doom9.org hates Opera browser

[lighty]

Khm... I am using Opera for quite some time now and at the moment I'm using version 7.23. However- every time I try to access any of the guides- middle frame simply reloads main page.

I tried this also at my friends PC and again Opera cannot open guides.

So... it is now a matter of honor... does Doom9 hates Opera or what?
:confused: :sly: ;)

[scharfis_brain]

just press F12 and disable
Java or Javascript.

(sorry for this unprecise answer but I am always forgetting which one to disable)

[lighty]

Thx!

Solution you suggested helped. :cool:

But stil I am wondering why most of the webmasters use some IE tricks that works fine on IE but screw up other browsers? :sly:

[Neo Neko]

Because unfortunatly since IE is forced on most people that is what they use. Most of them don't know there are alternatives or why they should use them. I am working on my spare time to fix some of the foybles on the site such as rendering differences etc. Speeking of which back to work. I was already going to look at the tables etc for the guide page. Perhaps I should try to tweak the JS as well. I have noticed that the home page behaves strangely in konqueror as well. So I am looking to track that down. Any Mac users with Safari handy to voice your experiences?

Unfortuantly most of the problems are due to Internet Explorer centric design. But what are you going to do if that's what people use. Ofcourse bug everyone to death about alternatives. :devil: Doom9 himself has been in kind of a love hate relationship with Mozilla and Firebird. He likes them but he keeps finding little annoyances. :P Perhaps we should get a pot together and offer a bounty ala Shuttleworth (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html) to fix such things as the line wrap bug etc.

You have to get the word out. The fewer people using IE the better then net will likely get. If you are a web master or know one personally tell them to get the word out and let their visitors know. Something perhaps like the old button campaign. Only this time it could be "This Page Best When Viewed With a Non-Internet Explorer browser". Cause at this point I don't care if you use Gecko, Opera, or Konqueror because they all do a good job. IE has just gotta go. The next revision of IE will be 7.0 but you will only get it when you purchase the next version of Windows. That version is not likely to be out untill 2006. Almost three years from now. Add another 5 years to that before it becomes the most common version of IE on the net. And that is just a conservative estimate. IE as it stands now has the internet in a virtual stranglehold of stagnation for almost the next decade easily! And that is assuming Microsoft actually fixes anything rather than add new features that don't work or that nobody wants.

[Doom9]

I'm writing this in Mozilla Firebird. Every time I have made a change in either design/layout or scripting, I have tested the site with the most recent IE, Mozilla and Opera and it did work every time. Though, with Opera one can never really be sure. As it is, new builds constantly break and fix something in the JavaScript department.. one time it does work, another it's back to square one. So, you cannot resonably expect me to go changing a script every time a new Opera comes out. Logic would call for a browser replacement rather than a script replacement, because it works just fine in the other two(with FB that's 3) major browsers.

I have even tested my site in Safari a couple of times and haven't noted any problems either.

So, if you ask me personally, yeah, I don't like Opera a lot. As a user I don't like the UI and the ads, as a webmaster I don't like that they constantly change parts of the program that make it display my site differently. But those javascripts are most certainly not tailored such that they make Opera fail. They were tested and found to be working. They do also work in the number one stickler for standards aka mozilla so for me that's a sign that this script is not that bad.
If you have a version of the javascrip that works better with Opera without breaking compatibility with IE and Mozilla/Firebird you're welcome to submit it.

[mf]

I find that when a page works in both Gecko* and IE, it works. You can add optional W3C compliancy for the nitpickers, but that's it. Anything beyond that is just browser's fault. There is a Gecko browser for just about every OS, so I don't think theres a problem.

* Gecko is the render engine of Mozilla, Firebird, Galeon, Camino, etc.

