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16 comments

1. Hilarious.

   Comment by Jesper — Friday, February 14, 2003 @ 12:44 pm

2. Noo und imprufed! Coostumeeze-a yuoor oovn pege-a veet lucel noos, veezeer, und mure-a!

   *giggles*

   Comment by Gina — Friday, February 14, 2003 @ 1:59 pm

3. I forgot to mention this. I’m swedish. :)

   Comment by Jesper — Friday, February 14, 2003 @ 3:17 pm

4. A friend of mine was telling me about this not 30 seconds before I saw your post. How utterly ridiculous is this? Not the Opera end of it, that’s just funny. But who intentionally prevents users from viewing their site? It’s just stupid, and I can’t believe that a company as large as Microsoft would do something so immature.

   Comment by Brock — Friday, February 14, 2003 @ 3:50 pm

5. Opera’s behavior on this issue seems pretty childish to me. 7’s only been officially released for what, a few weeks? I downloaded the non-Borked Windows version today and tried hitting MSN.com… and didn’t see anything strange at all. (I changed my user-agent string from what seemed to be a default of IE6 to Opera 7 first.) The source showed that the MSN.com homepage has been fixed so that it now sends the IE6-compatible CSS file to Opera 7, rather than the default site.css file.

   Since I hadn’t seen what was so terrible before, I checked out Opera 6 for the Mac (couldn’t find a place to download 6 for Windows.) It’s getting sent site.css, rather than the IE6-compatible file, and guess what? It works fine there too! It seems the rendering change (which is not defined for negative values that I know of) was of Opera’s own doing in the 7.0 series… either that or MS went the extra mile and made more than one change to solve the problem.

   A turnaround time for fixing a bug on a newly released browser of 2 weeks or so’s not that bad… especially considering that many Opera users probably don’t hit MSN.com anyway. It seems to me that Opera is trying the “hah hah, just kidding” approach to a pretty blatent overreaction on their part… which is not a very mature attitude for a company that wants respect in the browser market. I hope not to hear any more about this from them or my respect will probably drop to the point where I consider uninstalling it…

   Comment by Wade — Friday, February 14, 2003 @ 9:51 pm

6. This particular incident may seem small in isolation, but MSN does have a history of sniffing User-Agents and denying access to Opera.

   http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2001-October/005658.html

   Comment by Mark — Friday, February 14, 2003 @ 11:13 pm

7. Regarding the .NET-ized MSN debut, I remember the
   “reasons” MSN had for excluding all browsers other than IE. I think it was all a marketing ploy to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of consumers about the reliablilty of browsers other than IE. All along they intended to allow other browsers in after the news of the “non-compliance” had spread.

   Effective? I don’t know. As a tech-head type I have no grasp of the visibility of that kind of news. I see it every day. If the only people it reached were those like myself, Microsoft failed. Browsers not XHTML compliant? Come on. The site wasn’t even compliant. If this kind of news reached your average web user, though, it gave them reason to switch/upgrading, even if the reason was alot of technobable… crafty and evil, the MS folk are.

   It’s hard to beat crafty and evil with humorous and lame, though. It just doesn’t impress me. I already thought Microsoft was somewhat stupid. I at least had some confidence that Opera was not. :-) (I’ll keep trying to think that, but with the whole Safari issue too… it might be difficult.)

   Thanks for your site… it’s quite nice,

   Comment by Wade — Saturday, February 15, 2003 @ 1:17 am

8. Trackback by protocol7

9. Perhaps my opinion of Opera as a company has been unfairly influenced by their tantrum over Safari, but their adolescent whining about Microsoft’s Orchestrated Litany of Lies is a crock of shit.

   I can credit negligent testing on the part of Microsoft’s designers, especially since Opera’s treatment of list elements differs from that of IE (I can quite imagine someone trying a negative-margin stunt to get rid of bullets, for instance).
   I can credit it having been written for the perceived quirks of an earlier version of Opera, and not updated for the newborn and still-bloody Opera 7. I can credit the pragmatic ignorance of Microsoft continue using browser-sniffing and, once again, get their fingers burnt.

   But theorising a campaign of deliberate alienation based on a single CSS malapropism which has now, apparently, been fixed? Then writing a spoof browser to Stick It To The Man?

   Grow up, Opera.

