Opera Claims Microsoft Has Poor Interoperability 316
Noksagt writes "Opera CTO Hakon Lie has countered the claims that Bill Gates made regarding Microsoft's superior interoperability last week. He points out their invalid webpages, MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format, and more." From the article: "You say you believe in interoperability. Why then, did you terminate the Web Core Fonts initiative you started in 1996? You deserve credit for starting it, but why close down a project which could have given you yet much good will? (Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!)"
You Dad Sucks Syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just so much easier, and more importantly cheaper, to attack competitors like this.
Re:You Dad Sucks Syndrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You Dad Sucks Syndrome (Score:2)
Re:You Dad Sucks Syndrome (Score:2)
I have to see this one! (Score:5, Funny)
I can't wait to hear the fat lady sing in this one!
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:5, Funny)
The "fat lady is hoarse form singing, my friend.
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:5, Funny)
What a Microsoft World
Don't know much about my CPU,
Don't know what a DIMM's supposed to do,
Don't know what a hard disk is for,
Don't know how to overclock my core;
But I do know that Microsoft rules,
'cuz that's what they taught us all in school,
Oh, What a Microsoft world it must be.
Don't know why my screen is always blue,
Don't know what these damn exceptions do,
Don't know why my modem runs so slow,
What it's sending out I just don't know;
But I do know what the salesman said,
Once I save enough to finally upgrade,
What a wonderful world it will be.
What would the BOFH do?
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:2)
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:3, Informative)
IEBlog [msdn.com]
It makes for great comedy.
WARNING: Could cause serious coffee splurtage.
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:2)
Hangs
In a hang scenario, the browser becomes unresponsive, forcing the user to kill the process from Task Manager and restart it. This can be easily achieved without exploiting any bugs, e.g. by scripting an infinite loop on a web page.
WTF?
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:2)
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I have to see this one! (Score:2)
If you are that impatient, you can always watch the trailer [google.com]
MS interoperability (Score:2, Informative)
Well I can vouch for that: there is just no way I can access my Hotmail account with Mozilla, and it seems a dicey affair with Konq. However, for some reason (ahem...), it works just great with IE
Oh well, nothing new here. Remember the DRDOS case against Microsoft? They claimed Windows couldn't interoperate without MSDOS 7 too, yet it could. It's a classic case of Microsoft trying to maintain its monopolies by messing with standards to
Re:MS interoperability (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MS interoperability (Score:2, Informative)
Note that it's not much of a problem really, since I use Gotmail to redirect stuff coming to my Hotmail account to my main POP3 account
Re:MS interoperability (Score:2)
Re:MS interoperability (Score:2)
The issue is that, according to Opera's CEO, some MS sites are deliberately serving broken HTML if the browser identifies itself as Opera. When Opera tells the site it's IE (or Firefox, or anything else), the sites work fine.
Re:MS interoperability (Score:2)
Hotmail in Moz, etc. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MS interoperability (Score:2)
Re:MS interoperability (Score:5, Informative)
What about google? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What about google? (Score:3, Informative)
Last time I checked (like 5 seconds ago), maps.google.com said this:
Re:MS interoperability (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MS interoperability (Score:2, Insightful)
It is a low underhanded trick. But MicroBS gets away with it. Plus
I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sunny Dubey
(not a technical font person etc etc)
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:2)
I do web application development, and I'm pretty anal about text formatting, and I tend to use Verdana for the majority of my content areas.
Verdana for the win!
Use sans-serif, don't hardcode fonts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Use sans-serif, don't hardcode fonts (Score:2)
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:3)
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:2)
Although, being Slashdot, I feel compelled to mention Gnome's Bitstream Vera fonts. Bitstream Vera Sans looks great on a web page, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is a good choice to code with. You can get them as TTF files at the following URL: http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ [gnome.org]
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:2)
Sadly for me, they fall into the "so close, and yet so far" category. Vera Serif[1] is probably the most readable font I've ever seen on a screen. It is a thing of beauty. But the lack of italics makes it lack viability for common uses. I really hope this will be addressed soon.