[lighty]

@Neo Neko
Actualy new build of IE is due to be released in WinXP SP2 (or at least that's what M$ is claiming). It should add pop-up killers and some more little advancements.:rolleyes:



@Doom9
I like Opera because it has very fast rendering engine, it has a small RAM footprint and of course tabbed view. The funny thing is that doom9.org is one of the rare pages where it uderperforms. The problem I am talking about is that a lot of webmasters use IE hacks to makes it look better but it usualy breaks compatibility so if everybody would use completely compliant code I think there would be no problem. Same problems can often be found on warez sites where a lot of functionality is gone if IE is not used (or to be honest- if any kind of filtering is used) because they use IE hacks and tricks to make it all work.
I don't like Firebird because it is slower on my machine and has bigger RAM signature. But I guess it's just a matter of taste.:p



@mf
w3c compliancy should be on the top of the priority list and then faults could be pinned down on faulty browsers. For example FrontPage for a long time produced extremely IE oriented pages that represented a problem for other browsers to render- I am not sure what's the situation now but it says something about M$ politics. :angry:

[Latexxx]

Originally posted by lighty
Khm... I am using Opera for quite some time now and at the moment I'm using version 7.23. However- every time I try to access any of the guides- middle frame simply reloads main page.

I tried this also at my friends PC and again Opera cannot open guides.

So... it is now a matter of honor... does Doom9 hates Opera or what?
:confused: :sly: ;)

Do you mean that the main page loades every time you trie to access a guide just by putting url on the box or opening links on new windows? I have that problem.

[mf]

Originally posted by lighty
@mf
w3c compliancy should be on the top of the priority list and then faults could be pinned down on faulty browsers. For example FrontPage for a long time produced extremely IE oriented pages that represented a problem for other browsers to render- I am not sure what's the situation now but it says something about M$ politics. :angry:
W3C compliancy is so damn picky it's hard to comply. For instance, harmless scrollbar CSS is incompliant. Sure it is, but browsers that don't support it just ignore it, it's not like it'll break page rendering. And if it does, it's the problem of the browser, because browsers are required to ignore unrecognized tags and properties, to retain backwards compatibility with older browsers. So it's just little nitpicking. W3C are so keen on their standard they make it almost impossible to retain compliancy. I made my site (mf.xrs.net (http://mf.onthanet.com)) compliant, but only using a nasty trick that puts the task of scrollbar colouring in the hands of javascript instead of CSS, and since W3C can't and won't check javascript, it passes it through as compliant. Also, they're abolishing old tags and properties in new versions of HTML, since a short while now. <font> and <basefont> are now invalid HTML 4.01 strict tags. It should be done with CSS. So much for backwards compatibility. I just stick to HTML 4.01 Transitional instead, because W3C have granted me the right to use backwards-compatible tags, that I prefer over using CSS (I'm not too keen on CSS so I just don't use it if I don't have to). Next thing you know they're gonna make the <table> tag invalid XHTML 2.0 or some crazy thing like that. They're just making a fool out of themselves. That's why it's just better to stick to the two major HTML rendering engines instead of some lame W3C compliancy checker. After all, compatibility is for making things work across browsers, not to piss HTML writers off, or to discourage them in writing HTML the way they know works for them, and forcing them to learn and use these crazy standards that will be abolished after a few years anyway.
Sidenote: I actually had a home-made W3C incompatible badge on pages, for some time, and I had it on there with pride. :D

[vhelp]

@ lighty,

Can you tell me which Guide you were browsing and where ??

I'd like to give my v5.0 a try and see if it too, suffers.

Thanks,
-vhelp

[Doom9]

it works if you normally navigate the site. But if you try the shortcut (say http://www.doom9.org/guides.htm), then you'll get back to the index page. It doesn't stop you from clicking on the guides link and get there though.

[smiller667]

Just to illustrate doom9's point, clicking the link he gave in Opera 7.21 will just load the guides frame (without the navigation frame), following the links to the individual guides will NOT load the main page.

I like Opera for its rendering speed, esp. for tables-contaminated pages (it is significantly faster than mozilla/firebird there), but it still crashes too frequently for my taste.

