I don't know how many people might use the Opera browser, but I've been reading some news reports over the past week or so that suggest that Microsoft may have been deliberately trying to screw over users of non-IE browsers (particularly Opera) by assigning faulty style sheets to non-IE browsers that visited MSN.com. (This may not have been deliberate, but rather an error -- but it seems awfully convenient.)
At any rate, I just saw a news item about a special Swedish Chef Editition of Opera 7.0 that is identical to the normal version except for one detail: it translates MSN.com content into the characteristic "Bork! Bork! Bork!" language of the Swedish Chef from "The Muppet Show."
A funny idea, I think... Kinda childish and pointless, but still funny. Posted by E. Cartman (Member # 256) on :
It's mudslinging at corporate level (though in the case of Microsoft screwing over non-IE users, there's a precedent).
Identification strings: use them, learn them, love them.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Jag blir s�rad av detta och tycker att man inte borde dra upp gammalt skr�p utan ta nya tag och f�rb�ttra det som redan finns! Till exempel rova.
Posted by E. Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Gij spreekt in raadselachtige Zweedse tong!
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
Identification tags: oh, yeah. Fortunately, one of the benefits of the open-source browsers that I use (currently Apple's Chimera 0.8.2) can accept modifications from thirdy-party developers -- one of which I currently use to allow me to change the browser type and version that Safari identifies itself as. (Chimera Navigator [an offshoot of Mozilla] has this built-in, IIRC.)
What I'm wondering, though, is just why it's necessary to have multiple style sheets -- from the (slightly limited) range of browsers that I can easily set as my identification, it seems that MSN has a default sheet for early browsers, one for IE6, one for IE5 for Mac, another for NS6+... and all of them render the page approximately the same! (Ironically, the best renderings were NOT under the IE label...)
I'm admittedly not a fully-trained webmaster for all the ins and outs of managing the really big sites out there, but the only legitimate reasons for specifying style sheets that I can think of are to compensate either for poor HTML code in the page itself, or for poor rendering by a browser. Now, I *know* that all of today's major browsers can handle W3C-validated code perfectly well. So that eliminates the browser excuse that Microsoft tried to pull. Which leaves sloppy page coding as the only legitimate excuse (aside from MS trying to screw over non-IE users, of course).
On a tangental note, the recognition of browsers is in some ways so strict that Apple had to put the word "Gecko" in its identification string so that it wouldn't be treated as IE.
code:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/51 (like Gecko) Safari/51
Go figure...
The good news is that there's a few more browsers out there, starting to chip away at the stranglehold that IE has. I check my website stats on a semi-regular basis; both hosts I've had over the past 2 years have provided some fairly comprehensive statistics. I've noticed the proportion of non-IE browsers increasing over the past year or so... not a huge gain, but enough for a start.
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