
It's not necessarily a problem with the standard, it's a problem of specifications generally. Writing a specification that covers everything is very hard, and writing code to match a specification exactly is also very hard. You can realistically only get approximations. The same thing occurs with other standards. Look at how many differences you have between C compilers, Unixes, or (God help us) SQL databases – sometimes even when the standard is very clear.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
False dichotomy.
One of those W3C standards is that an element id or name cannot begin with a digit. It can contain digits mind you, it just can't begin with one.
This is true in HTML 4.01 and all non-HTML5 versions of XHTML. It is no longer true in HTML5:
It now just has to be non-empty, and can't contain ASCII whitespace. I'm waiting for this to be widely implemented so I can switch MediaWiki to not use awful id's with ad hoc UTF-8 hex digits in them . . . the old (HTML 4.01) rules didn't allow non-ASCII characters either.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
The fact still remains: Microsoft broke the law, and proposed the ballot screen themselves.
Clever signature text goes here.
Note that, if you control the HTML of the document, you could simply use something like <body onload="window.loaded = 'complete'> to tell you whether the page was done loading, and register your load event using addEventListener if window.loaded wasn’t defined.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Opera has 50 million desktop users, and another 50 million users of Opera Mini. Firefox is claimed to have 300 million users or so.
Clever signature text goes here.
Opera already has about 50 million desktop users, and another 50 million Opera Mini users. Compare that to Firefox's reported 300 million users, and you'll get the idea. The blatant lie that Opera has a tiny user base is still being spread by ignoramuses like yourself.
Clever signature text goes here.
Uh, do you have any idea how huge and diverse Europe is? Your comment just reeks og ignorance and bigotry.
Clever signature text goes here.
Apple is an OEM.
Yes they are. They sell hardware in competition with Dell and HP, which is important if you're considering if the desktop computer market is monopolized. They do not, however, compete, in the desktop OS market because they won't sell their product, only integrating it in their own machines, bypassing that market through vertical integration.
The market isn’t just “Dell”
I didn't say it was.
...and Apple doesn’t have to license OSX to Dell for Apple to be a competitor in the personal computing marketplace.
I used Dell as an example. We're not talking about the personal computer market because no one has ever been alleged to have monopoly influence in that market for the antitrust action we're discussing. The relevant markets are "web browsers" which is what was being influenced and "desktop operating systems" (as opposed to server which was ruled a separate market). If Apple is not willing to license their OS to a given OEM, then their OS is not relevant for purposes of defining the market and how much influence MS has over buyers (OEMs). When economists and lawmakers consider how much market share MS has, OS X's numbers are not even considered nor should they be.
You obviously haven't seen ie's 20% market share loss over the last 3 years...
I work as a Front End web programmer for one of the largest ministry sites in the world. For virtually everything we do, ie is the problem and all other browsers behave as expected, especially with CSS2/HTML4 stuff. The only time we have problems between the W3C-compliant browsers is doing something really advanced, but it's so rare I can't think of an example. IE is always the problem, and the lack of documentation and testing plugins (like Firebug) makes it an absolute nightmare to work with.
If I could control the HTML of the site, why would I bother with a bookmarklet in the first place? :)
Of course, I don't even control the HTML of the site normally-- our product is just a Javascript that customers put on their site without our having any access to it. The bookmarklet lets me give demos using their actual site instead of having to demo it on a mock-up, it's much more convincing that way.
Again, this is all one of the many scenarios the W3C never imagined when creating the standards.
Comment of the year
FUD fail.
Clever signature text goes here.
Actually, Opera 10.50 is faster than Chrome. Opera is back at the top.
Clever signature text goes here.
Actually, that was Microsoft's first proposal. It was rejected. So they came up with the ballot idea, which was accepted.
Clever signature text goes here.
Actually, Opera already has about 50 million desktop users, and another 50 million Opera Mini users. Compare that to Firefox's reported 300 million users, and you'll get the idea. The blatant lie that Opera has a tiny user base is still being spread by ignoramuses like yourself.
Clever signature text goes here.
Can't say I have noticed any bad bugs. It's stable and works well. Funny how all the negative comments are from ACs...
Clever signature text goes here.
Well, I didn't mention speed. But that's a good thing, at least.
I am not devoid of humor.
The Browser Ballet, featuring Waltz of the HTML rendering engine in D minor. Who wouldn't think it was a good idea ;-)
Follow me
This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.
I don't think that work means what you think it means.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
Every other browser would crash or slow to a crawl
Don't have much experience with Lynx, Links or w3m, do you? :)
(I know what you meant, and even basically agree, but you did say "[e]very other browser".)
The W3C publishes standards too rapidly [...]
Do you... experience the passage of time differently than the rest of us?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Opera must be doing something right, that all the other browsers are missing. Go ahead, look at market share in eastern Europe, and especially among people who use the Cyrillic alphabet. It seems that a LOT of people take Opera seriously.
While I doubt that anyone knows a definite answer to that, I've made an guess as to why it may be so, based on personal experience (as one of those guys using the Cyrillic alphabet...).
To sum it up briefly, it's because Opera was a viable, fast and feature-rich alternative to IE at the time when power users have already started looking for one, and before Firefox got rid of Mozilla's sluggishness.
all OSes have files, can count time, probably can make you some random numbers, TCP sockets and so forth
You gloss over GUI toolkit differences in "and so forth".
Wrap the differences in libportability
What's the difference between wrapping the differences in libportability written in C vs. wrapping the differences in libportability written in JavaScript? You might as well go for the web because it allows deploying and updating with zero effort, even to PCs whose owner lets the user browse the web but doesn't let the user install software.
The superior portability of web apps is not because there are less browsers but because they all adhere to a common standard, unlike operating systems. You can't run a Linux binary natively on Windows, and vice versa.
You can run a Windows binary natively on Linux/x86 because Wine is not an emulator. It's a PE loader and a reimplementation of the Windows API, just as NT is a reimplementation of the original Windows 3.x API.
browsers, which are essentially all mutually compatible middleware.
Except IE isn't very compatible with IE. As I understand it, the difference between IE 6 and, say, Chrome is at least as big as the difference between Windows 9x and Windows Vista.
Thanks for the link. Good write up, and it makes sense. And, here I was, trying to make sense of an apparent language/alphabet link, not even guessing at the political perspective. ;^)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Spatial navigation! No other browser has that. You can use shift+arrow keys to navigate through the links. Simple, but a big reason for me not to change to firefox. I even endured a period of incredible instability on the linux version couple of years ago - the recent versions have been rock-solid.
Regardless, my point was that the claim that Opera has a tiny user base is a blatant lie. You can of course spew nonsense and red herrings like you just did, but that does not change the fact that you are nothing but a sad, pathetic little liar :)
As for why people care about Opera... Why do they care about other browsers? Why do you care what other people care about? Personal issues, it seems.
WebKit superior? LOL.
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Opera is at the forefront of new web standards as well.
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