Years and years of “playing nice” and being patient with MS didn’t work. All we got was a bunch of empty promises.

Now the EU could force Microsoft to put up or shut up, and guess what, they felt their wallets burning, because IE8 might just be a huge step in the right direction. And they chose to default to standards compliant mode because of Opera’s complaint. It could cost them a lot of money, so to undermine the antitrust investigation they are showing something to avoind having to pay up again for their illegal practices.

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Regarding the content of your comment, I understand your position that Opera, as a player with a minority user share, can’t afford to annoy users (unlike, unfortunately, Microsoft). I’d like to reiterate that I’m not in an ivory tower, as my job requires me to constantly be updating the bad old websites of the world, the ‘real web’ as you put it. It’s an ugly unpleasant place.

Ultimately, I think we’re barking up the same tree as to what needs to happen (Microsoft needs to keep up with the progress of web standards and not forge its own path), but I think we’ll be in the opposite corners of the room when comes to the methods that should be used to compel Microsoft to change.

# Opera is justified in delaying implementations of
# “new” features because they’re focusing on backwards
# compatibility and not breaking the web.

Opera isn’t “justified”. It is FORCED.

And Opera isn’t focusing on “backwards compatibility and not breaking the web”. It is focusing on working around problems created by another browser which has locked the web to proprietary technologies. That same company can decide to enforce standards, or it can be forced to do so. And sites will have to adapt to that company’s decision. Opera has no power to make sites adapt to it.

# I agree with him completely. I find it comical
# that some of Opera’s employees apparently do not,
# and have yet to hear a compelling argument as
# to why they should be disregarding their CTO’s wisdom.

This is not making sense. Could you rephrase it? It sounds an awful lot like straw man to me.

# I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument as
# to why any smaller browser maker can justify
# their own delays at implementing “new” stuff
# with the same smoke and mirrors and not
# deserve the same treatment.

Because they have to spend huge amounts of resources to work around bugs in Microsoft’s browser, and because Opera is in no position to force sites to adapt to it, while Microsoft is.

# My intended point was that self-improvement is
# a more desirable technique than complaints to
# governmental entities.

That’s easy to say when you don’t have to deal with the real web. You can sit around in your ivory tower and demand that Opera move faster when it comes to open standards. But you are at odds with millions of Opera users who want Opera to work on real web sites.

Opera having to maintain compatibility with IE is not Opera’s doing. It is Microsoft which has abused its monopoly to undermine competition in the market.

Microsoft, as a monopoly, can be forced to “break the web”. What happens next is that website owners will be forced to adapt their sites to the new market situation.

If Opera “breaks the web”, it dies, because no one will adapt to Opera.

If Microsoft “breaks the web” and goes the standards path, sites will be forced to adapt.

Our progress isn’t limited per say by buggy old sites, but more in that if they use browser specific features then we are slowed down by having to reverse engineer the browser in question and implement that feature if enough important sites abuse it and other browsers have implemented it. There have been cases where we have had to move away from the spec as a number of browsers have implemented it in a incorrect way and the incorrect way has become the defacto standard. Microsoft implementing ActiveX, for example, probably causes us as much or more problems than it does hold MS back, as we can’t support those sites that uses it. Many man years are spent by our QA team analysing IE and Mozilla specific extensions to standards. If browsers didn’t do this and we had a free run at implementing standards then things would move faster, but then you could also argue we wouldn’t have things like XmlHttpRequest. I think there may be a standards based alternative in DOM3 but developers never used that, probably due to no other but Opera supporting it.

Thanks as always for the feedback.

This post was mostly in response to Rob G.N.’s commentary on the previous post on the topic, and some of the assertions he makes there. In particular the thrusts of his statements are that Opera’s progress is limited by preserving compatibility with buggy, bad old sites.

My point was that is what the IE team is always saying, and I’m not particularly motivated by it when it comes from either company.

Regarding the three oddball properties, I’ll admit by and large they’re not exactly highly useful. At the time that earlier post was written it was more about the comedy of the situation rather than any genuine displeasure. (I’m aware RGBA colors and Web Fonts are on the horizon, which I’m much more excited for universal support for.)

This post came out more rant-like than I intended. I genuinely believe that Opera is one of the front runners in doing browsers right. I’m also aware that Opera is in fact concentrating on improving its software constantly. My intended point was that self-improvement is a more desirable technique than complaints to governmental entities.

I really just need to get a CSSquirrel strip up with some Opera Valkyries.

No where does backwards compatibility come into not implementing a standard for Opera. We have broke compatibility (to the detriment to our compatibility) to follow the spec and we will do again when we need to. Web Forms 2 is an example that broke quite a ot of backwards compatibility and through our opwn the web work we are paving the way for the affects of that to be lesser for other browsers when they eventually implement it.

Due to vendor prefixes in CSS adding a new part of CSS doesn’t really hurt backwards or forwards compatibility (unless developers use it wrong), it just wastes development work that could go into something that is ready, if we implement too soon. As more designers design for other browsers, it more hurts our compatibility when other browser vendors implement something that is not inline with the final spec (addEventListener bubbling and Firefox spring to mind as a example off the top of my head).

If you look at most specs then Opera will be overall in the lead in implementation or not far behind. There are gaps but we are working to fill them with each successive core release. Core-2.2 will have better standards support than Core-2.1 for example. Håkons complaint is more that MS often haven’t been plugging those gaps, even though they have at least as much resourses as Opera. I’d for one would be very happy if IE had similar standards support than Opera. When you can get to the level of just naming a few features we don’t support (when we do actually even support some of those), then that is a sign we are doing our job. RGBA is now supported, so is HSLA. Web Fonts are in there somewhere. SVG is second to none. Wired listed Opera as having the most HTML5 support. We are the only browser (I think?) to support any of DOM3. we support all the interfaces of DOM2. The selectors API is in there. We tied with Safari for ACID3 support. Our XSLT and XPath impmentation is second to none. We support all of CSS3 color in Core-2.1. We support all of CSS 2.1 except one property/value pair, making us way ahead of any other browser. We support all CSS3 selectors. We support CSS namespaces. This gives us an almost complete coverage in Core-2.2 plus of the CSS WG’s 2007 snapshot, which are the stable modules. It is quite clear from this where we have put our resources in CSS and that we are taking standards as seriously as Håkon mentions in his quote. We will try to deliver the moon on a stick next time though. Which flavour would you like?