Web Designers: Now that Opera is Free, Will You Stress Test Your Sites for It?

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svet-am

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Title says it all. I'm interested in opinions from web designers as to how they plan on approaching opera support now that it's available to the masses.
 
As soon as I get a site complex enough to bother, yeah.

There's no reason not to any more. It runs on the Big 3 OSes. It's free. It's easy to install. Anybody who doesn't is just lazy.
 
yeah, i only downloaded opera so that i could test my sites in it, i'll continue to use firefox for browsing
 
i've used opera for years as a co-primary browser with firefox (primary in the pre-firefox years). in my web development experience, i've grown to both love and hate opera for its strict standards compliance.

there is a bit of a fudge factor in both IE and Firefox with how they handle standards. no such luck in opera. i'm mighty interested in seeing how people handle this.
 
ooooo.

I have used Opera since version 5. Makes me glad to see it ad free. ;)

Anyways, I do all my developing for Opera.
 
I don't see any point in changing my current practices until it occupies a significant share of the market. That said, I currently do spot-checking with Opera on just about every site I work on, and I do try to ensure that things look roughly correct in it. The only problems I've ever had in Opera are minor font size and box alignment issues.

I think one problem I'm having is that my custom tag for browser identification is probably identifying Opera (8.0, anyway) as IE, and so it's probably unintentionally getting the extra "IE hacks" stylesheet. That's not Opera's fault, in any case; I just need to go back and check the UA strings that browsers are sending out these days.
 
switched to opera from firefox about 2 weeks ago and opera pwns firefox. All I have to say.
 
Lews_Therin said:
There's no reason not to any more. It runs on the Big 3 OSes. It's free. It's easy to install. Anybody who doesn't is just lazy.
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Or smart. Why worry about software that has such a tiny installed base?

What does "Stress test" mean in this context, by the way? Why would a browser react differently if the site is under load?
 
well, when I said stress test, i meant stressing the design (CSS, DHTML, etc) so that it would work properly. As has been noted, all of the major browsers handle styling and tags a bit differently, so I was wondering if folks would find it worthwhile to go to the trouble of making sure that their sites would render properly in IE, FF, *and* Opera
 
I already do. I test all my websites in [what I consider] the big 4. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and I check with at least the last 3 major revisions of each. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Mac, because I'd love to be able to check Safari as well. I might buy a Mac Mini just for that purpose, unless Apple decides to bring Safari to Windows, but I'm not holding my breath. ;)

That said, I don't really care much for Opera as a browser. It's nice and has some great features, but I personally find Firefox a bit more intuitive.
 
doox00 said:
after about a minute of trying to load on my 6mb connection I gave up.. you on 28.8k? :p hehe
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My browser loaded both pages together in a total of about three seconds.
 
mikeblas said:
What does "Stress test" mean in this context, by the way? Why would a browser react differently if the site is under load?
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It was obvious to me (and apparently most of the people who have commented so far) what he meant in the context.

But if you prefer to take it literally, you'd be surprised the sorts of interesting things that can happen when you don't have a snappy connection (or nearly equivalently, if the server is slow). One thing that I never do that I probably should is put width and height attributes on images. If you've got a slow connection and a significant number of images that affect the layout, the page contents can jump around an awful lot as the browser gets its image requests serviced.

If you use something like IE7, the page layout can change rather dramatically once the browser gets around to requesting the Javascript file and running it. If your computer itself is under load, the effects from running the script can be quite distracting even when you're on a good connection.

One thing I see occasionally is a mismatch between the brightness of a background image and the brightness of the default color being applied until the image loads. The overlaying text may be illegible while the image is loading over a slow connection or from a loaded server.

I'm sure people can come up with other examples. A lot of these are things that you might not even notice during development unless you make an effort to test for them. Generally, good markup and styling habits can prevent most of them, but you never know what sorts of things may happen.
 
HorsePunchKid said:
It was obvious to me (and apparently most of the people who have commented so far) what he meant in the context.
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I'm so sorry to have let you down.

I'm involved with more stress testing than compatibility testing, so I was very curious to learn what in a static website could be stressed, and why the behaviour of the site under stress would vary from browser to browser.

Now that the OP has explained that he really meant to ask about compatibility testing, I'm on the same page. (But I still don't see why worrying about a browser that is dead last in market share with less than one percent of users would be "smart". Maybe it's entertaining or educational, but it hardly seems crucial.)
 
mikeblas said:
(But I still don't see why worrying about a browser that is dead last in market share with less than one percent of users would be "smart". Maybe it's entertaining or educational, but it hardly seems crucial.)
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i remember a time not too long ago when firefox has *just* debuted and it was dead last in the market share. while being based on mozilla/netscape, it didn't render like netscape or mozilla. still, a lot of web developers went out of their way to ensure compatibility for firefox.

now that opera is 100% totally free, i honestly think we'll begin to see a lot more adoption of it. with that, i think we'll see a need to make sure our sites work properly with it.
 
Probably not, I'll continue to test both IE and Firefox on Windows and Konqueror on Linux. I think thats enough coverage.
 
bush doesn't care about opera




When I'm done designing my sites, I run them in opera just to see how funny it looks. Then I laugh, my boss laughs, my coworkers laugh, and I deploy the site.
 
mikeblas said:
I'm so sorry to have let you down.
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Don't worry. You'll learn how to not take what people say so literally sooner or later; these little semantic squabbles rarely seem to add anything to the discussion.


mikeblas said:
But I still don't see why worrying about a browser that is dead last in market share with less than one percent of users would be "smart". Maybe it's entertaining or educational, but it hardly seems crucial.
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I don't think it would be wise to spend a lot of time trying to get things to look perfectly correct in Opera, unless you happen to use it as your primary browser. Get the site functioning and looking roughly correct in it; that will cost you hardly any effort at all, judging by my experience. If you're working on a site professionally and attempt to get it looking pixel-perfect in Opera, you'll quickly end up on the bad end of the cost-benefit tradeoff.

