Ironically Opera was the one who proposed the <video>-tag which this site uses for it's rotating LP, in 2007. [1] Way to exclude users.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#History_of_.3Cvideo...
and i know, this demo doesn't use it and will work fine in opera if you spoof the UA, but it's a lot easier to develop if you pick a feature set you're going to support, and skim out any browsers that don't support that feature set.
Overall support will include specific feature testing, regression testing, and user testing. Additionally, support tickets may be opened and introduce support costs in ticket management, escalation, and assessment.
Eventually people will start spoofing just to get in, and then you have a much worse problem in your hands. You know the Opera story. There is no excuse to block user agents unless it's commercial software with support contracts on the line.
All it takes to detect websockets is:
if ('WebSocket' in window) { /* Web Sockets supported / } else { / Web Sockets not supported */ }
Ironically, this was taken from:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introducing-web-sockets/
Also, every web developer with half a brain can use https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js instead of locking out users unnecessarily by matching the User-Agent.
I'm picking on websockets because that's what's been annoying me at work lately, but it's just an example. the myspace demo doesn't even use websockets, it's totally irrelevant, but websocket support is a good cursory indication of whether or not it is a modern browser, and therefore how much development time will be added by officially supporting it.
After all, Myspace has a commonly-used bug reporting functionality.
> complain loudly to their friends
Because they won't complain about being locked out?
What does showing a message "Our superpowers have detected you're using an outdated browser. That must mean: a - You don't use the Internet very often. b - You're at your parents' place on the PC they bought in 1996. c - You work for the government or a big corporation." to users using a browser released in the past month stand up for, other than ignorance?
They are not enabled by default, that's all. So it's not just that the message is snarky and insulting, it reflects ignorance as well.
And what's with the condescending list? Excuse my vulgarity but the page managed to be insulting, clueless, and factually inaccurate all at the same time. Here's how it reads to me:
a) Fuck you.
b) Fuck you.
c) Yes I do, a big technology company where I can install whatever software I need working on harder technical problems than getting Myspace working cross-browser and I use Opera at home too so fuck you.
I like it when larger, more corporate sites go for an informal tone, even if they don't completely nail the humour they might have been striving for. It's a better direction overall than a stuffy PR-speak message, and getting bent out of shape about it just seems like an overreaction.
Obviously they could have written a paragraph of text explaining that, but just saying "something you are using is so old that it is lame (in the duck sense, not in the teenage slang sense), here's how to fix it" gets the job done in one sentence.
This isn't a business website, this is a social network that gets most of their traffic from bands now. I can't fathom how the smallest amount of snark about IE8 being old on a product like this is raising so much anger on the HN community.
Do you think you are in MySpace's target market?
Here is another possible explanation: they aren't some kind of master marketers who unfailingly target their niches and never fail in such attempts.
Why do you think advertisers like snark?
$ curl -i --user-agent 'Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.02' https://new.myspace.com/
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
X-Powered-By: Express
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html
Location: https://new.myspace.com/browser
X-Response-Time: 1ms
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:53:34 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
<p>Moved Temporarily. Redirecting to <a href="https://new.myspace.com/browser">https://new.myspace.com/browser</a></p>And is only going to get worse, with WebGL is not just "Sorry your browser is not supported, please download a different one.", but "Your video card drivers are not supported, buy new hardware and/or install a different Operating System"
Turn off Flash and see how many sites require it (because of bad codec choice / lack of alternative ways of viewing embedded videos, because of crappy ads without fallback images so you get popups/warnings about missing plugins etc.).
This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment. I'm a web developer and I'm so excited about making awesome things and the fact that the web is evolving and enabling us to do this, and share our creations with the world. People like you and comments like this drive me crazy.
That being said, I don't think that you should just put up a blanket disabled site announcement when it's not necessary (as is the case with opera here), but if your computer or browser is actually missing capabilities because it's too old, that's too bad - you just don't get cool things. Upgrade or move on.
Straw man.
>This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment.
He didn't propose anything, just stated the problem. You're the one putting words in his mouth and jumping to overwrought conclusions.
Relax dude.
Sane and simple standards that can be implemented in any platform without requiring hundreds of man years of effort.
Nothing done in the web today is particularly technically advanced, we are about the same UI level as standard apps were more than 10 years ago (hell, I doubt you can build a photo manipulation app today that can compete with where Photoshop was 10 years ago).
Most of the complexity burden the web has is purely gratuitous and product of how flawed the standards it is built on are.
How JSON replaced XML is a good illustration of what is the right direction to go. Now if for example JavaScript was replaced with something considerably simpler, like, say, Scheme, instead of trying to bolt even more OO-crud into it and turn it into another pseudo-Java, that would be another good step.
