Microsoft's web Office: No love for Chrome, Opera

@Alex

So you insist your apps are tested on _all_ versions of netscape _all_ versions of IE, Lynx, etc etc. On all platforms going back to DOS and *nix, *nux going back to pre GUI days. Of course you don't.

All MS are saying is that they are limiting their testing to their list of target browsers.

X-browser testing should be a thing of the past anyway. The test should be that it validates against the target versions of ECMAScript, DOM, x/html and CSS if browsers it's the responsibility of the browser maker to do their stuff right.

There's also a question of whether the browser and the various standards are the right platform for rich and performant applications...but that is a can of worms that is best kept shut ;)

Anyone who knows me knows I am not a MS fanboi. Just in touch with reality...

Not in the official list, but not locked out, eiither

Opera and Chrome aren't in the list of officially supported browsers, but unless a lack of support can be shown to arrise because a failure of the web app to support Web standards, wherein lies the problem? This is why you build to standards, in the first place: in order to stop having to explicitly name the browsers you support. It should be implicit. A browser's quirks (should they exist) could change at any moment, with a software update from its maker, so there is no point supporting them if you can avoid doing so, since they should not have been there in the first place. Build to standards, and you can assume that what you build, today, will work in browsers yet unwritten - at least until the Web standard you were building to, itself, becomes defunct.

A lack of support for Internet Explorer 6 is much less surprising, in this sense, (regardless of the fact that it was, once, a Microsoft product) since IE 6's support for the Web is by far the worst, among commonly used browsers. Would we be surprised if Microsoft said it wasn't going to support Netscape Navigator 4.0 - after all, that's a Web browser, too? Of course not. Niether browser was built for the Web, but for some version of the 'Web' that both companies tried to foist upon us, at the time. That time has passed, a new time has come, when some triage should be applied.

Whether Opera and Chrome manage with heavy use of AJAX-driven in-page events, and so on, may be another question that influences their ability to work with an online version of Office. However, given that it will be unlikely that Microsoft would be able to market an online Office suite that did not meet certain levels of Web Accessibility (given the very nature of the product), then the scope for including deliberate proprietary lock-out is potentially limited. It is legal (although probably follisome) to deliberately not support users of a given Web browser, but it is against the law to try and market some types of software that don't support Web Accessibility. I'd guess Office Online would almost certainly fit into this category - so even any unintentional effects that caused degradation in otherwise compliant Web browsers would probably be best avoided, since they could have knock on implications for Web Accessibilty (and hence the overall legality of the product). This could prove far more costly than any phryic satisfaction to be had from driving away a few Opera users.

@ Effort ? By Rasczak

Amen to that

It's over, man. Let It go.

I loathe Microsoft probably more than the average Microsoft hater, and was loyal to Opera from about v. 2.x through 8.x, but there comes a time when you just have to give up. Firefox came along and, for whatever reason, found enough of a following, gained more market share in months than Opera could in years, and website developers (and even Microsoft) had to take notice and work with it or face a firestorm of complaints from users. I loved Opera, but it got futile to be one of three people taking the time to bitch at every site that wouldn't work with it, and to be (rightfully) ignored as they thought, "For less than 1% of our users we're going to spend time and money?"

@ Rasczak

This is a suite of web applications designed to integrate with desktop software. You can't gracefully degrade this kind of stuff - you just end up with something that doesn't work.

Unless of course Excel implemented with a million input fields and a submit button sounds appealing?

Since when

Has Microsoft had any love for anything that it didnt produce (or copy) itself?

Im surprised that FF & Safari users are allowed to soil the sacred orifice cloud.

I am Spartacus

I'm the second Opera user as well. I use it because it's the best, by some distance. FF fans ought to be grateful too, because all the cools stuff in the Mozilla browser (and plugins) was copied from Opera.

Since it is the most standards compliant browser, by some distance, sites that don't work in Opera are not "web" sites at all. They are (mostly) IE sites. They are broken.

It's not a matter of supporting a particular browser. It's about fixing your broken code. Anyone can freely use the W3C validators.

-A.

as the other Opera user...

I use Opera because of the Carthago skin. Best skin ever. also because I can turn off gif animation, and then there's paste and go, creating custom searches from the address bar (all these things Chrome is finally catching up to). Opera also has a fantastic zoom feature, allowing me to watch Homestar Runner at 150% and not have to squint. And when I'm using a mouse I do like Opera's gestures. Finally, Chrome comes closest to Opera in allowing you to run without a status bar (even though the fools at Opera turn it on by default for new installs). Why waste screen space in the status bar when you can have progress in the address bar and link destination in a tooltip. FF 2 had a plugin for that, but FF3 doesn't yet (at least last time I looked).

Yes it is a shame about intercepting right-clicks. It does annoy me when I have to use Safari (on OS X) or Chrome (on Windows) to use Google Maps.

But I use Safari sometimes on Windows when I need a fix of properly rendered text, since Cleartype does not accurately represent glyphs.

Anyway, in my opinion, while Chrome is fast approaching Opera's level of coolness, I still regard Opera as the only proper browser, a tool for heavy duty surfing. The others are all only useful for looking at the odd webpage every so often.

@Mark Redle

Or the Pascal folks during the C/C++ flame wars on Usenet. Or the Amiga folks during the PC/Apple][ "debates" in the mid-1980s. Etc. Same basic mindset.

For some reason people using fringe hardware and software feel the need to bang their drum. Not sure why, probably makes 'em feel important or something. Me, I say use whatever browser floats your boat, and shut up about it already. Nobody cares what clicky-pointy interface you use to browse the Web. All the collective "we" care about is what we use.

@Jake

See "I seriously have no fkn idea why anyone would use opera" above. Yes, the trolls got to me.

-A.