How do you know they didn't contact Microsoft? Maybe they have contacted MS and were told to f*** off? (Gates didn't know the details. Why should a comptetitor get more info?)
Why should Opera believe that IE8 will deliver what's promised? Maybe it's a dirty hack, maybe MS will drop "green branch" the second Opera gives up or delay release forever?
Maybe that was "Plan B" and this branch landed on trunk because Opera filed the complaint?
Bundling argument holds regardless.
Continuing with the complain doesn't neccessarily has to be stupid/out of spite. On the contrary, reversing strategy based on a screenshot on a blog could be naive.
You can't tell browser vendors to stop displaying 93% pages on the web. Creating a new XML-only language won't make it go away either. In fact, W3C already tried that and it failed.
So these "idiots" have already done what you're fuming about, learned that it will not work, and already found a new way of solving this problem. HTML5 defines, in gory details, how to parse tag soup, so every browser can read it the same way.
Browsers are non-validating parsers and don't read DTD. XHTML must also work inside other XML languages that may require their own DTD.
In XML, by design, this distinction must be made by the namespace, and this is reflected in design of DOM, CSS, XPath, etc. If you change design fundamentals, inevitably you'll end up with lots of nasty surprises and ugly workarounds.
Finder is not important. You can restart it even without loggin out. I don't have trouble keeping OS X uptime as high as time between QuickTime security patches:)
But other TCP/IP vendors aren't forced by monopoly-bent market to implement MSTCP/sortof-IP.
Opera would not complain if IE's brokenness didn't cause so many IE-only websites to be created (it's not even ActiveX issue, most of them don't use anything special, just rely on numerous IE bugs being present). Because there are IE-only websites, Opera cannot compete by implementing open standards, but are forced to reverse-engineer and re-implement each and every IE bug. We'd probably have CSS4 by now, if other browser vendors didn't have to disassemble and implement "MSCSS" in the meantime.
Of course Acid2 doesn't guarantee 100% compliance with anything, but it's not meaningless. If IE supported at least that much, web development would be significantly easier, cheaper, and less frustrating.
I want generated content, equal-height columns without hacks, gracefully degrading 1-liner for embedding multimedia, properly working margins, line-heights and positioning without hasLayout gotchas. Opera has all that plus SVG and some cool features from HTML5 and CSS3.
As for Opera's 100% compliance with CSS2.1, they've got 99% and constantly working on last 1%, releasing one version after another with fixes and improvements, and they don't wait 5 years between them.
What Apple is trying to say is that they cannot be sure that Ogg codecs are patent-free. Yes, Ogg has documented and freely licensed known patents. The problem is that it means nothing. Troll-friendly US patent system allows submarine patents, which might apply to Ogg, and you can't be sure until technology is older than life of patent or someone gets sued (and trolls might stay put until lawsuit-worthy company starts using the technology).
(Yes, this sucks, sounds stupid and applies to everything. Congrats to USPTO).
The "connect via GPRS or EDGE" is a problem for me. I'm not bothered very much that it doesn't have 3G (I've installed ziproxy + privoxy which cut down traffic), but not even having EDGE sucks (slow gets even slower!? and YouTube won't even try opening movies).
It finally suppports things like display:inline-block (sometimes much easier to use than float and is sort-of supported by IE already) and soft hyphen (­).
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author's Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
The problem is once something becomes (even de-facto) standard on the web, it will never die.
It doesn't matter if the standard is crappy or not. Look at all leftovers from browser wars (DOM0, quirky box-model, framesets, all now-deprecated HTML elements) -- browsers still must have first-class support for all that garbage.
Even if you add a brand new, super-cool language with excellent security model, Javascript won't die. Revolutions don't work on the web (see how far application/xhtml+xml has got and how well XHTML2 is doing). Browsers will just end up with new things to implement, new incompatibilities, more code to maintain and larger attack surface.
Whenever application changes (which might because it was upgraded or infected) OS X Tiger asks if you want to allow new version to access saved passwords (Keychain).
This question is too much like Vista's UAC making users answer "yes, whatever, just bugger off". I suppose signing helps distinguishing between harmless upgrades and real damage, allowing OS X to ask this question less often.
Opera does have equivalents of many must-have extensions. Some are missing (IETab), some are better integrated (gestures), some are almost-but-not-quite (web dev tools unfortunately).
Safari is fast indeed, but take Safari benchmarks with huge grain of salt, because Safari cheats by triggering onload event before load and rendering completly finishes.
If "bad guys" find vulnerability in SAAS before you, they can hack all "installations" at once. No need to send out billions of trojans or scan network with botnets - SAAS is a one huge, unfirewalled target with a jackpot.
I'll rather firewall and/or virtualize my buggy local apps than let 3rd party keep it open on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Continuing with the complain doesn't neccessarily has to be stupid/out of spite. On the contrary, reversing strategy based on a screenshot on a blog could be naive.
Editor of HTML5 conducted large scale (Google-scale) study of pages and concluded that 93% pages on the net contain syntax errors.
You can't tell browser vendors to stop displaying 93% pages on the web. Creating a new XML-only language won't make it go away either. In fact, W3C already tried that and it failed.
