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STICKY POST

Introduction

Friday, 23. April 2004, 16:12:37

My journal is Opera-related and technical. It will cover the main obstacles we come across when we use Opera on the Web as it is - the standard violations, the browser incompatibilities, the sniffers and faulty scripts. That is the whole mess a poor browser has to make sense of and believe me, Opera is doing a brilliant job.

40 Comments

MS' Virtualearth claims Opera has no SVG support

Wednesday, 20. August 2008, 19:29:12

, , , ...

As seen in this discussion, the BBC site uses a map from maps.live.com - and all we Opera users get is an error message:

We're sorry but your browser does not support BBC Sport's Olympic map.


Looking into it, first there is some Opera-sniffing from the BBC itself that detects Opera and displays the warning instead of the map.

With that sniffing neutralised, the map loads - but shows the United States, not Beijing. Come one Live Maps, admit you're wrong by several thousand kilometers.. Or?

Not in the mood to admit any fault, the script instead spits out an error laying the blame on us:

JavaScript - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/7493757.stm
Timeout thread: delay 10 ms
Error:
name: Msn.Drawing.Exception
message: Your Web browser does not support SVG or VML. Some graphics features may not function properly.
stacktrace:   Line 1 of linked script http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.1


So, my web browser does not support SVG, eh? Let's have a closer look at how you figured that out..

if(document.all)
         return new Msn.Drawing.VMLGraphic(e,b);
else{if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("KHTML")!==-1)
         return new Msn.Drawing.SVGGraphic(e,b);
var c=0,f=0,g=new RegExp("Firefox/(.*)"),d=g.exec(navigator.userAgent);
if(d&&d.length>=2){
         var a=d[1].split(".");
         if(a){c=a[0];
         f=a[1];
         if(parseInt(c)>0&&parseInt(f)>=5||parseInt(c)>=2)
                  return new Msn.Drawing.SVGGraphic(e,b)

         }
}
throw new Msn.Drawing.Exception(L_GraphicsInitError_Text)


Yes, nothing but browser sniffing.. Not a single attempt at intelligent feature detection. Basically, by claiming Opera doesn't support SVG and can't load the map Microsoft is lying to the BBC and to our users.

20 Comments

Hotmail has class

Thursday, 14. August 2008, 12:09:14

, ,

Hotmail's choice of class attribute for its HTML element if you use Opera to access it just strikes me as very funny.. The output of a 
javascript:alert(document.documentElement.className)
command is:



That's right. In other words 
<html class="Firefox FF_Win FF_M1 FF_D5 Opera">
Is that what you would call exquisite confusion? :confused:

Aside, I hope to have the basic Hotmail working again in Opera 9.2x before the end of the day. After all, what's an insulting class declaration to a browser from the proudly egalitarian Scandinavian peninsula? We're above class, for sure p:

5 Comments

User JS contest time!

Tuesday, 1. July 2008, 12:00:27

,

Have any good ideas for User JavaScripts? Or is there some broken site that you would like to fix but never got around to? It's time to fire up the editors and get coding - the User JavaScript contest is open for entries!

(Hey, look at the gorgeous prize - wish I could take part myself, too bad I'm an insider :-p..).

Keep those user scripts coming and have fun :-D

4 Comments

Release blues

Saturday, 21. June 2008, 20:14:18

,

I'm getting used to this. I've even learnt to expect it and prepare myself mentally. It's still true: releasing something is the most depressing job for somebody doing quality assurance.

So we finally have a new flagship desktop version. The long-awaited Opera 9.5 launched with - I hope - all the hype and thunder we could drum up. Literally thousands of bug fixes since the 9.2x versions, a fancy new skin, new features like getters and setters and Dragonfly that will make much of my work much easier - and yet I can think of few other things than the REMAINING bugs that we should have fixed. It's QA release blues time. Happened every time since Opera 6 final or so.

And with a new release comes new problems. The worst current compatibility issue is a problem with the TinyMCE editor, where legacy versions of TinyMCE will re-arrange your sentences in somewhat unpredictable ways when you press enter. (This is caused by TinyMCE detecting Opera to work around a bug in earlier Opera versions - we've now fixed the bug and unfortunately their workaround still runs and messes things up). To put this problem into the right perspective, TinyMCE is the default editor for Wordpress, and all admin screens in the millions of Wordpress installations out there are now suddenly broken in Opera. Ouch, Sir. What a gotcha!

This is fortunately precisely the sort of things we have browser.js for. There is a fix in already, needs some more tweaking to run in Wordpress' admin screen but I'll get that done. So thank God and Lars Erik for browser.js - when I can throw some fixes in after the final launch, release blues isn't quite as bad as it used to be :smile:.

I'm crossing my fingers that the patch will eventually be robust enough to work with most legacy TinyMCE installations out there. Wish me luck - or even better, tell me where it fails ;-o

21 Comments

extending the web is hard

Friday, 6. June 2008, 18:01:03

, , ,

The Prototype library defines a .replace() method on any element that replaces the contents of that element. The WebForms 2 spec defines a .replace attribute on INPUT type=submit that can be set to replace="values" to make a form submit not replace the entire document but simply update the form contents. You can't give two different things the same name. So if you use Prototype and call someInput.replace() your script will stop with an error in Opera because we support WebForms2 and "replace" is a property and not a method.

The wonderful flexibility of ECMAScript / JavaScript lets script authors define nearly anything and everything just about anywhere in the environment. That's why extending JavaScript is getting so complicated - anything we add to specifications and in browsers risks conflicting with something that an author already added somewhere. ES4 plans to come to the rescue with namespaces but until we get there we'll keep stumbling into problems when we try to improve the web. HTML5, you're overdue and welcome - but proceed with caution..

8 Comments

Employees anonymous are recruitment stars

Saturday, 24. May 2008, 20:07:36

There is a new recruitment video posted both on the desktopteam blog and on YouTube. I notice the comments and feedback are rather mixed. Some commenters think the video is trying too hard to be cool.

I think the main point of the video is easy to miss. The main point is that those people on the screen are genuine employees, not some PR agency cast. They probably came up with those words to describe Opera all by themselves too (knowing some of them I don't think it was scripted.)

Why is that point easy to miss? Because all of them except Håkon are anonymous. The video does not actually tell a casual watcher that these people work for Opera Software!

So the problem with the video is not that it fails to communicate "cool". The problem is that it fails to communicate "genuine". Simply due to the omission of people's names and titles. Someone please tell HR that "employees anonymous" isn't a group the target audience wants to join...

BTW, funny that one of YouTube's "related links" was Royal Opera House recruitment video - which does pretty much the same thing but pulls it off.. :smile:

You should consider joining Opera of course :smile:

5 Comments

nice stack, Firebug

Monday, 19. May 2008, 22:42:14

, ,

One of the nice UI features of Firebug is that it goes to great lengths to give functions a recognisable description.

Sometimes it even goes too far... :

Firebug stack

:smile: p: :smile:

3 Comments

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