Slightly ajar

It’s not a full fledged!

What does the Chief Lizard Wrangler herself, Mitchell Baker, have in common with the Iraqi Information Minister? Well, judging by her recent interview with ninemsn then her spinning of the truth comes a close second. Not so far off Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field about full HTML browsers.

Mitchell Baker: Oh well all of them are difficult to shoehorn onto a mobile device, so we should be clear about that. Opera has done a pretty good job of getting something useful on to a mobile device, but it's not a full fledged [sic] and doesn't have the capabilities of Firefox.

I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is talking about Opera Mini. Maybe that doesn't have all the features of Firefox, it is true, but that isn't the point. It is designed to work on almost any phone, and also compress data traffic so it is more economical to run, and faster to boot. We also have some exciting things in store for Opera Mini.

But the point is, that Mitchell conveniently overlooked, is we already have a tabbed browsing, Acid2 passing (it passed before Firefox), widget enabled web browser for mobile called Opera Mobile. This includes the full desktop rendering engine, is stacked with features, and can run in desktop mode like the Nokia and iPhone browsers. Except for extensions (which are probably not as useful as on desktop), I don't see what it lacks that Firefox provides. It is also available today. But we certainly welcome the competition in the mobile space, as we believe in the history and future of our innovation. Innovation that is unsurpassed in the browser space. Mozilla have talented people, so the competition should be fun.

You may remember if you've been following my blog that a bug in the way other browsers implement addEventListener causes Opera problems in many web sites as they assume the broken behaviour. I updated that post to mention that Geoffrey Garen at Apple has reported to me that they have fixed this in WebKit. The issue has also been reported here in the Mozilla bug tracking system, and Jonas has stated that they will also fix this bug.

What does this mean for Opera? Well initially nothing, as all the broken scripts will still be broken, however once the browsers start rolling out with these fixes in place all new browsers will break on these scripts. The authors will begin to notice what we've been telling them all along and they will have to fix their scripts or not work at all in any new version of the browsers that support this method.

I'd like to thank both Apple and Mozilla for looking into this issue. The browser is quite a unique market where even though we are rivals, there is a lot of friendly co-operation between vendors and generally very little hostility. The WHATWG is a good example of this cross browser co-operation. While everyone wants to be the best browser, with the best standards support, no one will use them standards unless a majority of the other browsers also support it (unless your name is IE). Therefore you are in a strange situation where you want your rivals to improve their product so that people will actually start using the cool new feature you've just added. However strange this is, it is good for the industry and good for users as co-operation pushes the web forward and keeps it from splintering further into many single vendor solutions