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by lighty
@Neo Neko
Actualy new build of IE is due to be released in WinXP SP2 (or at least that's what M$ is claiming). It should add pop-up killers and some more little advancements.:rolleyes:

If the popup killers work anything like IE's cookie management(IE not at all) what then? It's not like they are gonna fix it anyway. A new build is not a new version in any event. It does not answer any of the bugs that have existed in IE since 1998 till today. And it does nothing to update the DOM or CSS compliance. Add to that I am sure there will be no updated PNG handling which is really to bad for you IE users cause I use it lots. No updated Javascript implementation. But MS has not updated that for many many years. OTOH Netscape and Mozilla has. But MS is more about proprietary extensions that only they can use. Add to that the fact that MS is still after almost 5 years not going to fix, update, or even release a Java VM for their platform. Sun has been quite gracious about doing MS's work for them in this arena. But since MS still hides API secrets and actively blocks or hinder competitors technologies it will never be what it could be. We don't need .net. If Microsoft would only release a working java VM and not a lame farsical attempt at one this future of the internet they talk about coulda been here years ago. I am gonna cut it right there. I don't wanna go off on a rant. But you see where I am going. MS has no intention of fixing anything they don't control.



Originally posted by lighty
@Doom9
I like Opera because it has very fast rendering engine, it has a small RAM footprint and of course tabbed view. The funny thing is that doom9.org is one of the rare pages where it uderperforms. The problem I am talking about is that a lot of webmasters use IE hacks to makes it look better but it usualy breaks compatibility so if everybody would use completely compliant code I think there would be no problem. Same problems can often be found on warez sites where a lot of functionality is gone if IE is not used (or to be honest- if any kind of filtering is used) because they use IE hacks and tricks to make it all work.

In Doom9's defense even though most of this was designed in dreamweaver and uses IE as the model for it's look and feel it could be much worse than it is. Doom9 has done quite well so far at avoiding any major snags. All the savings and tweaks I offered him were based on extensive CSS layout usage and a more specific layout specification. Running several of the pages through the W3C HTML validator turns up no fatal errors or even great warnings. No mor than many other sites I have seen.

Originally posted by lighty
@mf
w3c compliancy should be on the top of the priority list and then faults could be pinned down on faulty browsers. For example FrontPage for a long time produced extremely IE oriented pages that represented a problem for other browsers to render- I am not sure what's the situation now but it says something about M$ politics. :angry:

Frontpage is still a bastian of proprietaryness. From broken URI generation, it's ability to bloat even a simple page to 20X it's propper size with missuse of non breaking spaces, VB script, nonstandard file extensions, use of a windows specific code page for rendering of foriegn or accented characters that render wrong when used with a standard code page or non MS-Browswe. It is a prety sad state. Most people will tell you I am a stickler for standards. Or at least a standard way of doing things. Complete adherance would be nice but is more than is really reasonably expectable. To that end usually the one that handles the standards the best gets my pick. But some standards are more important in everyday use than others. And just to show you how up MS is on those important standards for instance they have not really updated any standard CSS elements for years. Elements which give you better control of page layout and flow. But they have however given us proprietary extensions that let us do things like blur text to an un-usable state or other useless graphical manipulation in the browser dynamically. Oppera tries even though they often fall short. Seems as if nothing is going to move MS.:o

[mf]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
Add to that I am sure there will be no updated PNG handling which is really to bad for you IE users cause I use it lots.
Actually, since IE 6 there is now real PNG handling. Just load this page (http://mf.creations.nl/png-webfx/) in IE6 and see.

[Latexxx]

Originally posted by mf
Actually, since IE 6 there is now real PNG handling. Just load this page (http://mf.creations.nl/png-webfx/) in IE6 and see.

But it still requires special css tricks.

[mf]

Originally posted by Latexxx
But it still requires special css tricks.
So? If it works, it works. Just like AVI VBR MP3.

[Latexxx]

Originally posted by mf
So? If it works, it works. Just like AVI VBR MP3.

