Opera: 1 MSN: 0

[Wembley]

Hmmm... Aaaand. the header menus only work when I am running MSIE on my Windows box, but when I run Opera on my Linux box, all I get is a blank space - and yes, I do have the Flash player installed on my box.

Interesting.

Also, MC doesn't seem to work properly on my Commodore 64. Fix it please (kidding!)

-Rick "Wembley" Miller
..."SYS 64738?? But I thought you can NOT leave the magic!"

 

[frogboy4]

LOL! Yeah, I heard about it. BTW Alex, I believe the article actually states that the people at Microsoft created the Bork language to discourage Opera users, not the other way around. Yes, it did only cause MSN's page to malfunction, but it was Microsoft's doing. Opera tried to stop it. It's funny either way you look at it though. With all that time spent on creating Bork you'd think the folks at Microsoft could put their energy into improving their browser.

 

[Wembley]

Actually, I read that it was Opera that was borkifying MSNs web page, in response to that fact that MSN's servers were specifically messing up Opera's attempts to render MSN.com properly.

You see, when you connect to a web site, your browser sends certain information to the web server. Kinda like this:

WEB BROWSER: Hello, is this MUPPETCENTRAL.COM?
SERVER: Yes it is, and I am running Apache version 1.0

WB: Ok, I would like file INDEX.HTML, and I am running Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0 under Windows XP build 2600
S: Ok here it is.

(this example has been simplified, and it, while not technically correct, is an example of the type of information exchange that goes on)

What was happening was that MSN's web servers were checking the browesers that people were using, and anyone who was using Opera 6.xx were intentionally being given a corrupted file.

This is in fact quite an accepted practice, one could easily make a Netscape version of a website, a MSIE version of a website, etc. MSN was intentionally messing up Opera to get people to switch "back" to MSIE.

Anyway, the Opera people, not to be outdone, made version 7.01 of their browser *really* mess up MSN's web page by borkifyng MSN.COM while it was rendering it.

Here is the Slashdot article about this - it's very informative.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/14/1256231&mode=thread&tid=133

-Rick "Wembley" Miller
..."You can NOT leave the magic!"

 

[frogboy4]

Ah, the article I read must have mixed the information. It all seemed like one incident. Either way it's still funny, but apparently both practices are unlawful. It's always fun to see corporate big wigs slug it out.

 

[anathema]

To be specific, if Opera identified as itself, it got a CSS file back which caused layout problems. If it ID'd as IE, it got the IE CSS file, which worked fine. This could be a simple cockup caused by insufficient testing on MSN's part. Or it could be something more sinister...

Opera's response is a joke, as clearly stated in their press release

Personally, I'd like to see IE a) fix its bugs - there's a lot of websites out there that only work because IE has these bugs, and they break in standards-compliant browsers like Opera, and b) adhere to the standards that do exist!
It's a pipe-dream, I know...

 

[frogboy4]

Actually, a bug in Microsoft software was responsible for opening a door to Hackers that brought Bank of America down for a day. They need to get their stuff together, but as a designer, I like the web to be more standardized and hope they continue to be the industry leader. Nothing against Opera - it's a great idea. It just creates more work for someone like me.

 

[anathema]

If they adhered to standards, there wouldn't be any problems. Opera is 100% standards-compliant. Any correctly-written web page will work in it, which is more than I can say for IE.

 

[frogboy4]

The versions of Opera that I am aware of lumps Flash with pop-ups and eliminates both. The user can’t choose one without the other. As a designer that is discouraging and keeps web design in the dark ages of plain HTML. I hope they have changed that feature with the new version. It throws the baby out with the bathwater.

 

[anathema]

I've never run into that one. I guess you saw a pretty old version? I have popups disabled to counter their abuse by advertisers, and Flash is unaffected. In fact, Flash managed to install itself on one of my machines without my knowledge, which I found rather concerning! The first I knew about it was when I went to MC one day and got the menus

What I would like to see is Opera gaining the ability to disable automatic popups without disabling the ones triggered by my clicking on a link. I personally disagree with the use of popups for anything, but sadly a few sites I read use them :-( However, it is at least possible to have them appear in a tab in the main Opera window, rather than in their own separate windows.

Anyway, anything written to conform to the HTML spec will work in any browser, including IE, so there really isn't any need to code for specific browsers (unless you're wanting to use a non-standard custom feature).

I don't use IE at all if I can help it. MC works well in both Opera 6.05 and IBrowse 2.3 (aside from the latter not supporting Flash, which doesn't bother me :-D )

 

[frogboy4]

That's cool. Thanx for clearing it up. From what I have heard, many computers come with Flash installed. It may have been installed that way or could have been in a software installation. I have worked closely with people from Macromedia and know that they don't spontaneously install Flash on unsuspecting computers. LOL! I agree about pop-ups for the most part, but recently changed my own website to have the main page in a JavaScript window. The reason sites use them is so that they can control their palette. It's an artistic choice so there's no blank space and the designer can control just how their work will look on every computer. If it weren't for evil companies using the pop-ups - and the new Flash embedded ads that cover up content when searching Yahoo and other sites just bugs the heck out of me.