And yes, compared to Opera those other browsers do suck in varying degrees.

In any case, the whole idea of standards is to simplify development. So the theory is that if you as a web developer AND we as browser developers stick to the specified and published standards, development will be smoother and more stable for all of us, with less gotchas caused by incompatibilities and under-specified implementations.

We know browsers aren’t always perfect and bug-free in their standards support, but.. I think your post here proves that the “stick to standards, have less problems” idea still has its merits. Because you didn’t stick to the standardised stuff (meaning the methods and properties specified by ECMA-262 for the JS Array object) you ran into problems when you realised Safari 2 and Opera and who knows what other browsers or versions (IE5? Firefox 1.5? IE on Mac? NetFront on iMode mobile phones?) didn’t support the non-standard method you used.

So really, I think this post is a great compliment to Opera, because we’ve always been going on about the importance of standards for interoperability, and you prove we have a good point, no?

I see your point about the knowledge transfer. It’s really a wild-west situation out there. And it’s only getting worse. Competition is good for innovation but terrible for standards and stability.

The pendulum swung towards stability with IE6, when it had 95% market share. Lot’s of great things were created during that time and development was easier.

Now the pendulum is back the other way and it’s insane to be a developer again. I feel your pain.

Opera looks like a fine browser, but I really question the overall wisdom of having to test in so many clients.

I wish there was a way to embed WHICH rendering client you want to use in the page itself. SO I could say, “I like how opera makes developing this page easy, and its fast so render the page with opera”. That way the PUBLISHER could determine which browser to render in and the specific browser became meaningless.

Opera could make a big splash with that. Have IE7 and FF and Webkit rendering engines available to the page. Use a meta tag to say which to render with. I would absolutely ABSOLUTELY download and start using it if it did. It would be a wonderful testing tool, if nothing else. I could see the page in different rendering engines without Virtual PC.

I am going to blog about this, begging Opera to do it.

Indeed. Pretty often too. We do a lot of hard work on supporting the “de facto” stuff!

But the real problem with it being “de facto” instead of clearly specified is that we don’t KNOW about it. Until I saw your post I actually had no idea that Firefox had added a method known as Array.prototype.indexOf to their ECMAScript engine!

And that’s exactly the problem with non-standard stuff: we don’t KNOW about it until we are proven incompatible because something is broken or somebody is annoyed at us.

I definitely understand the spec argument, but as a minority browser, I would think that sometimes you need to support the “de-facto” standards that IE or FF set. Even if they contradict or expand on the spec.

I have the exact same problem with Firefox not supporting background-position-y as an independent CSS rule. They are correct as far as the spec goes, but it’s a no-brainer to include it.

Anyway, thanks again. I will keep you in mind.

My colleague Mark WJ explains the whole situation pretty well in the 2nd link you list in the post, but if you ever want any help with Opera standards support, or if you’d like to report more findings, feel free to contact us (my e-mail is cmills [at] opera [dot] com) – we’d love ot hear from you.

all the best,

Chris Mills
Opera Software ASA