The Browser Wars, Round 2

Last week I started using Opera 10.53 on my Macbook at a friend's recommendation. It's blazing fast, even faster than Chrome if you can believe that. It has great support for HTML5 and CSS3, and nice extras like Speed Dial and a tiny marker that lets you know when a tab has updated content or finished loading, so you don't have to waste your time checking on a slow-loading (or repeatedly-reloading) website over and over. It even has solid developer tools (Opera Dragonfly), with a built-in zooming website color picker!

It was almost everything I could want in a browser, and I was happy as could be. Then I realized that Opera's dev tools don't include a screen ruler, a tool I use all the time through Chrome's Pendule extension. No problem, I thought - Opera has its own extensions, called "widgets." Except, they don't seem to work - I found a screen ruler widget in less than a minute, but it refused to properly install, and once it was done I still couldn't actually run it.

Annoyed, I went on to find further annoyances. Amazon.com doesn't allow Opera to use the "Look Inside" feature. Opera's aggressive pop-up blocking led to sites that rely heavily on pop-ups becoming unusable, even when pop-up blocking was turned off. Some sites refuse to serve content to Opera at all, putting up a message that only Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox are supported. Opera does feature a handy user-agent switcher to trick these sites into thinking it's Firefox, but that actually leads to further problems. Google, for example, actually does the right thing when it comes to Opera support, but GMail became a scrambled mess with my user-agent string set to Firefox.

So, while the original browser wars are well behind us, and while standards-based development has easily become the norm, we're not out of the woods yet. The new battleground is the established trio of renderers - Trident, Gecko, and WebKit - vs. everyone else. While these three represent the vast majority of browsers in the world, things were not always this way, and site developers would do well to code to the standards and not to the popular rendering engines of the day. If your site really does have some advanced features, test for browser capabilities, not for the specific browser in use. That way, you'll avoid what is surely the most embarrassing gaffe I've come across while using Opera - disney.com doesn't recognize Opera, and so it assumes that you're using an iPhone!

[If you're wondering what browser I actually use after all that ranting, the answer is Opera. I've really come to like it, and when an individual site doesn't work right, it's fast and easy to fire up Chrome, or even Firefox for those truly annoying sites. Don't even get me started on government sites that only open in Internet Explorer.]