[1] No, I don't understand the obsession with using sans-serif fonts on web pages. It hinders readability. The serifs are there for a reason, to help guide the eye, and ass
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:2)
It's called aesthetics.
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:2)
Re:I speak for people *everywhere* when I say ... (Score:2, Insightful)
While many here at
At last the truth is told (Score:2, Informative)
Of course they terminated Web Core Fonts (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Of course they terminated Web Core Fonts (Score:5, Informative)
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Long Live Verdana!
Re:Of course they terminated Web Core Fonts (Score:2)
Windows 2000 (NT v5.0)
Windows XP (NT v5.1)
Windows Server 2003 (NT v5.2)
I payed for Windows 2000 and pirated Windows XP when I lost my Win2k CD's. No way in hell am I paying for the NT 5 kernel twice/thrice. Bring on the NT 6 kernel and I'll consider shelling out some dough.
Verdana (Score:5, Insightful)
Serif vs. sans-serif (Score:5, Informative)
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what makes fonts easy to read. The reason both Verdana and Georgia are easier for most people to read on a screen has more to do with being well-hinted, being designed to avoid warts at the relatively low resolutions in use, and having a large x-height. None of these is particularly true of obvious alternatives like Times Roman and Helvetica/Arial on most of today's systems. The presence or absence of serifs has relatively little to do with it.
More surprisingly, some research has suggested that serifs don't actually help much on paper either, at least for shorter works. They do seem to boost reading ease in long, blocky works like novels, but for something like a magazine article or a short paper, reading ease isn't much of an indicator one way or the other.
Re:Serif vs. sans-serif (Score:2)
Serifs DO help reading on paper because the "little thignies" (serifs) that extend perpendicular to stroke ends help the eye denote where the stroke actually ends. And it also helps greatly
Re:Serif vs. sans-serif (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you for the review of chapter 1 of the typography textbook. However, if you turn to chapter 2, I believe you may find some surprises...
The conven
Re:Verdana (Score:2)
Dave Hyatt on IE ruining Web coding (Score:5, Informative)
From the blog:
"Sometimes trying to support the standards can be a real pain.
While trying to improve our CSS2 compliance, I recently did a big cleanup of our block layout code, including the code for handling floats. I made what I believed to be a fairly innocuous correction to follow the CSS2 specification. Here's the scenario.
Lets say you have a div that is set to 300 pixels in CSS. You then put a 250 pixel wide float inside that div. Immediately after that you have a 100 pixel wide overflow:hidden div. All sizes have been specified in CSS.
Now here's the pop quiz. What do you think the layout should be? Should the overflow div:
(a) Be on the same line with the float and spill out of the enclosing 300 pixel div
(b) Be placed underneath the float, automatically clearing it because there is insufficient space for
the overflow div next to the float
Before I give an answer, lets see what the CSS specification has to say on this issue. Section 9.5 on floats, fifth paragraph.
'The margin box of a table or an element in the normal flow that establishes a new block formatting context (such as an element with 'overflow' other than 'visible') must not overlap any floats in the same block formatting context as the element itself. If necessary, implementations should clear the said element by placing it below any preceding floats, but may place it adjacent to such floats if there is sufficient space.'
My interpretation of this language is that there must be sufficient space for the table or overflow:hidden element to fit within the containing block. If not, you should clear. That's what I implemented. So in my opinion the correct answer to the question above is (b).
I decided to see what other browsers did. I started with Gecko. Gecko chose (a). Gecko always does (a). It is at least consistent if - in my humble opinion - incorrect. Gecko chooses (a) regardless of whether you pick strict, almost strict or quirks mode.
Next I tried WinIE, and this is the part that blew my mind. Depending on whether the float was an image or a table, the float was left or right aligned, the table specified that it floated via the align attribute or the float CSS property, and on whether or not the normal flow element was declared as a sibling or not of the float, I could get completely different results! The level of inconsistency was astonishing.
