Opera doesn't support websockets. I'm sure some socket.IO fans will tell me that's not a big deal, but it kind of is. modern browsers support websockets.

and i know, this demo doesn't use it and will work fine in opera if you spoof the UA, but it's a lot easier to develop if you pick a feature set you're going to support, and skim out any browsers that don't support that feature set.

Excuses, excuses ... Detecting required features by browser identification is not only so 90's, it's downright ridiculous.

All it takes to detect websockets is:

if ('WebSocket' in window) { /* Web Sockets supported / } else { / Web Sockets not supported */ }

Ironically, this was taken from:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introducing-web-sockets/

Also, every web developer with half a brain can use https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js instead of locking out users unnecessarily by matching the User-Agent.

It's not about detecting features. It's about testing: When you're developing a web app, each new browser you choose to support increases your testing time: starting out developing for chrome, adding safari support usually is just a formality. adding firefox support means a couple extra hours of testing, but everything usually works. adding opera support means your tests are going to start failing, and a bunch more work.

I'm picking on websockets because that's what's been annoying me at work lately, but it's just an example. the myspace demo doesn't even use websockets, it's totally irrelevant, but websocket support is a good cursory indication of whether or not it is a modern browser, and therefore how much development time will be added by officially supporting it.

"Hey friend, it looks like you are using Opera. Beware, pal, that we don't go to the opera down here on the ranch, so there may be rough-riding ahead! Try one of these nifty browsers buddy, or sally forth into the unknown. OK, pardner?"

You can put all the disclaimers you want before a use and they will "venture forth into the unknown". However, they will ignore (if they even read/understood it) your warning and then bury you in support tickets, complain loudly to their friends, and leave you with a mess to deal with and no real clean/easy way out.

And lest anybody say it won't be that bad, yes it will be that bad. There are some remarkably vitriolic people on the internet.

I second this... users rarely read anything & remember even less. If you let them in, then they expect it to work. Its unfortunate for Opera, but we're doing the same for our beta launch.

> then bury you in support tickets

After all, Myspace has a commonly-used bug reporting functionality.

> complain loudly to their friends

Because they won't complain about being locked out?

This is a preview. Complain if they launch publicly like this, otherwise, cut them some slack.

IT WILL BE TOO LATE IF WE COMPLAIN WHEN THEY LAUNCH PUBLICLY.

I agree with you that opera should support web sprockets, and I sympathize with web developers making the decision to develop for new technology and browsers that don't support it be damned. But the actual message myspace displays is pretty needlessly snarky and stupidly insulting. I also have zero faith they'll be able to update their browser detection script often enough to avoid looking like dinosaurs themselves from time to time.

It takes character and guts to stand up for something. I think MySpace can be credited for that. The snark-iness was probably meant more for ie6-7 users than Opera users.

> It takes character and guts to stand up for something.

What does showing a message "Our superpowers have detected you're using an outdated browser. That must mean: a - You don't use the Internet very often. b - You're at your parents' place on the PC they bought in 1996. c - You work for the government or a big corporation." to users using a browser released in the past month stand up for, other than ignorance?

Doesn't it seem far more likely to be indifference to a negligible market share than ignorance of Opera's existence? It's not worth their money to spend any amount of time making a custom error for "Your browser is new, but we don't support it anyway" separate from "Your browser is old and we don't support it" when 99.9% of the people seeing the message are in the latter category.

I was referring specifically to khet's statement I quoted. What is Myspace "standing up for" here?

Maybe they meant to say "outdated or foreign browser" and "d. You're a freedom-hating socialist commie", seeing as it's the only browser not developed in the US? ;-)

Demanding conformity from human beings (how dare you choose a different tool?) is the opposite of character, though doing it this brazenly does take guts.

Opera does support web sockets: opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebSockets

They are not enabled by default, that's all. So it's not just that the message is snarky and insulting, it reflects ignorance as well.

speaking of reflecting ignorance: thinking that disabled-by-default browser settings count as support.

