Opera Playground

All in all, I decided to write something here again. I almost lost my passion, but I got to know the young Opera lovers, so I liked to help them if there exists what I can do, even in a small degrees.

Some Japanese who wants to evangelize Opera in our country, translated change log of weekly builds, for the most of the readers here, it means almost nothing though.

Opera recently called for volunteer translators, so if any of you who know more than two languages, along with passions for Opera, might be able to do something meaningful, not only for Opera, but also for yourself, I think.

After Beta testings for a while, Yahoo! Japan opened the new top page since yesterday, 1st of Jan. 2008. It requires wide screen, over 1000px(!), and further worse for us, Opera users, if we turn FtWW on, the main contents are located far below.
But if you try to open that page with Minefield, you can read, though in Japanese, a warning,

To use all functions of Yahoo! JAPAN, you need below environments;
Windows：Internet Explorer 5.5 or above, 6.x、7.x / Firefox 2.0 or above, Macintosh：Safari 2.x

As you see, no Opera is there. We have to try to persuade Yahoo! Japan to add Opera, but they offer us full contents at present, contrary to the above statements It might be lucky for us. Thanks for 'wonderful' technologies.

You can see 3 columns design with Opera, IE or Firefox2, anyways. But their 'wonderful' browser detection rejects Minefield. They perhaps read 'Firefox', not 'Gecko', to recognize 'that' popular browser.
With Minefield, new Yahoo! Japan is 2 colmuns style with other outdated, basic browsers. So some of the users and developers of it started to write about it by now. I can't believe there aren't any Minefield users at Yahoo! Japan though.
Poor design, poor UA detection, and above all, hateful 'Use those enviroments' at site which has the largest number of visitors in this country.
N.B. Yahoo! Japan is independent from yahoo.com or any other yahoo around the world.
[4th, Jan] They have fixed this issue. Now Gecko can show you full contents.

We, Opera Tokyo Office, have taken part in Web 2.0 EXPO 2007 Tokyo last Thursday/Friday. So many people came to our booth, and we did wonderful presentations there. We could display brand new OLPC, which of course had been installed Opera for it inside, Håkon, our CTO brought to Tokyo!
You can see some photo at Choose Opera Japan branch's album.
As you can see, after that event, we moved to our office to join Friday Night Beer, with some guests. Thank you guests who visited our booth, presentations, and Håkon, Jan and Benjamin.