Here’s a surprise: web standardista extraordinaire Molly Holzschlag is now working with Microsoft to promote web standards within the organization.
Improving interoperability, especially at high-profile services like many of Microsoft’s, is critical to the future of the web. I can only hope that the emphasis on standards will feed into the design goals for Internet Explorer 8—and that IE8 will be released before Windows XP drops from mainstream to extended support in 2009.
In an interview at Opera Watch last week, Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner responded to the eternal question: with less than 1% of global marketshare, why should web developers make the effort to support Opera? His response demonstrates another perspective on the numbers:
I believe we have something like 10 – 15 million active desktop users. That is actually quite a lot of people.
If you try to think about it, the place that I’m come from is Iceland. I was born in Iceland, that’s three hundred thousand people – we have a lot more. The place I live is Norway – we have a lot more. Actually if you look at it, the US has about 300 million people that live here, 50 states, about 6 million in each state on average. So which states have people that you would like to ignore?
He goes on to add that Opera Mobile is installed on 40 million mobile phones, with an additional 7 million people actually using Opera Mini. And then there are devices like the Nintendo DS and Wii…
Going by 2005 numbers, only four states have 15 million people or more: California (36M), Texas (23M), New York (19M), and Florida (18M). So take the 10–15M desktop users, the 7M Opera Mini users, and even 10% of the 40M mobile install base, and you’re looking at 21–26 million—the equivalent of the population of Texas.
Put that way, it doesn’t seem so small.
If you’re already supporting Firefox, in most cases the changes to support Opera 9 are minimal. The recently-launched Opera Developer Community has has tools, articles, and other resources to help build cross-platform sites.
Unless, of course, you don’t mind writing off a potential audience the size of Texas.
Amazon.com’s search site, A9, has scaled back drastically. The rewards program is gone, as are bookmarks and history. They’ve even discontinued the A9 toolbar.
This of course brings up questions about some of the site integration technologies that they developed. OpenSearch has already taken on a life of its own, and in fact the new A9 seems to be mostly an OpenSearch aggregator. But what of SiteInfo? Continue reading
Microsoft is really pushing for people to make sure their websites and apps are compatible with IE7. Apparently this is a real concern for a lot of people who relied on certain proprietary features, bugs, and quirks in IE6. I guess they figured they wouldn’t have to worry about future versions. (Hmm… I wonder where they got that idea?)
The fact of the matter is, I’m not worried. I tested my personal sites and the sites I’d built for work months ago, using the IE7 betas, and more recently with RC1. I made a couple of minor changes to some stylesheets, but that was about it.
Why? I’ve been writing standards-based code for years. I validate it from time to time, and I test to make sure it works in the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari as well as IE. So the code was already portable.
Plus, anything new I’ve built since January has been designed with IE7 in mind from the beginning.
Most of the changes were to workarounds for IE6. Either stopping them from running on IE7 (if the bug was fixed), or keeping them running on IE7 (if it was done using a CSS hack).
I just read an interesting post from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team on The IE7 User-Agent String. This statement in particular illustrates a problem not unfamiliar to Opera users:
There are a few remaining sites which fail to recognize IE7 because they are performing exact string matches to look for specific IE version strings. Those checks will need to be removed or updated to accommodate IE7.
Yes, you read that correctly: there are websites out there using bad browser sniffing code which will send the wrong code to Internet Explorer 7. In fact, they go on to say that they’ve released a tool which will let IE7 pretend to be IE6!
To enable you to workaround any remaining sites that block access to Internet Explorer 7, we developed the User Agent String Utility. The utility comes in the form of a small executable that opens an IE7 instance that sends the IE6 user agent string. It also provides a mechanism for you to report problem web sites to Microsoft so that we can follow up with the affected site owners.
I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude, but it also points up just how bad a strategy browser sniffing can be when done thoughtlessly: It effectively builds an expiration date into your website after which even the browser you designed it for will run into problems.
*This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.