No reason to be snarky. Opera chose to disable websockets because of security flaws; see http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/12/security-flaws-force-firefo...

Or you could just use the features you want to use and try to fail gracefully when you can't. (Old IE could be a special case, as it is solid chunk of FUBAR.)

Sure, you could do that if you had unlimited developer time and people using old browsers are an important market. but that isn't always reality, you've got to choose where to focus your efforts.

No, you don't need unlimited developer time to do feature detection. It's just good practice, after it's ingrained it doesn't take any more time than not doing it.

Don't mix "development cost" with "overall support cost".

Overall support will include specific feature testing, regression testing, and user testing. Additionally, support tickets may be opened and introduce support costs in ticket management, escalation, and assessment.

Don't provide any extra support? "Your browser is not supported/you are on your own" is much better than denying access.

Eventually people will start spoofing just to get in, and then you have a much worse problem in your hands. You know the Opera story. There is no excuse to block user agents unless it's commercial software with support contracts on the line.

I challenge your assumption that the average person knows how to spoof user agents.

The average person is not using Opera :)

I agree.. plus I'm using Opera as I type this.

It could be worse. You might be using Dillo.

Actually that's quite easy in Opera. There is a dropdown box to select different user agents called "Browser Identification".

I understand that the HN audience finds it incredibly simple to do. My point being, go ask your family members who don't frequent HN (or sites like it) what a user-agent is.

Degradability died as an industry desire about 6mos after it emerged.

Opera supports websockets, thank you very much. They're just disabled by default.

About to post the exact same thing

http://i.imgur.com/DO5Kb.png

And what's with the condescending list? Excuse my vulgarity but the page managed to be insulting, clueless, and factually inaccurate all at the same time. Here's how it reads to me:

a) Fuck you.

b) Fuck you.

c) Yes I do, a big technology company where I can install whatever software I need working on harder technical problems than getting Myspace working cross-browser and I use Opera at home too so fuck you.

I think you and others are really being overly sensitive about this. Yes, they probably shouldn't have called your favourite browser outdated, but it's obvious that it was an oversight, and consequence of taking an informal tone with giving a message. A message necessitated by choosing not to support the major browser with the smallest market share in their "preview" release.

I like it when larger, more corporate sites go for an informal tone, even if they don't completely nail the humour they might have been striving for. It's a better direction overall than a stuffy PR-speak message, and getting bent out of shape about it just seems like an overreaction.

There is a middle ground, it is called a simple, straight forward message, something like "We don't support your browser". No shark needed, no suggestions that the user "doesn't use the internet much" or are "at their parent's house". Though the idea of MySpace trying to put on a hipster front is hilarious in the irony. Really? MySpace still exists as an actual thing?

Except that many IE8 users don't even know what a browser is. That isn't an euphemism, they literally don't know the word "browser". There message as displayed conveys the message better than "We don't support your browser" to those people, and there are more of those people than there are Opera users.

And some people use IE, keep it up to date, and don't like snarky websites talking down to them.

That line of reasoning almost works, except for the fact their error message already says browser.

My point wasn't that as soon as you say the word "browser" their brain's are going to shut off; with the message as presented you don't need to know anything about the word "browser" or even what a browser is or does to understand what they are saying.

Obviously they could have written a paragraph of text explaining that, but just saying "something you are using is so old that it is lame (in the duck sense, not in the teenage slang sense), here's how to fix it" gets the job done in one sentence.

This isn't a business website, this is a social network that gets most of their traffic from bands now. I can't fathom how the smallest amount of snark about IE8 being old on a product like this is raising so much anger on the HN community.

