Yahoo discriminating against the Opera browser
Published November 14th, 2005 8:08 PM EST By Daniel GoldmanWe often hear about the complaints that some websites give the Opera browser different code (many times broken code) than it does to other browsers, such as Internet Explorer (IE).
For those of you non-techies, JavaSript and HTML code is what makes a webpage work. The code you receive when you visit a webpage may depend on the type of browser you’re using.
Hallvord Steen, from Opera Software, created a neat animated comparison between the code Opera gets from Yahoo Mail and the code IE gets. This gives an indication of how much of the functionality Yahoo gives to IE-users that is omitted from the version they send Opera-users.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
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I just can’t understand what these people get from doing this!
I am pretty sure the first bit is a toolbar for the rich-text control that includes clipboard cut/copy/paste that isn’t possible in Opera. Didn’t look farther.
That animation is buggy, coze it neverending sends requests to Hallvords page, after it came to the end.
Greetings,
janbar.[img]http://janbar18.w.interia.pl/Rozowy/usmiechh.gif[/img]
Should Opera be trusted by Yahoo to be able to handle the code that IE is getting, though?
I see no problem. If they want maintenance nightmares, just let them do what they want.
> If they want maintenance nightmares, just let them do what they want.
If they had broken their page in Firefox, you would for sure talk differently :irked:
Good god. The first bit is the toolbar for rich-text control but there are is over 1500 lines of code for IE compared to around 500 for Opera. I thought Yahoo! was going Web 2.0 on us. I don’t know what that means exactly but I thought standards compliance was part of the deal.
How many browsers do you expect Yahoo to write code for. The first thing I noticed was that there is a lot of code. Maintaining it for several browsers is not an easy job. In fact Yahoo is much more compatible with Opera than most websites are. Over the years Yahoo has only improved support for Opera. Maybe Opera should think of making their browser work with Yahoo better.
Yahoo is definitely not more compatible with Opera than most web sites. Most web sites actually work fine. Yahoo has had certain problems.
Which leads to the next point: Why do these problems appear? Is it because Opera is not compatible enough?
No.
When Yahoo has been broken in Opera, as is also the case here, it has simply used browser detection to speficially break Opera in various ways.
This does indeed seem to be the case yet again.
Maybe the previous poster should think of actually reading the available information before making misinformed comments.
And really, how does it help yahoo by breaking Opera? Amazing isn’t it that yahoo has time to look for new ways to break Opera but neither the will nor the proficiency to make there site work with Opera. Your lack of common sense astounds me. A browser that has less than a percent of market share probably is not even visible on Yahoo’s radar and yet they make there website work just fine with Opera. Recently they improved My Yahoo to work with Opera. Most feature rich websites like AOL for example do not work with Opera. Gmail did not work with Opera for one full year. People still have issues. start.com does not work with Opera. Yahoo is among the better websites out there - unlike google, msn, aol etc.
Hmm, since complex scripting in IE often involves proprietary methods, but Firefox and Opera both strive to implement standards, wouldn’t it have made more sense to compare the code that Yahoo gives Opera to the code it serves to Firefox?
My eyes kind of glazed over, but I imagine at least some of that code that IE got was there to work around bugs or behavior differences, or to implement missing features.
A lot of it also seems to be related to the rich text interface, which Opera up through 8.5 can’t use in the first place, so at least some of the deletions actually help Opera users by saving them bandwidth.
> If they had broken their page in Firefox, you would for sure talk differently :irked:
Sure. If they had broken their pages in Firefox, I won’t even waste my time to visit the site anymore. So no problem for me again.
If you dont use Opera, then why for sake, you waste your time here, typing useless comments,minghong?
Oh true and when I had a problem with my inbox (i couldn’t access it anymore), the help from yahoo was a long e-mail (how to delete cookies, clear history etc) and two links… where I should find the latest version of IE and Firefox.
And since a couple of days, the tool ‘mark as’ unread, read etc, is unavailabe with Opera
@janbar, because this is by far the most informative, up-to-date and interesting Opera-related blog that I’ve seen. Why can’t I leave a comment here?
I agree with atlantel.
Up until a few weeks ago, when I was using opera 8.50, I had absolutly no problem marking emails read/unread etc. The all of a sudden I was no longer able to get the div with thos einfo to show whn clicking on the mark button. I upgraded to opera 8.51 (latest) but still nothing. I then sent them an email with a bug report and got back response like that on how to clean up/configure browser or to get IE or netscape.
Since it did work, and now it doesn’t work, it means they are trying to break opera. what other reason would be to feed crappy code to opera for a function that DID work with no problem for as loong as I can remember? (I use opera since version 6, and I’m with yahoo for more than 5 years)
This issue is more than ugly.
Oh, and I also sent them those differences between what IE and opera gets, but they just ignored that. As they also ignored my suggestions on how to reproduce the problem on a clean amchine with any account after they wanted to get into my account to see the issue.
From my point of view, Yahoo customer care, at least those who took the time to respond to my bug report, are incompetent. All they know is to copy and paste those standard text lines on how to blablabla. They don’t even have the decency to escalete the issue when comming from someone that claims and demonstrates that he knows what he is talking about.
I hope it is ok to put a link to a petition on this subject. If it’s not, then just delete the comment. Thank you.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/932730987