Ninja Rants and Raves

The CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie, must be feeling the pressure. The Opera browsers are not taking over the market place. No, Microsoft’s IE browsers and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers are the big players here with Apple’s Safari increasing its presence, and Opera having a bit part.

But rather than emulate Firefox’s successes, Opera Software opts to complain to the EU about Microsoft in the same vein that Netscape tried many years ago. This is not the way to go. Opera need to improve their software. Their mobile versions are rubbish as it takes several keystrokes to get the browser and its Java environment running. And their desktop versions have given me such a lot of headache that I no longer test my pages for Opera behaviour…IE and Firefox are the kings here. So Opera Software, pull your finger out and don’t go crying to the EU. And it isn’t just me, but a lot of people think that Opera are wrong.

Now, Håkon Wium Lie recently published an article at The Register…the article is damming evidence of the pressures being felt by Opera as Håkon Wium Lie deliberately misleads on the current situation regarding Microsoft’s new IE8 standards-mode switching.

As detailed in my previous article, a proposal has been put forward to use meta-declarations for switching IE8 to full standards-mode rather than rely on DOCTYPE-switching. Håkon Wium Lie implies that because there was an uproar over this proposal that Microsoft should remove this feature and instead rely on DOCTYPE. Well, his suggestion totally ignores all the arguments that other respected web developers and web standards experts have made as to why meta-declaration standards-mode switching is probably the right thing to do. Just look at Jeffrey Zeldman’s article “Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?”, Eric Meyer’s article “From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey” and Aaron Gustafson’s article “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8″. I agree the proposal is controversial but Håkon Wium Lie implies that everyone is against this idea. That is so false.

Håkon Wium Lie also implies that Microsoft isn’t keen on standards and are holding back web development. This doesn’t stack up with what the new IE team have been doing over the last couple of years or so. IE6 was in the doldrums for a long time, but the new IE team have produced a far superior standards-compliant version in IE7, and now they’ve developing  IE8 (currently in beta) which probably puts the browser right up there at the cutting edge of standards-compliance. And this development wasn’t done at the behest of someone with a big stick from the EU! So don’t lie Lie!

Håkon Wium Lie is trying to use the well-known techniques of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) rather than use smarts to develop and market his company’s software. So, Håkon Wium Lie, what do you want to do? Rest on the laurels of your past achievements and act like a cry-baby, or get off your back-end and start producing software and a business model that can take on Microsoft’s IE browsers and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers? Well?

Copyright © 2008 Kulvinder Singh Matharu - All Rights Reserved