I was able to watch WinIE do clipping in one case, to wrap in a second case, to not wrap in a third case, to overwrite content in a fourth case, all by just tweaking the parameters outlined above. It's no wonder Web designers have no idea how to code a page to standards when they have to deal with a layout engine that is so horribly inconsistent and buggy.
Naively I opted to implement (b) and to hope for the best. Unfortunately the bugs immediately started pouring in. finance.yahoo.com was broken for example because it used an old-style align table and relied on it not wrapping underneath the float. Undaunted, I simply added a strict mode/quirks mode check and opted to do (a) in quirks mode and (b) in strict mode.
The bugs kept coming in though. Next was versiontracker.com, a page that is actually in strict mode and relies on an overflow:hidden div to spill out of a containing block rather than wrapping.
So now I really have no choice. This is an example of where the CSS2 standard simply can't be followed because buggy layout engines have set a bad precedent that the rest of us have no choice but to follow.
It's a shame that Gecko does not do the right thing in strict mode at least, but I suppose they had no choice in the matter either."
LMAO, AGAIN (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to say, i really wasn't expecting that hostel of a letter to be put out by opera, but its funny as hell.
This is almost as bad as when Microsoft made IE part of your operating system. before (in win98 ) you could remove IE and get it to still work, now, if you remove it you virtually kiss your OS goodbye.
Its all part of their strategy, like donating computers to schools, your not being nice, your getting kids hooked on MS word at age 8! I have to say, Microsoft is one of the best companies ever if you just look at what they do as a business, but their products are crap.
unfortunetly, its the only crap that will play half life 2 ^_^
Re:LMAO, AGAIN (Score:4, Interesting)
At the time, My roommate (who did a lot of windows stuff) figured out that you could use the IE3 uninstaller to uninstall IE4, and you'd be fine.
For me this simply proved that MS was, in fact capable of safely removing IE4, but they chose not to --- and, in fact, they willfully broke the OS of any customer impertinent enough to remove Microsoft's browser from their system.
Heh (Score:2)
Georgia? (Score:2, Funny)
The author obviously has never been to Atlanta.
Re:Georgia? (Score:2)
MS vs /. (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like MSN's markup [htmlhelp.com] is more valid then Slashdot's [htmlhelp.com] is.
Re:MS vs /. (Score:2)
Microsoft has 'McInteroperability' (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft has 'McInteroperability' (Score:2, Informative)
What kind of APIs do you really think they use that give such a great speed boost and still are unavailable to everybody else? You know, it's not that hard to track down what the software actually does with debuggers and monitoring tools. Yes, some Microsoft products use some undocumented calls, but they are mainly insignificant. On the other hand, many tru
Undocumented NT/2000 native API (Score:2, Informative)
The smell of rot... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The smell of rot... (Score:2, Informative)
The free MS fonts live on... (Score:4, Informative)
I prefer Bitstream Vera myself.
For terminals though, I *love* non-smoothed Lucida Typewriter 9 point. Not the Xfree version though (the 'm' and 'w' look wierd), I like the one which comes with Solaris (the standard font used by OpenWindow's cmdtool).
Mmm, functional
My Dog... (Score:2, Funny)
A little Opera-centric (Score:2, Insightful)
It is nice to see Opera on the offensive (Score:3, Insightful)
He points out their invalid webpages(; (Score:3, Funny)
... and... you'll get 1338 errors (on 1 page!!!)
I think it tells a lot about this 1337 (+1) company
Good one! (Score:3, Interesting)
Response from Microsoft's PR blogger (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, they are working hard to fix it in IIS 7.0 and the next version of ASP.NET.