So these "idiots" have already done what you're fuming about, learned that it will not work, and already found a new way of solving this problem. HTML5 defines, in gory details, how to parse tag soup, so every browser can read it the same way.
Browsers are non-validating parsers and don't read DTD. XHTML must also work inside other XML languages that may require their own DTD.
In XML, by design, this distinction must be made by the namespace, and this is reflected in design of DOM, CSS, XPath, etc. If you change design fundamentals, inevitably you'll end up with lots of nasty surprises and ugly workarounds.
Finder is not important. You can restart it even without loggin out. I don't have trouble keeping OS X uptime as high as time between QuickTime security patches :)
But other TCP/IP vendors aren't forced by monopoly-bent market to implement MSTCP/sortof-IP.
Opera would not complain if IE's brokenness didn't cause so many IE-only websites to be created (it's not even ActiveX issue, most of them don't use anything special, just rely on numerous IE bugs being present).
Because there are IE-only websites, Opera cannot compete by implementing open standards, but are forced to reverse-engineer and re-implement each and every IE bug. We'd probably have CSS4 by now, if other browser vendors didn't have to disassemble and implement "MSCSS" in the meantime.
Of course Acid2 doesn't guarantee 100% compliance with anything, but it's not meaningless. If IE supported at least that much, web development would be significantly easier, cheaper, and less frustrating.
I want generated content, equal-height columns without hacks, gracefully degrading 1-liner for embedding multimedia, properly working margins, line-heights and positioning without hasLayout gotchas. Opera has all that plus SVG and some cool features from HTML5 and CSS3.
As for Opera's 100% compliance with CSS2.1, they've got 99% and constantly working on last 1%, releasing one version after another with fixes and improvements, and they don't wait 5 years between them.
What Apple is trying to say is that they cannot be sure that Ogg codecs are patent-free. Yes, Ogg has documented and freely licensed known patents. The problem is that it means nothing. Troll-friendly US patent system allows submarine patents, which might apply to Ogg, and you can't be sure until technology is older than life of patent or someone gets sued (and trolls might stay put until lawsuit-worthy company starts using the technology).
(Yes, this sucks, sounds stupid and applies to everything. Congrats to USPTO).
Hurray for the revolution. When (outdated/corrupted) law stops following common sense, people start willfully violating it.
You get death penalty for being a suspect. It makes killing people as simple as pointing and screaming "It was that guy!"
The "connect via GPRS or EDGE" is a problem for me. I'm not bothered very much that it doesn't have 3G (I've installed ziproxy + privoxy which cut down traffic), but not even having EDGE sucks (slow gets even slower!? and YouTube won't even try opening movies).
Yeah, I should probably change my profession.
No, the conclusion is you should always use salted hashes.
It finally suppports things like display:inline-block (sometimes much easier to use than float and is sort-of supported by IE already) and soft hyphen (­).
Do they have that in languages that are used by target audience of OLPC?
Can't find anything useful on the website (without giving e-mail address), here's why: <a class="starter" accesskey="5" title="STIX Beta Test" href="#">STIX Beta Test</a>
The problem is once something becomes (even de-facto) standard on the web, it will never die.
It doesn't matter if the standard is crappy or not. Look at all leftovers from browser wars (DOM0, quirky box-model, framesets, all now-deprecated HTML elements) -- browsers still must have first-class support for all that garbage.
Even if you add a brand new, super-cool language with excellent security model, Javascript won't die. Revolutions don't work on the web (see how far application/xhtml+xml has got and how well XHTML2 is doing). Browsers will just end up with new things to implement, new incompatibilities, more code to maintain and larger attack surface.
If page obfuscates/encrypts source code with JS, use this bookmarklet:
javascript:alert(document.documentElement.innerHTML)(outerHTML gives better results, but not in Firefox).
Whenever application changes (which might because it was upgraded or infected) OS X Tiger asks if you want to allow new version to access saved passwords (Keychain).
This question is too much like Vista's UAC making users answer "yes, whatever, just bugger off". I suppose signing helps distinguishing between harmless upgrades and real damage, allowing OS X to ask this question less often.
This reminds me this salesman.
Whenever you think your code needs cleaning up, just look at osCommerce.
Opera does have equivalents of many must-have extensions. Some are missing (IETab), some are better integrated (gestures), some are almost-but-not-quite (web dev tools unfortunately).
p opular-firefox-extensions-and-opera
That sums it up: http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2006/07/04/top-150-
Out of 113 most popular Fx extensions: 38 are built-in, 38 are not possible, rest can be added by tweaking/hacking/configuring something.
Safari is fast indeed, but take Safari benchmarks with huge grain of salt, because Safari cheats by triggering onload event before load and rendering completly finishes.
That's why row-oriented databases have indexes and perform index scans.
If "bad guys" find vulnerability in SAAS before you, they can hack all "installations" at once. No need to send out billions of trojans or scan network with botnets - SAAS is a one huge, unfirewalled target with a jackpot.
I'll rather firewall and/or virtualize my buggy local apps than let 3rd party keep it open on the internet.