Slightly ajar

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