Most expensive javascript ever
my.opera.com
my.opera.com
It's not like I hate these sorts of things so much, but still...
Instead of simply being insulted by the company's software, they could have basically bought support for their product from this "major hardware supplier" for free.
It would be interesting to run something like the stupid filter on comments rated > x for all comments today and for all comments not long after Startup News was renamed Hacker News. I'm curious to see if the totality of comments would show a significant difference in the stupid score as determined by a simple bayesian filter.
Also, is Opera unable to recognize that the vendor has limited engineering and support resources, and that supporting a browser with limited market share has ramifications for both those things? Wikipedia says Opera has less than 1% of browser market share. I have nothing against Opera, but from a neutral point of view, can they really say it makes sense for the vendor to spend time and money testing and supporting a platform that barely anyone uses?
I feel like Opera should be asking why the vendor feels the need to do this, rather than getting self-righteous about it.
But the plain fact is that, these days, the only browser which incurs support costs high enough to consider cutting out is Internet Explorer. Stuff that works in any of the other browsers will, almost always, work in all of them.
There's a huge gulf between "we don't support Opera" and "no version of Opera is allowed to even try to render our pages."
Of course, given the small number of people using Opera, the question is whether there would really be much of a burden on their resources.
"I'm sorry, your browser isn't supported" What? Chrome isn't supported? Were you people drunk when you wrote this?
Howabout a message that says "the browser you are using has not been extensively tested, please use at your own risk.".
We had a large-ish JS app which ran fine in FF and IE, but generated all sorts of exceptions in Opera. The reason we didn't fix it was that every single one of those errors read something like "There was an error in [function].". No line numbers, no surrounding code, no nothing. So we blocked it.
(We did eventually fix the bugs, but only after a new version of Opera which printed more informative messages was released.)
My site depends heavily on custom-coded javascript. Minor browser inconsistencies are one thing you expect to handle or live through. Absolute FAIL because of poor javascript engine implementation is another.
The company didn't intend to block opera. Also, it's shortsighted to take a vindictive approach to negotiations if you intend to gain market share.
Opera is a nice browser, but they're deluding themselves if they think they can get offended when something isn't supported. They have the dubious honor of being big enough to be known, and small enough to be ignored due to compatibility issues. (There probably wasn't a check for Konqueror or IceWeasel).
Opera could have used this as a chance to improve their market share and image (so less admins get the impression that Opera is an also-ran browser that nobody needs to support). But losing the contract, especially for an outsourced component, makes them appear petty.
However, if you are doing an application and you have time/resources/will to test and develop on one or two browsers, then state it obviously on the application gateway. This was just a lazy forwarding to error page. MobileMe does a nice, polite notice if you are there with unsupported browser, check it out.
So, yeah, I'd call that a big loss. According to the article, this was in an evaluation period with several different vendors. This one little piece of Javascript seems to have been enough to remove that company from the running. I don't know if Opera would have liked that company's offerings otherwise, but that would probably be enough to remove them from consideration.
I guess if you're trying to sell something to a browser maker, you might want to make sure that your admin interface works with their browser.
Not just that. The little piece just acknowledge the fact that the browser isn't supported, so removing it doesn't magically makes things work.
Millions in lost sales should teach them to take standards seriously.
I would be very surprised if the profit on that one sale would cover certifying the product and supporting it going forwards.
What technical reason would a server company have for NOT supporting a largely standards-compliant browser like Opera? Isn't the whole point of serving up content to the World Wide Web to be able to communicate with multiple devices all over the world?
Is it impossible to write a Web application that simply doesn't test the limits of most browser implementations? Again, I'm asking an informational question to follow up on your interesting response. What actually happens in the typical case of a server vendor's application that is supposed to run on an arbitrary browser if a browser the vendor hasn't considered is used? Does the whole application crash? Or does it just look a little bit less pretty?
Unfortunately, you don't know which of those end results you're going to get until you actually try the thing out, and the answer could be wildly different on different pages of your app.
It's still generally poor form to straight up disable a particular browser unless you know for a fact that it doesn't work properly (generally in the sense of you-can't-use-the-site, not things-look-kind-of-funny), but perhaps in this case they did in fact know that their app didn't work with Opera.
Your assuming that value amounts to a large portion of their revenue.
I'd venture it doesn't, and they wont be too worried.
It does. FTA:
> This single statement, apparently written by some sub-contractor they had outsourced admin interface programming to, cost them millions of NOK in lost sales.