For example I can't upload an avatar having png transparency because I can't change the source code of a board which I don't own. I can't even put a png with transparency to my signature because it looks like crap using ie(I tested it). The ie's implementation just doesn't follow the standard. It is something like painting text to your car to be allowed to drive on a freeway. It doesn't make sense that Microsoft just can't support png images like they are ment to be used!
Also: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmf.creations.nl%2Fpng-webfx%2F&warning=1&profile=css2&usermedium=all

[mf]

Originally posted by Latexxx
Also: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmf.creations.nl%2Fpng-webfx%2F&warning=1&profile=css2&usermedium=all
VBR MP3 in an AVI also isn't compliant, but it does work :D.

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by mf
VBR MP3 in an AVI also isn't compliant, but it does work :D.

It's still apples and oranges. VBR MP3 in AVI will work more or less ok even in non-MS decoders. There is not much required to make it work most times. Not so with PNG. Even the web-fx page and it's css code which I have known of for years is more work than it should be to support PNG. The PNG libraries are there for MS to use with only slight moddifications. It just does not suit them to do it or allow it to be done. Oh and even with the webfx code IE will still screw up my avatar. :devil: It's such a tiny thing to ask that MS fix it. But in their eyes it is like asking them to stop being themselves. Therefore they have not fixed or even touched the issue over the last 5 years. Because it is not as of IE6 that you could do the web-fx trick. IIRC the DOM extension that web-fx uses was introduced in late IE4 service packs and has always existed in IE5 not just IE6. But all that does is really make you want to ask the question why MS has done it the way they did. MS picture and fax viewer handles PNG images fine. So why not IE? I thought MS was all about integrating everything in everything. So why not integrate the MS image and Fax viewer in IE? The answer is simple. PNG is an open standard that anyone can and have implemented. Microsoft has no control over it. GIF needs replacing and Microsoft is working on a replacement. Not only that they are also working on an even more proprietary Macromedia Flash replacement. As if flash was not rather proprietary to begin with. Microsoft has the largest controll over most peoples browsing experience. And they have such spin masters working for them that they can make it look like its PNG's fault that IE doesn't support it. Or at the verry least play it down massively. MS needs a swift kick in the pants or its bottom line to make it do anything beneficial or usefull.

IE has never had propper PNG support and likely never will. All that is proably holding it back is one or two lines of code that MS will not change.

[mf]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
Because it is not as of IE6 that you could do the web-fx trick. IIRC the DOM extension that web-fx uses was introduced in late IE4 service packs and has always existed in IE5 not just IE6. IE has never had propper PNG support and likely never will. All that is proably holding it back is one or two lines of code that MS will not change.
Actually, the code on that page (http://mf.creations.nl/png-webfx/) doesn't work with IE 5.5. Could be you need extra stuff to make it work with IE4/5 though, this code is just the stuff I got from Tronic. I haven't really investigated in the web-fx thing.

[Neo Neko]

The code comes from here -> http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html . In any event nothing you can say changes anything. MS does it wrong period. Explain the purpose of having two different methods of handling PNG in the same program. One method which is the standard method for every other browser on the market handles it wrong. The second method wich is IE specific and does not work at all in any non-IE browsers handles them correctly. Why not simplify the code and take out the non working code and substitute the working code for both methods. You will notice that the last sentance was a rhetorical question. Because I know the answer. There is only one answer. Microsoft hates PNG. They want to make it dificult to use so that few people will. But if they refused to support it outright even people like you would be whining about them. But if they support it at all. Even if it is a 100% proprietary way they can keep a large majority including yourself from getting to testy about it and at the same time give the impression that PNG is buggy and not worth using to the public at large. It is the typical MS response to non-ms technologies. They did it with java, javascript, css, html even! And Microsoft even claims to own the pattent on core CSS technologies. :lol: And people wonder why some people hate microsoft.

[thoralf]

regarding the doom9 vs. opera issue one more time: i thought that referrer logging should be pretty much standardised (see ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2616.txt)?
I remember that opera had a bug concerning referrer logging, but this was in version 5 or so and should have been fixed by now ... As for opera's javascript-support: yeah, sometimes it sucks, but it pretty much sticks to the dom now.