Apparently.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Response from Microsoft's PR blogger (Score:2, Interesting)
Sigh. Here's the excerpt:
"I invite Håkon to watch Channel 9 too. In about a week we have an interview with Scott Guthrie, who heads up the IIS and ASP.NET teams. I gave Scott crap about just this problem in that interview and he says that they are working hard to fix it in IIS 7.0 and the next version of ASP.NET. Not exactly the answer that Lie will want to hear, but demonstrates that we are worki
Re:Response from Microsoft's PR blogger (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, call me a skeptic, though I'll believe that when they actually implement security properly (by default -- not the theoretical after the fact kind) and don't stab business partners in the back on a regular basis. Long established habbits tend to be the hardest to break -- though I don't think there's much will or intent to change. Why should they?
The Word 97 fiasco. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing about Word 97 is that it was unwilling to save in word 5/95 format. This is something that MS refused to fix for the better part of a year.
In the meantime, any company that bought a new PC was only offered word 97 for the new machine. This meant that, the first time they saved a document that needed to be read anywhere else in the company, all recipients needed to buy the '97 version to read it (much less to edit it). You could save your document in RTF format, but the '97 RTF format was sadly broken.... Back to plan A.
MS did, in time, release an official plugin that allowed you to save in word'95 format (as long as you were willing to work your way thru the warning messages), but I don't believe that it was possible to set '95 as the default save format, so -- sooner or later you'd accidently just 'save', and the next thing you know, your recipients can't read your document.
The end result of this is that MS raked in Billions of dollars in spurious sales by forcing people to abandon all older versions of their word processors. This is part of the way that they cemented their monopoly on the office software market.
_____
Then of course, there's the NT filesystem [sourceforge.net] that is sorely short on public documentation, and almost impossible to figure out. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is entirely uninterested in letting others interoperate with it. In fact, I'm guessing that they put in some strange land-mines just to piss off people trying to use it other than from inside of the most recent versions of Windows.
Also: word reader (Score:2)
Yeah, I remember the Office 95/97 landmine. Got hit by the PPT format cutover about that point to. While revising slides. At the conference. And found I couldn't open my presentation any more.....
Microsoft also created a set of read-only tools for Word, PPT, and Excel. Except....
Under Linux, if you've got a document reader, spurious typing is generally ignored. Microsoft's solution? A fscking popup window telling you "Sorry, you can't edit this document" (or words to the effect). For someone tra
Re:The Word 97 fiasco. (Score:5, Insightful)
It obviously won't repeat itself verbatim, but MS has other ways to do the same thing. There was, for example, the case when Word on OS-X didn't properly support Hebrew. The Microsoft Rep said that it just wasn't worth their time to upgrade it. They still refused when Israel offered to pay for the programmers to do the fix and promise a minimum number of sales to boot.
"Sorry -- No dice. Move to Windows
It wasn't untill Israel awarded a grant to port Open Office to OS-X and seriously threatened to cut off Microsoft's standing PO for the entire government that Microsoft relented and suddenly started negotiating in good faith.
Microsoft is a company that you can trust as far as you can throw them -- and they're big.
hmm (Score:2)
Interoperable.. (Score:5, Funny)
It's like C# being multiplatform... multiple windows platforms...
Embedded fonts... OSS alternative? (Score:2)
But what is stopping Opera or Mozilla from implementing its own truetype embedded font technology? I just don't understand it at all. Fonts already have a protection bit for copyright enforcement. It's not like it will install a virus on your computer -- it's more akin to a cookie.
It's incredibly frustrating to see
Fonts! (Score:5, Funny)
Remind me not to hire you to design a website
.Net refuses to serve same HTML ... argh! (Score:5, Informative)
As we started digging, we started finding lots more stuff like this; for example, tables get a style of "border-collapse: collapsed" by default in IE, which is a tag that IE uses to tighen up table structures (into non-standard measurements) while other browsers ignore the tag. There's no reason for this tag to be there, except to guarantee that tables will look different in IE as compared to other browsers.
The punch line, of course, is that this "feature" can't be turned off. So now we either have to burn a lot of extra effort to validate multiple sets of rendered HTML, or we have to give up alternative-browser compatibility -- which I am sure was the point in the first place.
