Re: Why no Opera?
Ben Finney wrote:
> Felipe Sateler <fsateler@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Ben Finney wrote:
>> > Again, I don't see what's preventing people from using [other web
>> > browser] software if they want to.
>>
>> Maybe a significant amount of sites that only work with IE
>> (unavailable on linux, at least without wine) or Firefox?
>
> If that's still true, I don't see it. I surf with my User-Agent set to
> an informative string that, if read, encourages the reader to observe
> W3C standards and stop obsessing over User-Agent [0]. In other words,
> the site has no idea which web browser I'm using.
This doesn't necessarily have to do with the User-Agent string. Just try a
Javascript-crippled page and see what I mean. For reference, my last pain
was my government's Ministry of Education's web site[1] that wouldn't let
me get a student id with konqueror.
>
> In the last five years, surfing countless thousands of pages, I've
> encountered maybe a dozen that refused to work with an unknown
> browser. In the last two years, I can't recall *any* sites that did
> so. No doubt they exist, but IME, it's far from "a significant
> amount".
Again, it's not about denying access. It's about pages not rendering
correctly (which is a serious pain sometimes).
>
> If the pages don't *render* properly in non-mainstream browsers,
> that's merely a bug to be fixed, and doesn't speak to a monoculture.
Well, I'd say it does speak of a monoculture, because there is no need for
the webmaster to actually fix the page, since "nobody" uses anything other
than firefox.
And don't try to downplay this because of pages "only" not rendering
correctly. Web browsers are meant to render pages, so if they don't do it
correctly, it's not minor.
[1] http://pases.mineduc.cl (in spanish)
--
Felipe Sateler
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