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Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

Get this message on the latest version of Opera.

>Greetings, Mobile Champion!

>We noticed that you're using an unsupported browser. But have no fear, you can view themobileplaybook.com from the latest versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Please update your browser and come back to visit us.

>Alternatively, we suggest checking out the site from your tablet if you have one or from your smartphone device.

What galls me about these messages is the insinuation to the Opera users that their browser is somehow outdated and that we need to update or upgrade it. If you can't be assed to test on Opera at least change the message to asking to use a different browser, not to "upgrade" to one.

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Oh, that's hilarious. https://www.google.com/search?q=themobileplaybook.com shows that same "greeting" as a preview, and the cached version is completely blank (because there's no content in their markup, just scripted crap). It just goes to show that if such anti-semantic authoring were the norm, Google's search engine wouldn't even exist. Talk about pulling the ladder up behind you....

Look, if you use Opera then that's awesome. You have your reasons. It's got a lot of users, and that's also great.

But developers reasonably make decisions about which browsers to optimize for and which ones NOT to optimize for. They're not insulting you for your browser choice: they're just being reasonable about how they spend their time.

We should always be open to new things so I won't sit here and say "you should just use Chrome because it's awesome and incredibly fast", and if they're differentiated enough they'll become standards everyone supports. Opera is not. And you're not a martyr.

First, it's Google we're talking about here, not some cash starved startup.

Second, you seem to have not completely read my post. It was more about the "update" and "upgrade" language. How would people on Linux feel if they tried to download a program and and it told them to "upgrade" to Windows to get it working?

>"We should always be open to new things so I won't sit here and say "you should just use Chrome because it's awesome and incredibly fast"

You should try Opera, it is awesome and incredibly fast :)

>and if they're differentiated enough they'll become standards everyone supports. Opera is not.

What is not differentiated enough and Opera is not what?

Opera is pretty good at following standards, it's no IE for sure.

Again, it's okay if web developers don't have the time to test and support Opera, just don't tell its users to update or upgrade to other browsers. Even "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" is less condescending We didn't get rid of that and Flash to end up back again in this browser sniffing mess.

I use Opera on slow connections, huge fan. Chrome before Chrome in my opinion (but now we have Chrome so.....)

But yeah "best viewed on Internet Explorer" is always a treat isn't it! The word "update" was probably a little weak.

I suggest the community downvote comments like this. I'd like to see a published community guideline encouraging people to not make meta comments. The vast majority of readers don't use Opera, and a personal quest to see Opera treated as a first class browser doesn't belong in this thread.

This is a cheap and easy way to score points.

Why do you think Opera is a second class browser? You should upgrade your browser to Opera sometime.

He said no such thing. Can we talk about the article now?

Opera is by far one of the best browsers for Android in my opinion. Firefox frustrated me considerably as every time I horizontally scrolled I would open a side bar for managing favourites sites / tabs. This may have been changed in newer versions of firefox for the Android unfortunately I can't run it as Firefox consistently crashes on CM10 (not sure if this is a bug on Firefox's behalf or CM 10)

(edit)I have a feeling quite a few people probably use Opera browser on their handsets...

The irony that you would talk about opera in response to my comment is staggering.

Forgive me, I fail to see the irony in talking about Opera in response to a comment regarding the Opera browser....

This is incorrect in Asia - the fastest growing mobile market in the world. Opera is very, very big in India - it also comes preinstalled in many dumbphones.

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/07/q1_and_2_201...

On a personal note, I do want to mention that your comment leans a bit too much towards dogma. I dont want to start a flamewar (and go offtopic), but please have a downvote cookie.

Returning to on-topic, I am able to use the site fine with Opera Mobile on Gingerbread.

We're here to either discuss the site design or the content. Seeing as the content is marketing speak apparently targeted at executives I think we're here to discuss the design. A design that excludes Opera is an interesting topic because we're supposed to be living in a standards compliant paradise nowadays.

What would've happened to Chrome if every website treated it like they're treating Opera now from the beginning?

WHEN THEY TAKE OPERA THEY WILL TAKE YOUR FIREFOX

Additionally, this new trend of testing for browser strings deserves our scrutiny.

I wish it was new, but the UA has been abused pretty much since we have the web. See http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Other commenters have said this as well, but I think this Mobile Playbook site is amazingly cool and kudos to the developers who put this together. Disappointed that the top HN comment right now is a complaint about Opera not being supported.

Same here, so I switched over to Chrome (Canary) and got exactly the same error. This is why UI sniffing is such a bad idea.

Hilarious - I just noticed the same issue, and then found this thread... Opera has been the best for power browsers since before I remember... some people just don't get it!

edit. After additional reading, I see the larger issue... Opera users are more like behind-the-scenes admins - we aren't really in the consumer/end-user category, and for this we just need to deal with some hardships like not being included in browser compatibility lists for all sites... that's a fact I'm OK with now. Cheers!

What's even funnier is that it doesn't block the PS Vita browser like that, but then the actual page it loads is completely broken.

The PS Vita browser is an oldish Webkit build with JS 1.7, half-implemented HTML5, and a handful of features disabled. Its user agent is something like "Mozilla/5.0 (Playstation Vita 1.50) AppleWebKit/531.22.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Silk/3.2", and it probably advertises a feature set close to Chrome builds from about a year ago.

I'm not too surprised that it doesn't support this gimmicky site, nor that it slipped through the feature/agent sniffing.

I don't use Opera. But based on your C&P of the message, I don't see the word "upgrade" used anywhere. The message reads please update your browser.

The URL has /upgrade/ at the end. http://www.themobileplaybook.com/en-us/upgrade/

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