Opera Sucks, At Least Some People Have Sense

Everybody loves to hate Microsoft. If you don’t thrash talk about Microsoft or IE you are not considered a Uber Web Geek. Opera took upon it self to sue Microsoft by complaining to the European Commission and force them to follow web standards. And its the lamest thing they could do. At least some people have sense and are not taking sides.

Today we have taken a stand. Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its Web browser, Internet Explorer. We believe that Microsoft has harmed Web standards by refusing to support them; Microsoft often participates in creating Web standards, promoting them, and even promising to implement them. Despite their talent, however, they refuse to support Web standards correctly. For example, Internet Explorer is the only modern Web browser that does not support Acid2.

Sure IE 7 doesn’t have the best support for Web Standards but at least Microsoft is trying. Hey I am web designer and I hate IE. But lets not forget that IE was at one time the most advanced and sophisticated Browser heck IE was the first to implement the concept of AJAX.

The XMLHttpRequest concept was originally developed by Microsoft as part of Outlook Web Access 2000, as a server side API call. At the time, it was not a standards-based web client feature; however, de facto support for it was implemented by many major web browsers. The Microsoft implementation is called XMLHTTP. It has been available since the introduction of Internet Explorer 5.0[5] and is accessible via JScript, VBScript and other scripting languages supported by IE browsers.

I like it how Peter-Paul Koch, puts it.

Nonetheless, I have to point out the potentially disastrous consequences of “asking the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities.”

Opera is begging a political body to take control of web standards.

Also I find Eric Meyers Response pretty awesome.

Look, the time to file this motion and make this appeal was in 2005, when Internet Explorer had been dead in the water for years and it was genuinely holding back web design. Then there’d have been a case to make. When IE7 came out in late 2006, it wasn’t a great leap forward for web development, but it did bring IE more or less in line with where browsers were at the time—which was, frankly, a pretty large leap. After all, they were doing five years of catch-up with a pretty small team. Now we have IE8 in development, and there is a real chance that it could push standards support forward in a significant way.

Its pretty clear Opera has a clear conflict of interest.

As has been widely reported, software developer Opera, has filed an antitrust complaint with the EU to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer and to carry alternative browsers pre-installed on Windows. What has not yet been discussed is the devastating and destabilizing effect that this will undoubtably have on the development of future CSS.

Following Opera’s action, today I am calling on Bert Bos, chairman of the CSS Working Group, and those higher up within the W3C including Sir Tim Berners Lee, to immediately disband the CSS Working Group in its current form. I am asking for immediate action to be taken on the formulation of a replacement CSS Working Group that will include new members who are not the representatives of browser vendors. Instead the new CSS Working Group should consist of people, including some who already serve on the group, who are committed to seeing the development of CSS3 succeed because that is central to the success of our profession. This new group need not start from scratch, but should instead build uponn the significant advances and hard work of the current CSS Working Group.