[Tfug] Opera, Firefox, IE, etc.

[Rich]

On Apr 7, 2007, at 9:09 am, christopher floess wrote:

> Do any of you know what it is that's different between Opera and  
> Firefox and
> IE that makes the websites that say "This website is best viewed  
> with Internet Explorer or Firefox" display stuff badly in Opera, or  
> not even functional at all under opera?

Completely different SGML, CSS and ECMAScript engines.

If it says it's designed for IE, then it's designed for all its  
"hasLayout" bugs. In other words, it is invalid code. FF does a  
better job than Opera of rendering invalid code acceptably. Opera  
displays what it's been told to display, which is a hotch-potch of  
mumbo-jumbo. Opera isn't *failing*, it's showing how the web  
"designer" failed.

This is why a lot of the good web designers design first in Opera,  
because it'll show you what you've done wrong.

> Gmail is a good example of this.
Actually, Gmail is a great example of how poor Javascript support is  
on *all* browsers, without exception. They're all IE5's when it comes  
to Javascript, and all very different. Ajax is darned clever, but  
behind all those includes is a huge number of implementation checks.  
The amount of code to check feature implementations and workarounds  
is ridiculous compared to the code that would result if all browsers  
were alike. And get this: a check for implementation can return TRUE  
for two very different implementations, which you might not be able  
to check for, so you *have* to fall back on "what browser?" checks.

But still: Gmail? I like Google for their clever-clever stuff, but  
y'know, "do no evil" isn't a strong enough privacy policy for me...

> And further, why isn't opera more popular.
Various reasons:
* Because they wanted money for it for a long time
* Because Opera isn't a default browser on any platform
* Because Debian underlies the predominant user-level Linuxes and apt  
makes it hugely unfriendly to even consider downloading anything  
commercial. Opera is commercial, it's just free. The latest Ubuntu is  
upsetting all the Debian die-hards by making Opera easily available.

> I know it doesn't have much of the market share, and that's why  
> people don't cater to it when they make their websites,
Oh they do. If you write standards-compliant code, then it will work  
on Opera. It's not a special case, you don't have to cater to Opera  
specifically. And if the standards-compliant code doesn't work on
> but Firefox just seemed to come out of nowhere,
It came out of AOL. So yeah: nowhere.
> and now everybody raves about it like they invented tabbed browsing  
> or something
Microsoft did. Just kidding: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/ 
archives/008433.html

Have fun.
R.

>
> ~ Chris
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