A Blog From Behind the Trenches

It doesn't look like Microsoft is learning from its past mistakes.

Microsoft's "Office Web Apps" will only support IE, Firefox and Safari. This means that they are leaving out support for Opera and Chrome. This is quite strange considering the antitrust troubles Microsoft has gotten itself into by breaking antitrust laws.

Microsoft is also aiming for using Silverlight, yet another proprietary technology controlled by them.

One would think that Microsoft would be eager to show that they are no longer going to abuse their dominant position in one market to affect a different market, but even with antitrust authorities breathing down their necks, their priorities seem to be a bit off.

These priorities seem to be based on the browser situation in the United States. Europe is quite different, however. While Opera's global market share seems to be around 3%, it could be approaching 10% in Europe, which is more than Safari and Chrome combined if one is to believe these statistics.

Perhaps if other browser vendors weren't forced to spend so much time on compatibility issues due to IE's dominance, standards support could be taken to a new level. But designing for browsers rather than standards still seems to be the norm. Even though Microsoft in particular should know better.

Do we need another Opera Bork Edition (and a Chrome Bork Edition while we are at it)?

You may have seen the video where Google asks more than 50 people in Times Square, New York, what a browser is. Most of them basically think a browser is a search engine!

It looks like the various browser vendors have a lot of work to do in order to create awareness around browsers!

Now someone has tried a similar poll in Russia.

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Microsoft claims that IE8 is faster than Chrome and Firefox. The question is if those results are because IE8 is actually faster, or if it's just that most sites are designed to work as smoothly as possible in IE. IE is the dominant browser, after all.

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Over the last few days I've been reading constant references to Google's Chrome browser and how it will eventually find its way to mobile phones. This, according to some people, spells trouble for Opera, since our main source of revenue is the mobile phone market.

I am quite surprised that both journalists and industry analysts seem to have missed the fact that Google already has a mobile browser. It might not be called "Chrome", but it's using the same engine, namely Apple's WebKit. If one were to simplify this a lot, "Chrome" for mobile phones has been available for as long as Google's mobile operating system, Android, has been available.

If a mobile browser from Google would spell trouble for Opera, that should have happened several months ago!

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In my previous post about Google encouraging webmasters to test in all browsers, I may have been a bit harsh. It seems that Google is at least being consistent with its browser discrimination.



There's more on Google's stance on browser discrimination over at the Opera Developer Network. As a sidenote, Microsoft has apparently often been more responsive fixing their issues than Google has when fixing theirs. Food for thought.

According to Google's "Information for web developers" page (emphasis mine):

Internet users have an increasing number of choices for web browsers today, including Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now Google Chrome. Sometimes web pages look and work differently in each browser, so it's important to test your site across all of them to ensure all your visitors can enjoy the experience you've designed.

Thank you, Google! Now let's see if you can practice what you preach, and get all those services working smoothly in Opera at all times.

It's also nice to see Google acknowledging Opera now, as they have mostly failed to do so in their Chrome PR material. They've borrowed heavily from Opera, but have only mentioned Firefox and Safari.