Eli Mitchell

How to make Amazon function normally in Opera

Monday, November 28, 2011 6:59:50 PM

Amazon, opera, identify, incompatibility, mask

Amazon blocks some features on their website from us Opera users. One feature, for example, that is blocked is the "click to preview" feature. Instead of showing the book preview, it will tell you your browser is not compatible. This is an example of a very bad web practice called "browser sniffing" that should have been replaced by feature detection long ago.

Anyway, there is a very simple workaround. Just go to Amazon, right-click on the page and select "Edit Site Preferences..." Go to the "network" tab and under "Browser identification" select "Identify as Firefox". Reload the page and see if the feature is now working. If it is not, then select "Mask as Firefox" instead. Masking should be a last resort as it removes absolutely any trace of the browser being Opera. But, in certain cases, as with Amazon's "click to preview", masking is necessary.

Read more at http://www.cyberstream.us/post/opera-browser-website-incompatibilities-how-to-fix-them

Fix the Web - an exciting new Opera extension project

Comments

Leslie D. MartinLDMartin1959 # Thursday, February 14, 2013 3:15:58 PM

This sort of thing really ticks me off. No business in their right mind would have a person stand at the front door of their store and tell people that they can't shop at the store, or can't go into certain departments, or purchase certain goods or services simply because they don't like the care they drove up in. And the problems created by browser sniffing (or nearly as bad, browser sniffing that is outdated or biased to only one or two browsers) are just as inexcusable on a business web site, particularly for a business as large as Amazon, and with as large an investment and dependence on that web site.

Eli Mitchellcyberstream # Sunday, February 17, 2013 7:49:24 AM

I agree! What's annoying is that once you mask Opera as Firefox, Opera falls under web analytic software's radar, making Opera usage look even more insignificant to Amazon's site managers.