An additional bonus of keeping Opera handy is that it can give you some insight into problems with your CSS when IE and Firefox disagree and neither appear correct.


svet-am said:
while being based on mozilla/netscape, it didn't render like netscape or mozilla. still, a lot of web developers went out of their way to ensure compatibility for firefox.
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I'm not going to be able to quote any exact statistics or discrepancies or anything, but this was definitely not my experience. One of the big draws of Firefox was that it rendered almost identically to Netscape, so designers could move over to Firefox for their development work without having to worry too much about debugging their designs in Netscape.

Unless you're talking about Netscape 4 and 5, which were still rather popular back then; but that's a whole other nightmare. :eek:
 
HorsePunchKid said:
Don't worry. You'll learn how to not take what people say so literally sooner or later; these little semantic squabbles rarely seem to add anything to the discussion.
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Maybe not for you, but I get to learn something. If I went around guessing at what people meant, assuming I was making a good guess, and never asked them about it, I'd be nothing more than complacent in my certainty that I knew everything.

If I ask for clarification, then I have a shot at learning something.

I don't see a squabble -- not, at least, until you showed up.
 
HorsePunchKid said:
I don't think it would be wise to spend a lot of time trying to get things to look perfectly correct in Opera, unless you happen to use it as your primary browser. Get the site functioning and looking roughly correct in it; that will cost you hardly any effort at all, judging by my experience. If you're working on a site professionally and attempt to get it looking pixel-perfect in Opera, you'll quickly end up on the bad end of the cost-benefit tradeoff.
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My XHTML and CSS are both valid and both render just fine in browsers that chose to implement the Recommendations. It is not my duty to cater to the browsers whose developers can't be bothered to properly implement the standards.

Incidentally Opera and Firefox both seem to render my personal page properly.
 
doh said:
My XHTML and CSS are both valid and both render just fine in browsers that chose to implement the Recommendations. It is not my duty to cater to the browsers whose developers can't be bothered to properly implement the standards.
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this strikes right at the very heart of my question. Opera has gained a reputation over the years for it dead-bang standards compliance. I've seen sites that work fine in IE and FF come to their knees because they did quirky stuff that skirted outside the standard.

Incidentally, my alma mater's alumni site is one such site that is unusable in Opera becauase of its weird CSS issues.

I think my question might've been better stated as "will you spend more time making sure that your content is 100% standards compliant"
 
svet-am said:
I think my question might've been better stated as "will you spend more time making sure that your content is 100% standards compliant"
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I always make certain my websites are 100% standards compliant and as accessibile as possible.
 
doh said:
My XHTML and CSS are both valid and both render just fine in browsers that chose to implement the Recommendations. It is not my duty to cater to the browsers whose developers can't be bothered to properly implement the standards.
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What's the alternative? Say there's a bug in IE that prevents it from rendering your site correctly. Because of its dominant market share, your sentiment leaves visitors to your website with a lesser experience. If, instead, you took it on yourself to workaround the issue, those users would have an fuller experience.

Some users might realize "wow, IE must be busted; let me try FireFox". I think the majority of users will figure that your site is busted, and leave. Sure, it'll depend on the site and its content, since those predict the type of user you'll get.

All software has bugs. Letting a bug in a tool limit you can leave you largely unsuccessful. And I think that applies to all software tools, not just browsers.
 
mikeblas said:
What's the alternative? Say there's a bug in IE that prevents it from rendering your site correctly. Because of its dominant market share, your sentiment leaves visitors to your website with a lesser experience. If, instead, you took it on yourself to workaround the issue, those users would have an fuller experience.
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Agreed, I'm working on a site for a salon and on the directions page I have an embedded Google map. Seems simple enough, except that IE uses a proprietary xmlns attribute and I had to place the call script outside of the html because IE likes to crap out when there is DOM manipulation within the HTML.

Is that particular page invalid? Yes.

Is it still perfectly functional in IE, Firefox, Opera, Netscape, etc.? Yes.

Would it have been a better idea to say tough shit IE users? Hell no. It occupies too much of the market. I'm not swearing off that many people because they don't know better. You think the average person is going to check another browser if they're having problems? Think again. They'll just assume that your page is broken.

On top of that, explain the whole thing to your employer, who is likely using IE and doesn't understand what goes on behind the scenes. Tell them that the interactive map just won't work in IE and they'll have to live with that page being broken because you won't have an invalid page.

You can have perfectly valid code that functions properly across the board, but sometimes sacrifices must be made to integrate advanced features that will wow your visitors or add a great deal more functionality to the site.
 
animeguru said:
You can have perfectly valid code that functions properly across the board, but sometimes sacrifices must be made to integrate advanced features that will wow your visitors or add a great deal more functionality to the site.
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To some extend I agree, which is why I am making my own personal statement on my personal website. ;) However at some time we as an Internet Society and as web designers need to stop catering to user agents that do not support today's standards.

I would gimp the design so it would work in IE for any production website, but I wouldn't revert to tables.
 
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