Actually, Opera missed a trick here. They should have asked the supplier to fix the offending software during the evaluation period, thereby chipping away at the small mountain of similar admin interfaces/websites that fail when presented with Opera browser. They might then have further benefited from the supplier's hardware if it had been the best value.
I can't help but wonder why the parent post, insightful and well-worded, is upvoted significantly less than the post starting with `I hate these sorts of things...'
It's not like I hate these sorts of things so much, but still...
Well, you are missing his point. Opera could have used this opportunity to get the "major hardware supplier" to add Opera support to their admin tool.
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.
From an objective point of view, why should this matter to Opera when they were trying to evaluating the best hardware for the large amount of money they were spending? It's an emotional reason rather than a rational one, which doesn't seem like a very good way to make a decision when spending gobs of money.
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.
If Opera were significantly and wildly incompatible with other "popular" browsers like Firefox and Safari, you might have a point, but not much of one.
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.
I agree. However, that's the point. Completely barring Opera means they're certain they won't receive any support requests from people using Opera. Doing otherwise means opening their support apparatus to people using Opera, who might find all sorts of things wrong with the software and not realize it's because the software isn't tested with it.
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.
Sometimes that's not an option. We were once forced to do the same thing. Block Opera, that is.
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.)
Because sometimes it wasn't immediately obvious that something was broken without looking at the error console. This was a business app and if, for example, a form widget failed to work properly it could result in silent data loss which wouldn't get noticed for a while.
Because the customer's perception of your professionalism matters, and the problems with the browser's execution of javascript would strongly and negatively affect their likelihood to use your service and convert to a paying customer?
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.
Exactly. Code to spec, not to the browser. If you really, really, really want it to look just-so in a certain browser, do that after you get it working to spec. Maybe then more browsers would implement spec. Heck, maybe XHTML2 wouldn't be dead.
I would have done everything in my power to get that line removed and then taken the contract. The short sighted response is to be angry at this server company, but realize that they have many other customers -- customers who may not be using Opera because its not supported with the admin tool.
"This single statement, apparently written by some sub-contractor they had outsourced admin interface programming to, cost them millions of NOK in lost sales."
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.
I've done a site about a year or two ago - I don't make websites, but I was pushed into it. So, client wants modern, slick design, some JS functionality etc... and in the end I've received an email with a question why doesn't it work on their windows '95 IE5 computer. I've politely forwarded links to microsoft site where it states '95 and IE5 are not supported anymore, so why should I support it then? By that logic I should support commodore 64 browsing the site.
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.
The article links to http://www.digi.no/504306/her-kjores-egentlig-opera-mini&... for pictures of the blade server. But that page also reports that they're driving Opera Mini with... Pike! I thought I'd never hear of Pike again. (insert Kirk joke if applicable).
Seems to me that it's mistitled. It's only an expensive bug if they lost the contract, and the article doesn't say that. No doubt the parties involved fixed whatever layout glitch or misconception led to the platform test and moved on. Contracts that big are expensive for both sides to cancel.
Except it wasn't a contract, it was a sample server sent as a sales pitch. If somebody is trying to get your business and sends you a machine that purposefully checks for your flagship product, so that that machine can treat it like a second-class citizen, you probably aren't going to decide to give them your business.
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.
"Enterprise Software" deliberately insists on IE or another pet browser just because it can. Half the time they're not even doing anything browser specific.
Millions in lost sales should teach them to take standards seriously.
Not true. When a customer calls with a problem, if they're using some hoky browser (no offence to the Opera folks, but even they have to admit they're a tiny niche), then that's one more factor to eliminate before the problem can be understood.
I would be very surprised if the profit on that one sale would cover certifying the product and supporting it going forwards.
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?
Not to mention that IE, the corporate standard, had to masquarade as "Mozilla compatible" just to get its foot through the door. Spyglass was actually a decent piece of software.
Well, for a start, it would mean rolling out Opera to every developer, tester and support rep's desktop, and it being someone's job to make sure it worked on every PC they had, to keep it up to date and apply any patches. It also means doing any manual QA cycles again with Opera, and/or rewriting automated tests to use it too. All of those things have cash costs associated with them.
Well, for a start, it would mean rolling out Opera to every developer, tester and support rep's desktop, and it being someone's job to make sure it worked on every PC they had, to keep it up to date and apply any patches.
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?
It could be practically anything; sometimes it's a little less pretty, sometimes it's a lot less pretty, sometimes a few little parts of the UI don't work as intended (maybe changing field X doesn't update field Y like it should, maybe button Z doesn't do what it should when you click it), and sometimes it just starts throwing exceptions like crazy and completely blows up. CSS is kind of sort of standardized, so you sort of have some hope there that all standards compliant browsers (not that any of them really are 100% compliant) will render the page about the same way, but once you get into Javascript land the myth of standardization quickly disappears, and multi-browser support becomes a never-ending nightmare.
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.
> Seems to me that it's mistitled. It's only an expensive bug if they lost the contract, and the article doesn't say that.
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.
they did lose the contract, and it was a big one. there wasn't any glitch or misconception, it was a hard-coded redirect specifically designed to kill opera usage. and, just in case you didn't pick it up from the article, this is opera trying to make the purchase. also, opera is a web browser. :)