People don't appreciate being needlessly insulted, I can't fathom that you don't actually understand that. Your "big paragraph explaining a browser" is a strawman. They already say browser, they don't need to elaborate. They can still suggest browsers they do support, the shark just gains them nothing. You honestly think someone seeing the message they have is going to think they are cool/clever/funny/hip? When a course of action gains you nothing and has the possibility of offending potential customers/users the decision seems pretty obvious to me.

I expect most people would not care at all, with the remaining minority either grinning or groaning. I'm not surprised that you think it was ill-advised, but for so many people on HN to be offended or feel insulted because of a lousy attempt at humorously calling out users of out-of-date browsers is just a bizarre concept to me.

Yeah, I always take snarky lists like this as an attempt to be hip or edgy, it fails both attempts here and just makes me think the developer, or whoever came up with that copy, an idiot. One thing is certain, they're not in possession of any ability in the comedy realm.

To quote the patron saint of Hacker News, patio11: If you don't like it, maybe you aren't in their target market.

Do you think you are in MySpace's target market?

Probably not, I am a tech aware, young adult with lots of disposable income and nowhere to spend it. I can see how they would prefer to target the teenage set. Though I guess that isn't their target either as they say "you are at your parents house", which would be sort of tautological if their target were teens. So maybe it is middle aged folks? Retirees?

Here is another possible explanation: they aren't some kind of master marketers who unfailingly target their niches and never fail in such attempts.

99% of people aren't using Opera. I think they can cope with upsetting a few folks.

Why upset them at all? It's not like the target users who would enjoy this sort of snark are ever going to see the message. Seems like a zero sum game to me.

Supporting Opera has in my experience, been as much work and pain as supporting IE6/IE7.

> Do you think you are in MySpace's target market?

Why do you think advertisers like snark?

Totally agreed. What annoys me the most it that they are doing browser sniffing on the server side based on the user-agent, instead of feature detection on the client side. Talk about being updated.

  $ curl -i --user-agent 'Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.02' https://new.myspace.com/
  HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
  X-Powered-By: Express
  Vary: Accept-Encoding
  Content-Type: text/html
  Location: https://new.myspace.com/browser
  X-Response-Time: 1ms
  Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:53:34 GMT
  Connection: keep-alive
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked

  <p>Moved Temporarily. Redirecting to <a href="https://new.myspace.com/browser">https://new.myspace.com/browser</a></p>

Erratum: s/updated/outdated/

You can edit your comments.

Not after 12 hours.

The Web 2.0 craze is leading us back to the "Best viewed with" insanity of the 90's.

And is only going to get worse, with WebGL is not just "Sorry your browser is not supported, please download a different one.", but "Your video card drivers are not supported, buy new hardware and/or install a different Operating System"

First, the web 2.0 "craze" has already gone through its growing pains half a decade ago, we're in a different era now. Second, this is a false and misleading comparison.

What started the original "best viewed with" problems of the 90s? It was largely due to the lack of compliance with standardization. Every browser had its own buggy way to render content, often slightly different from the equally buggy ways that the competition rendered content. Most web devs at the time were undisciplined and lazy and they tended to use a standard reference browser as a guide for creating their layouts. This led to the insanity of sites that looked fine in one browser but were broken in others, typically due to accidentally making use of rendering bugs.

Now things are completely different. Standards compliant rendering is the norm for all of the most popular browsers. The issue today isn't basic compatibility as it was in the 90s it is now features. In order to push the state of the art in terms of new features on the web it will be necessary for some sites to remind their users that not every browser supports the features their site is built on.

Opera is actually fully compliant.

So what exactly do you propose? That we just halt all technological innovation on the web so that people that don't feel better about having old browsers and/or computers?

This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment. I'm a web developer and I'm so excited about making awesome things and the fact that the web is evolving and enabling us to do this, and share our creations with the world. People like you and comments like this drive me crazy.

That being said, I don't think that you should just put up a blanket disabled site announcement when it's not necessary (as is the case with opera here), but if your computer or browser is actually missing capabilities because it's too old, that's too bad - you just don't get cool things. Upgrade or move on.

