Re: [Geek] M$ feature

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 22:28:20 +0000, Show Me On The Badger Where The
Man Touched You <showme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>In message <f2mts1di068lpjsebillra0aleejhqlpah@xxxxxxx>, Derek Potter
><dpatspothyphenonhyphensolutionsdotcodotuk@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>MY own work took me to
>>Plexiglas recently. It doesn't display text, I presume it's one or
>>more of its 77 HTML errors screwing up the height attribute.
>
>I'm having no trouble at all with Plexiglas in Firefox. (1.0.x on my
>home machine, as I've not got round to downloading 1.5 here.) It's
>similarly fine in Opera 8.5.1.
>
>I thought that not being able to select the second level horizontal menu
>at the top (e.g. hovering over Technical Data and going straight for
>Standards without clicking) was possibly a CSS/Javascript/whatever
>glitch in non-IE browsers, but booting up IE shows me that it's the same
>in that.
>
>Aside from minor rendering differences - which can of course be found
>between different versions of IE anyway - such as a little extra spacing
>here and there, I can't see any significant differences at all.

Damn. My mistake. It wasn't plexiglas, it was perspex, or, as they
call themselves now, lucitesolutions.com. My apologies.

You can't miss the problem on the right site. Oddly enough it displays
properly in Firefox and even Amaya, but as Opera is supposed to be
fully W3C compliant,Ii presume the fault is with the site and the fact
the other browsers make sense of it is just a matter of how they
handle broken code.

>> I
>>regularly use PCBTrain for circuit boards but it doesn't accept a file
>>upload from Opera though it does with IE.
>
>Firefox and friends may well work just fine here.

Perhaps, but that is just a guess.

>>Others I've found don't
>>accept a payment except through IE.
>
>A couple of mouse clicks in Opera (and I'd imagine there are Mozilla
>extensions/config options to do the same trick in Firefox, though I've
>never cared to spoof my User Agent in Firefox) means that you'll be
>claiming to be IE and using the same SSL protocols. Practically all
>payment systems like that are just a few forms running with HTTPS.
>*Possibly* some client-side JavaScript checking of values, though any
>sensible website would do server-side verification as well (for people
>who turn off JavaScript, for someone attempting an interesting hack), so
>it would be very unlikely to be a killer issue.

I'm not a complete newbie! Tried all that. If a site is going to crash
with Opera, nothing seems to stop it. I doubt whether there's an issue
with SSL, it's much more likely something to do with the payment
system itself.

>I can't recall any payment system that I've ever come across that
>required something as icky as ActiveX (which would be a pain in non-IE
>browsers, of course).

Nope, I don't think that's the issue either :)

>>More still insist on telling you
>>to upgrade to IE4 or better.
>
>In Opera, that's trivially avoidable with a couple of mouse clicks such
>that the site can't tell you're not using IE!

Incorrect, I'm afraid. I asked their tekkies about that and whilst it
will easily spoof the HTTP headers, there are still lots of other
things (I forget which, it was a while back and I'm not *that*
interested to research it again) which it refuses to mimic. This is
deliberate on the part of the Opera team.

I think the common factor is uploading data. Who knows what's involved
beyond that?

>The vast majority of such sites that I've come across recently merely
>tell me that they're designed "for" IE5 or IE6 or whatever, and
>sometimes work slightly more clunkily in a non-IE browser (e.g. the
>navigation is slightly less whizzy).

Then you are either very lucky or simply don't frequent the sleaze
pits that I do - sites that specialize in electronic components.

Considering that a company will spend tens if not hundreds of £k on a
site, taking another day to create a style *** to make it look right
in all known browsers would not seem to be a great overhead. It's
almost as it some designers recall those "Best viewed with Internet
Explorer" buttons of a few years ago as something cool.

However, I agree, mercifully one sees it less and less.

>The last sites I recall, now that I delve into the depths of my memory,
>that were doing silly "Must have IE" tricks belonged to banks, though I
>can't remember the last time I saw someone complain about such, so I
>assume this has got significantly better. (My own bank's online banking
>has worked in pretty much any browser I threw at it ever since I've used
>it.)

Yes, banks have improved, I like to think it's due to people nagging
every time their system breaks.
.