Google services that (don’t) work in the Opera browser
9 CommentsPublished November 8th, 2006 11:30 AM EST By Daniel Goldman
On the CyberNet blog Ryan posted a list of Google services, many that work and some that don’t work in the Opera browser.
Most of the Google services mentioned work in the Opera browser, such as Google Reader, Google AdWords (”Duh! Of course it works…think profit!”), and Gmail. Yet there are some services that falsely prompt Opera users with a message saying their browser isn’t supported even though they work fine in Opera, such as Google Calendar and Google Page Creator.
In the blog post, Ryan says it shouldn’t be up to Opera to fix Google’s problems.
Yes, Google services cause nightmares to Opera users at times. They seem to occasionally disregard Opera. But it’s something we both need to work on together. If it means adding some unimplemented feature to the browser, then we need to add it. On the other hand, big companies such as Google need to set an example with standard-compliant implementation.
We at Opera Software work closely with Google to make sure their services work in the Opera browser. Sometimes, unfortunately, it takes a bit longer than we all would like.
I’d also like to give my kudos to the Google Reader team for developing such a powerful web application that works with more than just Firefox and Internet Explorer (as Ryan mentioned). Hopefully their influence could permeate to the rest of the company.
Additional reading: An inside look at how Opera works on site compatibility by Opera’s Hallvord Steen.
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One google service that does not fully support Opera is picasaweb. The slideshow, i.e. the JavaScript enabled photo viewer, does not work – clicking on the slideshow button simply gives you a 500 Internal Server Error… I don’t know who to blame for this, but me as an end user, I hate switching browsers in order to use a website.
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Google is one of the worst offenders; their code looks like something from 1998. Even their “accessibility” service fails to validate…
If google chose to use standards-compliance and good-coding as a bigger part of page rank — you would get a huge and rapid increase in standards observance…
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Writely don’t work with opera too
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Google Calendar IS NOT compatible with Opera.
It’s insanely slow, and buggish (just tried to create and delete an event, and all freeze).
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With most of their services, they can just blame it on being a beta.
PS: Picture should be credited Joe Hewitt and his FireBug. But I couldn’t find the picture on his website right now, so uploaded it to my server.
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Google are notably poor performers when it comes to building standards-compliant, cross-platform/cross-browser compatible services. It’s utterly ridiculous for a company which a) has such massive resources, and b) claims to live by a slogan of ‘do no evil’.
The relative cost for them to hire a UI/accessibility person would be trivial. The only position that I’ve heard of Google advertising was still more of a “coder who does accessibility”, which misses the point a bit.
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Google notebook doesn’t work properly! You can’t move anything.
I rely on this rather than Opera notes because I can access it from any browser, anywhere, (plus it embeds images and font styles)
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Script fix some Google pages:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=1819066
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Almost Google Search works, but…
Google is Bad!
Google Video… doesn’t works! I hate that