> So what exactly do you propose?

Sane and simple standards that can be implemented in any platform without requiring hundreds of man years of effort.

Nothing done in the web today is particularly technically advanced, we are about the same UI level as standard apps were more than 10 years ago (hell, I doubt you can build a photo manipulation app today that can compete with where Photoshop was 10 years ago).

Most of the complexity burden the web has is purely gratuitous and product of how flawed the standards it is built on are.

How JSON replaced XML is a good illustration of what is the right direction to go. Now if for example JavaScript was replaced with something considerably simpler, like, say, Scheme, instead of trying to bolt even more OO-crud into it and turn it into another pseudo-Java, that would be another good step.

There is little doubt the DOM and CSS could be dramatically simplified without reducing functionality, same goes for HTTP (as a recent post to hacker news illustrated).

"most of the complexity burden of the web is purely gratuitous"

To think that some people are actualy getting paid to make submitting and retrieving data using web overly complicated and annoying is one of those things I try not to think about. The standards idea clearly is not working if it is being interpreted as a mandate for needless complexity to keep web developers entertained. Instead we hear web developers complain that standards are being ignored because some browser will not support their desired gratuitious complexity. I would say they've lost the plot but I'm not sure there ever was a sane plot to begin with.

If your beef was with the W3C, you should have stated that in your original comment. And then do some research on what it is, how it works, and who sits on the panel before you decide to rule them all inefficient idiots.

...then you argue that we should replace javascript with another language, and that would improve "best viewed in" problems? The kinds of changes you are proposing here would make the same issues you complained about 1000x worse. "Sorry, we wrote this in python, so you have to upgrade your browser, because it only runs javascript". This would immediately invalidate all old browsers, rather than slowly upgrading the tools we already have. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is how it goes when upgrading, you can't just make vast and rash changes like this.

It's great that you are thinking this way, but you have a lot more thinking to go, and a lot more research before you start posting comments like this.

>So what exactly do you propose? That we just halt all technological innovation on the web so that people that don't feel better about having old browsers and/or computers?

Straw man.

>This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment.

He didn't propose anything, just stated the problem. You're the one putting words in his mouth and jumping to overwrought conclusions.

Relax dude.

Fair enough - it wasn't a totally fair logical argument and you called me out on that one - +1 for that. However, you must acknowledge that the conclusions I jumped to were far from unreasonable. Who complains about technological progress?

    > I'm a web developer

Me too, and I agree with you. I would be interested to hear from anybody who currently works as a professional web developer and thinks that supporting a well-defined set of browsers is a bad idea. I suspect that a lot of this negative commentary is coming from people who have no idea what kind of workload can be added by supporting an extra browser.

The issue isn't "supporting". They actively went out of their way to specifically add code blocking Opera's user-agent string. It's more work to that than to let it through and let it fail if it must.

Making choices is a part of web development and choosing not to include an audience based on the technology they use is a choice. It's perfectly valid to make that choice--even if it excludes people--but it's a choice (that should be) dependent on the audience you are trying to serve.

For example, I support a few websites aimed at farmers. The sites are simple and degrade gracefully, because farmers tend to use older technology; small, because farmers don't typically have access to broadband internet; and mobile-friendly, because data access via cell phone is often more reliable for them than a consumer internet connection. These sites are not impressive, but they suit their purpose and their audience. So, obviously, the technology choice can go backwards as well.

Side-note: one of my favorite games is "breaking" websites by opening them in IE8 and reloading them with "Compatibility Mode" turned on.

Modern web development is pretty demanding and resource intensive as it is, add not-100%-compatible browsers into the mix and it's hell. I think that considering Microsoft pissing on everyone for over a decade with their IE compatibility issues, Myspace have done a completely reasonable decision. Consider Opera (and whatever other oddball browsers are there) as collateral damage.

