Opera files complaint — an open letter to the Web community

Opera.com | 2007-12-13 | Håkon Wium Lie, CTO, Opera Software

[ReignOfError]

“Nothing annoys me more than running into a Web site that is IE only.”

Do you really see this as a Microsoft problem?

I do, in part. Microsoft, rather than abide by accepted standards, has repeatedly introduced its own. And because of its dominant position in the market, a number of wrong-headed Web developers have built sites for IE only, not bothering to test on other browsers, or even putting in a browser-detect javascript to lock out other browsers.

Should Microsoft stick to open standards? Yes. Should developers write standards-compliant code and test it on multiple platforms and browsers? Yes. Is this "should" something the courts can and should enforce? I don't see how.

Fortunately, IE-only sites are becoming less and less common. Security concerns led a lot of Windows users to switch to Firefox, Macs OX and Linux market share is growing, and anyone with a lick of sense can see that you don't want to slam the door in the face of potential customers, when it's just as easy to code to accepted standards instead of a single browser.

Even if IE/Windows has 90% of the eyeballs -- and I don't think it ever got that high -- who wants to drive off 10% of its customer base if it's easy to avoid?

[MarkL]

Some businesses who are tied to Microsoft products have some very serious problems. There's a major, nation-wide company that does all their business through web based applications that in-house developers had written. That was all well and good until XP came out. You see, their apps required the use of Microsoft's virutal machine (the M$ version of Java.) As you may or may not know, Sun, who owns Java, sued Microsoft, because M$ the Microsoft version wasn't compliant with the specs laid down by Sun. Because Sun claimed that M$ broke the license agreement, they sued, and Microsoft lost. The judgment stated that M$ was no longer allowed to distribute their VM.

Well guess what. Since the Microsoft VM wasn't compliant with the Sun Java standards, applications that are designed to work with the MS VM will often times NOT WORK with Sun's Java. This is the case with this company. Although I was eventually able to find the installable files on the Internet, and it can be installed on XP, this doesn't bode well for the future.

Mark