Comic Update: Opera’s Rough Edges
November 16, 2009When all else fails, I resort to poking a little at Opera in good jest. I take these sort of risks because Oslo is very far away and the last invasion of North America via the Scandinavian peoples was over a thousand years ago. If anything, it’s far safer than my cheap shots at Microsoft, when my town is less than two hours away from Redmond by car.
Today’s comic is one of those little jabs at everyone’s favorite European browser maker. I’ve got issues with Opera that this comic makes light of (while wishing squirrel snogger and Opera employee Bruce Lawson a belated happy birthday). Yes, Opera is a far smoother experience for modern web features than Internet Explorer. That’s not in question. But I’m getting a bit exhausted by the relatively slow adoption speed of CSS3 features by the browser in comparison to the increasingly popular Firefox and Webkit-based browsers.
Rounded corners are, admittedly, largely a non-issue. If visitors using Opera get square corners in a design, I’ve taken steps to ensure it’s at least a good looking square design. It’s an example, though, of a slew of features that Opera’s failing to keep pace with. Due to this lack of universal browser support (in the modern browsers, at least), It is hard for me to sell adoption of these designs to clients when roughly 1% of a customer’s visitors are getting a bad experience as a result.
Take for example, Jonathan Snook’s text-rotation tutorial. It provides a way (via filters) to get even IE to come to the ballgame with producing vertically-oriented text. Everyone, except Opera, can play with this toy. Even if IE couldn’t, thanks to conditional comments, I could provide a fallback solution for that browser. But as Opera lacks such (and I’m not recommending they adopt conditional comments), there’s no way with just CSS to provide an acceptable fallback that makes the browser not create something hideous with the text out of place. (I’ve concocted a JS-based solution, but I don’t want to have to rely on that to get CSS to work).
Opera’s not alone in the modern browser category in being the last to adopt a given feature (I’m looking at you, Firefox), but there’s definitely a lot of seemingly basic CSS3 techniques that the browser’s fallen behind on. Just because you can wait on adoption, gents, doesn’t mean you need to do so. The future isn’t coming any more slowly, and designers will have to jury rig solutions that would be solved much more cleanly with CSS if you’d keep pace.
Or, even worse, there could be more situations such as when I’ve suggested to some people who’s sites don’t have any notable Opera traffic that they just not sweat Opera support at all. With as small a market base as you have, it’d serve you better to keep pace (rather than not sweat the details, as Microsoft can afford due to its market share).
Curious about a browser’s support for various features? Check out When Can I Use.
> there’s no way with just CSS to provide an acceptable fallback that makes the browser not create something hideous with the text out of place.
Just remember : CSS (like JS) is optional. I often use my own style to view a page. It’s ok if your page looks “hideous” then. But if your text is “out of place”, your design is bad. Use progr enhancement, or at least graceful degr.
I always wondered about the lack of rounded corners in Opera, though your summary at the end was rather surprising I never realized opera was so backward I always assumed they supported the latest CSS standards, guess I need to stop making assumptions.
Sadly, you will always have this problem with the way that the HTML and CSS standards are created. There is no version to target, nor do browser vendors implement features at the same time. Plus, once a browser supports a feature you’ll still have to wait eternally for adoption to be high enough.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have one unified rendering engine, that is able to auto update, handling html and css, and let browser vendors use that as a basis, so that they provide the rest of the UI, history, bookmarks, etc. There should be a oficially sanctioned way to target one specific version of the specification, and if an user is visiting the page with an outdated rendering engine it would prompt to auto update itself.
Then you wouldn’t need to worry about graceful degradation, browser differences and whatnot, wich are all consequences of “seamless forward compatibility”, which is not really as nice as it sounds.
@David – CSS is certainly optional, but any commercial or professionally produced website is making heavy use of it to provide an aesthetically pleasing experience for the site’s visitors. In that context, it’s not an optional tool to the site’s designer. I agree that progressive enhancement/graceful degradation is a great way to make use of advanced features on browsers that support them, and still provide a good experience for those who can’t.
In the case of rounded corners, that’s exactly what I do. But some things, like text rotation, don’t have fallback options for a browser like Opera. This means that if you’re seeking to guarantee a visually appealing experience for all visitors, you can’t make use of the technique. And this is a very bad thing for someone looking forward to the use of these features.
@Arpit Jacob – It’s still better than IE. ;) But yes, I was surprised too at some of the feature support missing.
@VeoSanto – It’d be nice in theory. I admit, I worry about the unexpected costs that would come with a single rendering engine (aka, a single gateway to feature advancement among other things). But there’s always a problem with every solution, it seems.
:) anything is better than IE
@Kyle: look at it this way, WebKit is advancing rendering capabilities like no other browser (transforms, animations, 3d, etc), but those features won’t be put to use until years after, or even never, just because other browsers don’t jump on board. Actually, we’re already bound to a single gateway for features, namely the W3C. It’s just because of the different levels of implementation of each browser that we have this mess.
I propose an open source project, like WebKit, but where everybody’s contribution adds to the web as a whole. This way, browser makers could stop wasting time in reinventing the wheel, and focus on what makes their software special. And authors know exactaly what they can expect in how their pages will be rendered.
This is part of a project of mine, which, if everything goes as planned, will change the web forever. Next to it, HTML+CSS will look like we’ve been living in the stone age :) If you want to have a chat, and want me to tell you more about it, well you have my email address ;)
And by the way, it is VeoSotano, not VeoSanto ;)
Cheers
P.D. How can I have my custom avatar? If I get one, I’ll stop by and add to the conversation more often, I promise :D
@VeoSanto – I pull the avatars from http://www.gravatar.com/. You associate an image with the email address that you use when writing your comment, and it will pull that image instead of the default acorn.
Hey, it’s NOT VeoSanto!!!
VeoSotano. Right. Sorry. I was typing too fast. :)
@Kyle What do you think, how would the webosphere react to a new (and in my view, far superior) technology, deployed as a browser plug-in? Would they opose it just because it is something different than HTML5?
I’m going to let out just a little bit: What I call XHS is a combination of two technologies: a new language whose syntax is derived from CSS, called HSS (Hierarchical Style Sheets) and good ol’ XML for the content. The publishing of the web documents remain plain text files, and it will be an open standard every can code for. The document will be displayed using a browser plug-in, developed by the open source community.
@VeoSotano – Well, to start with, using a browser plug-in as the basis for a new presentational technique is a recipe for disaster for anyone who uses a browser that doesn’t support the plug-in.
I personally am not an expert enough on the topic to say whether such a technology would be superior to the current standards, or even if it was, how easy it would be to learn and deploy. But in general, most good ideas start as crazy ones.
@Kyle – That’s only for the plug-ins that require support to view ANY content. In my plan, since all the content (which, e.g. your search engine spider will be able to read) is written in XML -plain text-, those users who have a browser with no plug-in architecture will still be able to access all the content. Just not the rendering.
Using a plug-in has the distinct advantage that you can support all browsers with a plug-in architecture – heck, even IE6! – and the rendered output will look and behave exactly the same on all plattforms (well, not everywhere. It’s not the same a desktop pc with a large screen or a smartphone with touchscreen, but that will be solved by means of profiles (á la CSS-media rules) and other cool features).
[...] CSSquirrel : Comic Update: Opera's Rough Edges: Kyle Weems [...]
Ohh…the irony, the guys working behind Opera are also behind the W3C CSS Spec, it’s incredible!
Nice comic btw, got a good laugh out of it :D