Things were of course different if it was a paid service (where users can post demands) or Facebook (where the market penetration is so high they can't afford to forgo non Chrome/FF) but in Myspace's case, I think their decision is completely understandable.

We made the same decision for our site (not yet up) and our user base is way more conservative than Myspace's. We just don't have the resources to do pretty and cross-browser, so we'll have to do with FF and Chrome only.

We've had this all the time since the 90's with Flash being required, only we couldn't tell because it was duct-taped onto all major browsers all that time.

Turn off Flash and see how many sites require it (because of bad codec choice / lack of alternative ways of viewing embedded videos, because of crappy ads without fallback images so you get popups/warnings about missing plugins etc.).

The biggest hit to your esteem should be that there is space for a fourth browser icon there, they probably added Opera and then removed it when they realized it wasn't a modern browser after all.

I hate it when design agencies try this hard to be cool.

I'll pass on your humbling words to the design team, I'm sure they'll appreciate your words. They put a lot of hard work into the redesign, they're not trying to be anything. What you see is a refreshing take on a social site and although I am biased because I work for the agency that designed (as a developer) it doesn't take a designer to see this is the best MySpace has ever looked.

It's condescending comments like these that give HN a bad name. Let me know when you redesign a large social site like MySpace and then we'll talk.

Wait, the guy's complaining about condescending browser-fail messages and you have a go at him for writing something condescending? That's entirely independent of the design (which I like).

Oh, my apologies. HN didn't show me the context in which the comment was said, so it just appeared to be a general fact-less stab. Please ignore my comment.

Not so fast!

a) You don't really use HN that often b) You're accessing HN from your grandpa's computer on IE3 c) You work for a REALLY big corporation

If you chose a) or b), there's still hope! Just smile ( :-) ) and you'll soon be enjoying HN like it's '96

I didn't say anything about the main design. Look at that browser message and tell me it isn't stupid.

Looks pretty harmless to me. I dunno why people are getting so worked up over it.

Their audience is people who still use Myspace.

Isn't that the complement (in the maths/logic sense) of their target audience for the redesign? Surely they're trying to attract new users or those who've drifted/moved/run away from MySpace.

And that worked great for digg. Three times.

Or just try. Go do something else if you're not.

You (or someone else reaping sweet karma) already posted this comment on reddit. As a computer scientist who uses the most modern browsers, I haven't had Opera installed SINCE 2007. As a web developer, opera has always been last to implement things, even when opera had been the one to propose new features. Opera just does not have the same support for HTML5 as the ones listed. If you're going to use a Hipster's browser, don't be surprised when you're forgotten about. Also, if you're so offended, complain to the MySpace marketing team.

> opera has always been last to implement things

Except when it wasn't, right? Sorry, but this is a complete lie.

I was also rather put off by this condescending message. Excuse me for using a browser that provides an enjoyable Internet experience.

I can so relate. The first startup I joined post Sun was a place called GolfWeb, which was a website dedicated to Golf enthusiasts and it was, in 1995, the top dedicated Golf site on the Internet. We had all sorts of Java plans, except only a few of the people coming to the site had Java, and RealAudio plans, but the same story. The great masses were all AOL customers it seemed and not all of them had a browser that could display tables correctly!

As publishing site you had to shoot for the lowest common denominator in order to reach the most customers. That is still a good strategy, sites that can shrug off features that aren't supported but still get the message across. Maybe MySpace will get that message.

I want to add the fact that it works just fine when spoofing the user agent. "Identify as Firefox" setting in Opera.

Seems like they are overlooking a market as well by excluding them.

From: http://www.opera.com/press/faq/

"How many people are using Opera? Today, more than 275 million people are using Opera every month."

And yet, 0.14% of the folks hitting our servers are using it.

If 10% of the world's Internet users are on Opera, where are they?

5.06% here (Austria) by IP addresses (10440 out of 206384 in 24h).

