Opera Software is building a team of “web evangelists” whose job it is to find sites that do not display correctly in Opera and are not standards-compliant, and then email the site owners. They are sending emails with specific tips on how to fix HTML, CSS or other issues that don’t make sites compliant. Opera has always been a strong advocate for web standards, and this initiative is good for not only Opera but standards support on the web in general.
On the Opera jobs website, there are job listings for multiple web evangelist positions. They are hiring in Norway, China, South Korea, the Czech Republic and the USA – so it is a multi-lingual global effort. Here is an example of an email sent to one site owner from an evangelist at Opera, with specific details on fixing a CSS bug:
Hello from Opera Software,
We have recently come to know that [retracted] is not displaying
properly in Opera. It stems from an Opera bug which we plan have resolved
and should be out with the next release. However, till that time, it would
be nice if you could tweak the site on your end to make it work with Opera.Just add “overflow-y:visible;” to the “Body” of the web page in the CSS
file. Or you can just putBody{
overflow-y:visible;
}In the <style> section of the pages, and it should make the pages display
with Opera perfectly. If you have any more questions, please feel free to
contact us.
that is neat they are doing that. kudos to opera
Finally, websites are going to compliant for Opera. Once they are all compliant I am going to back using opera as my primary browser.
I’m all about pushing websites to become standards compliant but pushing websites to fix their css because of a bug in Opera which is going to be fixed soon seems, well, stupid.
IMO in the case of Opera bugs, their time would be better spent rushing the next release of Opera out the door instead of changing the internet one web page at a time.
I’m not adding in CSS to fix an Opera bug. Sorry, but we don’t get enough visitors using Opera to make the 30 seconds worth it.
Sorry, but second rate browsers like Opera don’t matter enough for me to care. My advice would be to have the users to switch to Firefox.
Well part of it is about bugs (such as in that email), but the bigger part of it is about standards compliance.
Kudos to Opera indeed but I think Nik used a wrong email to display, if the email was about the site not being standards compliance it would’ve been great but for a bug sounds bit oh well.
ceejayoz and ronbailey , we shouldn’t force people to convert to firefox as a skillful developer you should attempt to please the user and help them have a pleasant experience using your site regardless which browser they are using, I know its not easy and its not always possible but atleast attempt not say comments like “its not worth it” etc..
again kudos Opera
ceejayoz and ronbailey – even you don’t get visitors using opera, or simply you are not interested in how a site looks in opera doesn’t mean you must ignore that are people that use this.
I think a real webdeveloper should try to make sites as cross-browser as possible, even if this ask more work, and brain…
…and no, i don’t use opera, only for testing purposes, and cross-browser checks.
Opera is by far best browser on the market. This is on of the things that proves that. Firefox is too slow, uses too much memory, and more and more behaces like IE browser, with every version regressing rather progressing.
Firefox 3 has too much bugs and problems with numrous plugins and websites to be used as a standard browser. Shame for Mozilla team to release such a bad browser.
On the other hand, each Opera version is even fatser then previous, with new features, more and more compliant to various web standards that is proven by famous ACID3 test. Opera scores 83/100 and Firefox3 only 51/100.
And recently anounced Dragonfly Developer Tools for Opera look much better then totally useless new Firebug for Firefox.
>>And recently anounced Dragonfly Developer Tools for Opera look much better then totally useless new Firebug for Firefox.
If you can figure out how to look at variables after a page has run, let me know. I tried it and I’m not at all impressed.
And FF3 uses less memory than Opera 9.5, at least on the PC.
I do like Opera 9.5, though. It’s the first version that has a good-looking interface, and it fixed the bug that was keeping things from rendering correctly on my site.
Is this a joke? Opera has no right to send unsolicited emails to web masters regardless of whether it’s to do with standards compliance or not. Other browsers deal with quirks and so should opera – I guess that’s why it has a minimal market share if this is their approach (which won’t ever scale).
I dont see why Opera (or anybody else) should restrain from contacting websites about rendering issues that are the website’s fault. I do that myself as a user, but very rarely because of the time it takes. Kudos to Opera for hiring people to do this. It’s then up the website developer to decide wether he cares or not.
On the other hand, asking the website to work around a soon-fixed browser bug is a waste of everybody’s time, especially with a browser whose userbase upgrades quickly. In the example above, couldn’t Opera release a per-website script that fixes the css at runtime ? They have a pretty neat framework for those things, AFAIK.
I love to see Opera team explain how I can find a functions caller without have the caller passed as an argument since Opera doesn’t support arguments.callee.caller while every other browser does (IE4+, FF1+, Safari etc. etc.)
I can’t view and save background images from any website even the recent edition of Opera. However Internet Explorer and Mozilla can do that. Pictures over which text and images are layered over. There is no right key mouse command which can do that. Opera cannot be relied to do that.