(few things microsoftie make me seethe, but this one does...)
Re:.Net refuses to serve same HTML ... argh! (Score:2, Informative)
forget webforms
and you will get what you want.
Why do we trust web designers again? (Score:2)
Hergee berger snooger bork (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm tired of Microsoft bashing (Score:2)
Wouldn't that be off topic if done as comments to this article?
Re:I'm tired of Microsoft bashing (Score:5, Funny)
I'm so glad Microsoft brought Opera to my attention! Go Microsoft!!
Re:I'm tired of Microsoft bashing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm tired of Microsoft bashing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm tired of Microsoft bashing (Score:2)
Re:I'm tired of Microsoft bashing (Score:3, Funny)
Like making money, getting away with breaking the law, and software installs are a breeze in windows, just browse the web for a while and software just installs itself without any help.
Re:Actually (Score:3, Informative)
I love the way Verdana looks, but when I make pages using it and switch from a Windows environment to my home Linux environment, all the fonts are the wrong size!
Verdana does suck because of they way in which it is disproportionately sized relative to other font sizes... which is why it is great when small, but it does indeed suck when increased in size.
Re:Actually (Score:2, Informative)
I think you have the right idea about it. Fonts have to be made for specific purposes, and it often takes some careful thinking about which ones to use when, and at what size.
I'm something of a TypeNazi, so I thought it was funny seeing "Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!" in the story. What most people probably don't know is that they were created by the same designer.
Say hello to Matthew Carter [google.com].
Verdana is so aught-one (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Verdana is so aught-one (Score:2)
Lucida (Score:2)
Verdana sort of looks ok and Georgia is damn ugly IMO, I find myself using "Lucida Sans Unicode, Ludica Grande" these days as they work on both Windoze and Macs out of the box and look better than anything else.
Course if it iwas up to me I'd use Arnold Bocklin everywhere. Now you know why it's not up to me.
Re:Actually (Score:5, Informative)
Verdana is a better font, but not for the web. The problem is that it has a higher aspect value than most other fonts. This means that at a smaller size it still remains legible where other fonts may not. It also means that at a normal size, it appears to be quite a bit larger than other fonts.
The problem is that web designers can't specify any particular font and assume that the web browser will honour that request. There are lots of different reasons why a different font may be substituted for the originally requested one.
This means that if a web designer specifies Verdana for small text, another font could be used in its place, resulting in unreadable text. If a web designer specifies Verdana for normal text, people will think that it's ugly because it's too big. There really aren't that many situations where Verdana is an appropriate choice for web designers.
None of this is to say that it isn't a nice font; I personally use it throughout most of KDE. But it's not a good choice for the Web Core Fonts collection.
Opera has had first-hand experience with Microsoft breaking interoperability. At one point, Microsoft were deliberately serving broken CSS to Opera that would cause it to mess up the layout for that one particular browser [opera.com].
Re:Microsoft is not about using standards (Score:5, Insightful)
That is simply not true. From a customer perspective, I would rather have one good proprietary solution that serves my needs than a dozen mediocre but interoperable ones. I only need one at once!
Re:Microsoft is not about using standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft is not about using standards (Score:2)
Ah, but what you'd REALLY prefer (as would we all) is one good solution that serves my needs, but can interoperate with a dozen mediocre ones in case the good solution becomes mediocre or a mediocre solution becomes great in the future. Standards, baby.
Re:Microsoft is not about using standards (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also why ambiguous standards are bad. Anybody else read the little blurb a few years ago about how no browser (Netscape, IE, etc....) passed the standards test completely?
Exactly (Score:2)
RMN
~~~
Re:Opera Compatibility (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Serifs and web font sizes... (Score:2)
Re:Serifs and web font sizes... (Score:2)
I do agree with you to some extent. Sometimes, though, designers decide to sacrifice some functionality to gain some aesthetic value. Everything is a trade-off.