Hallvord R. M. Steen

Yahoooooooooooooooo!

Monday, 14. November 2005, 23:11:05

I have a picture of thousand words, it speaks volumes about the unjust web.

Watch the animated comparison between the code Opera gets from Yahoo Mail and the code IE gets. See the full dinner of HTML and JavaScript that is sent to IE versus the meagre crumbs and tap water they serve Opera. Yahooooo for blatant browser discrimination!

a sudden misstep while dancing with bloggervar arguments; in function body ignored in IE and FireFox

Comments

Nixer # 15. November 2005, 00:12

I gave up after two and a half thousand lines of code for IE and about six hunderd for Opera. Incredible.

lsaplai # 15. November 2005, 01:32

Awfull!

Now, the real question is: would the yahoo page work in Opera if it served the full code?

TreeGo # 15. November 2005, 04:31

Maybe it's this simple: Yahoo doesn't trust Opera's capabilities.

As Isaplai is asking, is Yahoo correct if that is their position?

Do they discriminate this way against Firefox, also?

feldgendler # 15. November 2005, 05:00

That's what UA spoofing and user JS are for.

janbar # 15. November 2005, 05:13

I think your animated thing is buggy, coze it's neverending send requests to your site, after that show is ended.
Opera 8.50 .

Greetings,

janbar.

)

PS. Amount lines of code is 3059 for IE and 1260 for Opera.

pholie # 15. November 2005, 06:36

OMG, we're in in 2005. Don't they know it? All current browsers should be able to deal with complex javascripts. Why discriminating?!

hallvors # 15. November 2005, 11:45

Isaplai asks: would the full version work, if served to Opera?
In Opera 8.5: partly (except the rich text editor functionality). In Opera 9: yes, as far as I can see it should work. They may have to slightly modify any browser sniffing used in the script, but that's easy.

Of course, there may be bugs in Opera that would cause problems but by not giving us the script, Yahoo prevents us from finding these bugs and fixing them.

hallvors # 15. November 2005, 12:04

janbar: when the animation is ended, it should replace itself with a big PNG picture of the entire code. I'm not sure what the bug you saw was. However, I have changed the end of the animation because I decided that the full, zoomed-out picture is too large and will slow down Opera too much, so now the page should just say "The end" and stop. Thanks for reporting a bug in my script, whatever it was :-)

Lockhart # 15. November 2005, 12:38

Well, I think it's an appropriate measure if the current Opera doesn't support all of the omitted codes since the quality of service is very important.

Anyway, I don't care at all for I don't turn on javascript while I use YahooMail. SIMPLE IS THE BEST! lol

hallvors # 15. November 2005, 15:35

Lockhart: instead of using server-side sniffing the script itself could be written to detect what the browser supports. That way, autocomplete of contacts would work right now in Opera 8.5, and when Opera 9 is released the rich text editor would automagically start working for users who upgraded Opera. It is better and requires less maintenance than server-side assumptions based on browser name.

janbar # 15. November 2005, 22:46

I just wonder, if it was because of my antyads plugin in my firewall... ;] Nevermind, if it's work now, then very good.

Greetings,

janbar.

)

CrazyTerabyte # 23. November 2005, 01:56

Maybe you should use "pngcrush -brute" to compress better all PNG images. For example, I got 17.27% reduction for ycomp067.png image (from 22472 to 18591 bytes).

One more thing: although your page shows exactly what is the message, it is pretty boring to watch. Maybe some interactivity could be added, or some button/something to speed it up.