That's not counting those Opera users who switched their User-Agent string to MSIE or similar because of stupid JS detection like MySpace's.

In my experience, Opera gets significant usage in non-English-speaking countries. I read at one point (several years ago, so grain of salt) that 25% of Russian users were using Opera.

That said, our own traffic shows 0.80% Opera users, which puts it just above RockMelt. It's silly to actively filter them out as MySpace is doing here, but would be equally as silly (for us at least) to devote any resources to dealing with any Opera-specific issues, until the usage stats justify it.

Yes, if you look at http://gs.statcounter.com/ and select individual countries you can see that Opera is strong in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. There are historical reasons for that (just my opinion, see bellow) and also the fact that Opera had/has Turbo - which really helps on slow connections (mobile).

So if you run US-focused site, there isn't really reason to care about Opera, and test for it. Blocking it (or any other browser) is bad though.

The "historical reasons": Opera was by any means the best (serious) browser out there, but it was paid. People in these countries weren't paying for software anyway, because their income was well bellow western standards while prices were same, and as a bonus, there was no one who would care. So while someone on the west would rather use something free (like IE), people in (for example) Ukraine picked the best. That's why first decent browser (Firefox) took over the west so fast.

My site shows Opera at 4%, above Safari at 3.6%.

I use Opera Mini (or is it mobile?) on my old phone - they have a system that routes request through their own caches that downscales/downsamples images, removes cruft, etc. before the pages hit the mobile device. I imagine that means they get under-represented in hit figures (but not by that much).

Looking at hits is doing it wrong - profit is where it's at, what proportion of profits come from Opera users.

[For example, hypothetically, they might be highly paid trend setters and amount for a disproportionately large profit share on a fashion site or such.]

I'm showing Opera as 1.61%. Yeah, still not exactly massive.

Every month? I wonder how many of those are developers testing their stuff ;)

I'd rather see a number of users who have set it as their default browser.

Yes, the message could perhaps be targeted at Opera specifically, but what else do you want when your browser IS the minority on the web? If you've ever shipped software you know the time will come when you have to cut your list down. How do you make the justification for supporting Opera? And like notatoad says, it's not just a matter of adding some JS, you need to test, etc.

opera 12 is supported now, just pushed

Thank you.

Opera is full of nonstandard irritating mishmashes of stupid.

Their market share has been under 1% for years, so it's really not worth any website worrying about.

Interesting... It works just fine in IE 10...

Doesn't that say more about Opera than Myspace? It even works in lynx. https://twitter.com/tuxtux/status/250605928691417088/photo/1...

Not sure if that was sarcasm or not. What that actually says is that they're explicitly blocking Opera by the user-agent string, and haven't bothered blocking Lynx. As pointed out elsewhere in comments here, the page actually works just fine in Opera when you tell it to spoof the user-agent string to pretend it's Firefox.

Yeah, it's pretty a bad practice blocking on user agent. Re: Opera - I just think it's a pain and an unwanted cost to support Opera. Though my dislike for Opera comes mainly from having developed mobile apps for a long time and having to deal with debugging though their "enhancing" proxy.

These days I have no problem with sites who don't want to support some users, that's their call. I wouldn't recommend suggesting the users must not use the internet very often though.

Opera excludes itself, by making its software difficult for developers to support. Most people have never even heard of Opera. So why should developers bother? Where's the value?

Well if you care about majority of Ukraine and Russian users you better support Opera, I'm sure there are more countries where Opera is popular but in those 2 if has the market lead.

well seriously thou why would someone use opera ...

I've always found Opera to be innovative and easy to use. They seem to get their default styling right too.

Personally I use Firefox as my main browser but that's because their web dev tools won me over first and now I'm entrenched.

Sync between a very good mobile and a desktop browser would seem to be a good reason - if their Android browser didn't force close on me so much I'd be tempted towards using Opera on the desktop for non-dev stuff.

Maybe they wanted to browse the web?

/s?