   Comment by Alun David Bestor — Sunday, February 16, 2003 @ 9:16 pm

10. It’s unlikely MSN did this by mistake. Think about it. Do you sniff for the user agent Opera, write a “special” file, and then not check it in, say, Opera? Even if they checked in a different browser the mistake would be obvious. Come on. Either they wrote a modified style sheet without checking it in any browser, they failed to notice a glaring bug (even when pointed out by Opera users and eventually Opera they did nothing), or they did it on purpose. I’m not going to say I know exactly how it went down, but I’m no fool either. Coupled with MSN’s past actions, I have little doubt Opera was targeted.

    The reason Opera raised hell is because their users raised hell. Opera users complained to MSN and MSN did nothing. Opera contacted MSN and they did nothing. Opera stuck it to MSN in public and MSN fixed the problem in record time. Fancy that! With no public statement, either. I’d think they were caught doing something dirty if I didn’t know better. (After all, who’s more honest than MSN?)

    The Bork edition is Opera’s way of giving MSN the finger. It’s about time.

    Comment by Juhn Looees — Monday, February 17, 2003 @ 5:04 am

11. Fantastic. This is really what had to be done.

    Comment by Anonymous — Monday, February 17, 2003 @ 9:43 am

12. I’m sure MSN are all evil and everything; but if it was an innocent bug, it’s not all that unreasonable that it took a while to get fixed.

    Large websites have longer release cycles than your average weblog.

    A $big_site type place I do work we do weekly releases, but changes are usually planned, implemented and QA’ed over several weeks.

    - ask

    Comment by Ask Bjoern Hansen — Monday, February 17, 2003 @ 10:04 am

13. Right.

    http://people.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/07/
    Read that. Read the note at the top. Carefully.

    According to the article at http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/, the offending stylesheet served up to Opera is called ’site.css’. In this article, Opera claims that “Opera 7 is explicitly instructed to move content off the side of its container thus creating the impression that there is something wrong with Opera 7″. Why do they claim this? Because when they spoofed the browser-sniffer with a different user-agent string they got a specifically customised stylesheet for the browser they were spoofing as (eg ’site-all-nav6.css’) that didn’t include the offending rule.

    ’site.css’, as compared to ’site-all-nav6.css’? That didn’t sound very Opera-7-specific, orchestrated-smear-campaign to me. And indeed, Opera state in http://people.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/07/ that Opera 6 (and 7, until MSN fixed their sniffer) receive the same outdated stylesheet that IE 3 does. Microsoft wrote a hack into a default stylesheet to work around an IE3 bug and, because they didn’t update their browser-sniffer properly to pick up the Opera user-agent string, Opera wasn’t getting an override stylesheet like the other browsers were. I imagine this ugly display error didn’t show up in Microsoft’s testing of the site because Opera, version 7 and below, *sends an IE user-agent string by default*. Most Opera users would never have seen this display error in the first place!

    Yes, MSN shouldn’t have been using browser-sniffing. Yes, since they did, they should have catered for Opera’s browser and Opera’s ego (”classifying [Opera 6] along with the outdated MSIE3 is an insult”) for those occasions when Opera actually identifies itself as Opera. Yes, they certainly shouldn’t have left a hack for a 7-year-old browser in a default stylesheet.

    Call me a corporate running-dog lacky, but I can stomach Microsoft’s incompetence in this matter. What I cannot stomach is Opera’s Napoleon complex peddling this into a deliberate conspiracy.

    Comment by Alun David Bestor — Monday, February 17, 2003 @ 10:04 pm

14. Eating One’s Own Words Dept.

    After testing in Opera 6, and more reading of the initial report at http://my.opera.com/dev/discussion/openweb/20030206/ without my Slashdot Alarm Glasses on, I ought to retract my previous statements. No matter what user-agent was set, Opera (6 and 7) will both include the Opera version at the end of the UA string; and no matter what user agent was set, the browsers were always receiving the bad code.
    The string “Opera” is being deliberately tested for on MSN, as their “Oprah” test proves, which means someone made the conscious decision (not the unconscious oversight) to send Opera site.css and nothing else.
    I’ll guess I’ll flip a coin to decide whether it was malevelont incompetence or deliberate sabotage ;)

    Comment by Alun David Bestor — Tuesday, February 18, 2003 @ 4:20 am

15. What astounds me is that there were enough opera users going to MSN to warrant anything. Compare the sentence “Ferrari have responded to complaints from their owner group by installing a gear that enables them to travel comfortably at 10 miles per hour.”

    They must have been slumming.

    Comment by Anonymous — Tuesday, February 18, 2003 @ 8:04 pm

16. Trackback by quotidian

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