

Opera 10 Browser UA string format changed to accomodate bad applications - aj
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/

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niyazpk
This is the take away from the article:

"Browser sniffing — unless you’re writing a web stats application — is always
a bad idea. It’s a misguided attempt to send different content to different
user agents. This is never scalable — you can’t change every website you’ve
ever made every time a new browser version comes out. It is also not future-
proof, as highlighted by this article."

~~~
access_denied
<http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/>

~~~
TweedHeads
text-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #a0937f;

cool

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pierrefar
I think they should just stick to /10.00 and let bad code fail. This kind of
backward compatibility will only create more crud on the internet. Opera's
market-share is low enough so as not to cause too much fuss (changing IE would
cause too much backlash) but high enough to prompt authors of browser sniffers
to act.

~~~
jasonkester
The absolute last thing you want to do with your 1.5%-market-share-having
browser is allow it to show people broken web pages. They're correct here that
nobody is going to change their site to accommodate a dying browser. The best
thing they can do is what they've done.

If you're Firefox with 25% share and a strong developer following, then MAYBE
you could get away with that. Opera, treading water as fast as it possibly
can, would simply die if it didn't render every existing page on the web
correctly.

~~~
w1ntermute
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Opera is a dying browser. They have a
significant market share in the mobile market. As Wikipedia says
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_browser>):

 _Approximately 40 million mobile phones have shipped with Opera pre-
installed. Opera is the only commercial web browser available for the Nintendo
DS and Wii gaming systems._

~~~
jasonkester
Here is the only yearly data that I could find:

<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

You could certainly read that to mean that Opera has doubled its market share
since early 2003.

You could also read that to mean that Opera has remained at about 2% market
share for six years now, during which time Firefox has been born and risen to
about 40% penetration, and during the last six months of which Google's
browser has been both released and passed them by a factor of 3.

So yes, Opera is not going anywhere. You can read that to mean that they're
going to stick around if you'd like. You can also read that to mean that they
are not now, nor have they ever been a real competitor in the Browser market.

~~~
w1ntermute
I don't know if those statistics are really that accurate. They are often
biased towards the desktop/laptop, & often the USA/English as well. Also from
that Wikipedia article:

 _As of September 2008, usage data on English-language sites show Opera's
share of the browser market as being below 1%. The browser has seen more
success in Europe, including about 18–20% market share in Russia and
Ukraine,and 5–6% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic._

Unlike any of the other browsers listed in those statistics, Opera is
developed by a company based in a non-English language country. They have
their own niche languages/platforms and I'm sure they're doing quite well in
them.

That said, I live in the US and find Opera to be entirely usable on my laptop.
In fact, I asked on another thread
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622038>) why Opera doesn't have a larger
market share, and most of the reasons given were non-technical.

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zaph0d
Browser sniffing (when you actually want to find support for a particular
feature or bug) is the most idiotic thing ever.

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aj
Unfortunately, there is no simple way out of this. ALL the applications across
the Internets will have to be changed..

Legacy code comes back to bite us in the rear again!

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JVeinbergs
IE already has a solution.

Compatibility mode.

~~~
mseebach
How do you propose that would work? The problem is that scripts detect Opera
as version 1, not 10, and then failing - "if digit 1 of version < 4 then
fail". To the browser, the looks like (and IS) the expected behaviour, so
there no not-horribly-broken automatic fallback.

In a way this solution is compatibility mode. "Broken" detection scripts see
version nine (which is good enough), scripts that know about Opera 10 sees
version 10.