There is little doubt the DOM and CSS could be dramatically simplified without reducing functionality, same goes for HTTP (as a recent post to hacker news illustrated).
To think that some people are actualy getting paid to make submitting and retrieving data using web overly complicated and annoying is one of those things I try not to think about. The standards idea clearly is not working if it is being interpreted as a mandate for needless complexity to keep web developers entertained. Instead we hear web developers complain that standards are being ignored because some browser will not support their desired gratuitious complexity. I would say they've lost the plot but I'm not sure there ever was a sane plot to begin with.
...then you argue that we should replace javascript with another language, and that would improve "best viewed in" problems? The kinds of changes you are proposing here would make the same issues you complained about 1000x worse. "Sorry, we wrote this in python, so you have to upgrade your browser, because it only runs javascript". This would immediately invalidate all old browsers, rather than slowly upgrading the tools we already have. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is how it goes when upgrading, you can't just make vast and rash changes like this.
It's great that you are thinking this way, but you have a lot more thinking to go, and a lot more research before you start posting comments like this.
> I'm a web developer
Things were of course different if it was a paid service (where users can post demands) or Facebook (where the market penetration is so high they can't afford to forgo non Chrome/FF) but in Myspace's case, I think their decision is completely understandable.
We made the same decision for our site (not yet up) and our user base is way more conservative than Myspace's. We just don't have the resources to do pretty and cross-browser, so we'll have to do with FF and Chrome only.
For example, I support a few websites aimed at farmers. The sites are simple and degrade gracefully, because farmers tend to use older technology; small, because farmers don't typically have access to broadband internet; and mobile-friendly, because data access via cell phone is often more reliable for them than a consumer internet connection. These sites are not impressive, but they suit their purpose and their audience. So, obviously, the technology choice can go backwards as well.
Side-note: one of my favorite games is "breaking" websites by opening them in IE8 and reloading them with "Compatibility Mode" turned on.
What started the original "best viewed with" problems of the 90s? It was largely due to the lack of compliance with standardization. Every browser had its own buggy way to render content, often slightly different from the equally buggy ways that the competition rendered content. Most web devs at the time were undisciplined and lazy and they tended to use a standard reference browser as a guide for creating their layouts. This led to the insanity of sites that looked fine in one browser but were broken in others, typically due to accidentally making use of rendering bugs.
Now things are completely different. Standards compliant rendering is the norm for all of the most popular browsers. The issue today isn't basic compatibility as it was in the 90s it is now features. In order to push the state of the art in terms of new features on the web it will be necessary for some sites to remind their users that not every browser supports the features their site is built on.
It's condescending comments like these that give HN a bad name. Let me know when you redesign a large social site like MySpace and then we'll talk.
a) You don't really use HN that often b) You're accessing HN from your grandpa's computer on IE3 c) You work for a REALLY big corporation
If you chose a) or b), there's still hope! Just smile ( :-) ) and you'll soon be enjoying HN like it's '96
Except when it wasn't, right? Sorry, but this is a complete lie.
As publishing site you had to shoot for the lowest common denominator in order to reach the most customers. That is still a good strategy, sites that can shrug off features that aren't supported but still get the message across. Maybe MySpace will get that message.
From: http://www.opera.com/press/faq/
"How many people are using Opera? Today, more than 275 million people are using Opera every month."
I'd rather see a number of users who have set it as their default browser.
If 10% of the world's Internet users are on Opera, where are they?
That said, our own traffic shows 0.80% Opera users, which puts it just above RockMelt. It's silly to actively filter them out as MySpace is doing here, but would be equally as silly (for us at least) to devote any resources to dealing with any Opera-specific issues, until the usage stats justify it.
So if you run US-focused site, there isn't really reason to care about Opera, and test for it. Blocking it (or any other browser) is bad though.
The "historical reasons": Opera was by any means the best (serious) browser out there, but it was paid. People in these countries weren't paying for software anyway, because their income was well bellow western standards while prices were same, and as a bonus, there was no one who would care. So while someone on the west would rather use something free (like IE), people in (for example) Ukraine picked the best. That's why first decent browser (Firefox) took over the west so fast.
Looking at hits is doing it wrong - profit is where it's at, what proportion of profits come from Opera users.
[For example, hypothetically, they might be highly paid trend setters and amount for a disproportionately large profit share on a fashion site or such.]
That's not counting those Opera users who switched their User-Agent string to MSIE or similar because of stupid JS detection like MySpace's.
Their market share has been under 1% for years, so it's really not worth any website worrying about.
Personally I use Firefox as my main browser but that's because their web dev tools won me over first and now I'm entrenched.
Sync between a very good mobile and a desktop browser would seem to be a good reason - if their Android browser didn't force close on me so much I'd be tempted towards using Opera on the desktop for non-dev stuff.