As a response to the last comic that featured Opera (right here), viking descendant and Opera Software web opener David Storey simultaneously did three things at once:

1. He left a comment. Which I love. Feedback of any sort is appreciated, especially when it includes the phrase “funny comic”.

2. He defended his company’s product’s implementations of standards by pointing out that one of the three CSS properties I mentioned is in 9.5 (which is now launched), one is only experimentally implemented, and the third is as he puts it “not in a stable spec”. I’ll give him the first two, but I don’t think word-wrap is unstable enough to justify not implementing it.

3. Lastly, he threatened to attack me with the SVGorilla.

The idea of a smoothly scaling primate collided with my recent CSS3 rgba colors experimentation in my head, and spawned this week’s comic.

Opera’s been doing a fine job with their browser, and 9.5 is actually pretty slick. Will I use it day to day? No. It’s feature set does not offer enough to draw me away from Firefox, which is officially launching version 3.0 in mere hours. If addons became a big thing with Opera, I think it’d have a fighting chance in sucking me in, though. As a rule, I prefer browsers made by browser software companies, not operating system software companies.

That said… although the properties I’ve mentioned earlier (word-wrap, border-radius, and outline-offset, aren’t exactly going to see a lot of use by me. However, CSS3 rgba colors? I’m all over that. I especially enjoy the ability to set an element’s opacity without it affecting all of its children. I don’t think it was a good call for Opera to skip adding this into 9.5, as it means it may be a while yet before we see it in an official Opera release.

Well, on the plus side, it let me escape the vicious SVGorilla.

When it comes to browsers, Firefox is my primary choice. It’s combination of strong standards support and large addons library makes it not only desirable, but indispensable in how I browse and work on the Net. I know I can do web development without Firebug, but I certainly don’t know why I’d want to.

Although I’ve been running the beta (then later the release candidates) for some time now, I’m excited for the upcoming official release of Firefox 3 tomorrow. Although I hadn’t planned out a release party like Mozilla has encouraged as part of their Download Day 2008 event, I’ll definitely be upgrading to the release version to help with their “most downloads in one day” goal.

In related news, while I’ve made it clear how much I dislike their tendancy to swing at IE without checking if their own zipper is up, I am also glad to see Opera 9.5 has been officially released, bringing with it a slick upgraded interface, more speed, and overall better standards support (but still no CSS3 rgba color support yet.) Between those two and Safari, a lot more CSS3 and other standards-related features are becoming available in 2008.

Now if only Microsoft would get off it’s lazy rear and announce a general target for when they plan to release IE8. Preferably this year…

When I first started thinking up the idea for this week’s comic, I thought it was an absurd intrusion of the adoration video games receive into an the stately field of browser software. After all, despite the fact that web browsers are probably some of the most ubiquitous bits of software floating around on people’s computers, your average Joe doesn’t go bananas for a new release, do they?

Apparently, as I learned from this little tidbit at the Web Standards Project, the idea isn’t as far fetched as I thought. It turns out that Mozilla is looking to get Firefox 3 to be the most downloaded piece of software in a single day, with an event they call Download Day 2008, and among other things they’re building excitement for it by encouraging people to have launch parties.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited for Firefox 3. I’ve been using the beta (now the release candidate) for weeks now, and I can’t help but feel that it’s an upgrade in every way, shape, and form. It’s faster, it’s sleeker, has sweet add-ons, and among many other things it now supports inline-block (the most neglected of CSS display types). Of course, it doesn’t have multiple-backgrounds yet, and is only supporting border-radius with a proprietary version… but I’m not expecting it to be perfect out of the gate (this doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to drag your feet on that, Mozilla.)

However, I never thought that browser software actually needed a launch party (well, outside of the company that slaved and toiled to make it.) But now that the topic has arisen, why not? As web professionals, we rely on constantly improving, standards compliant browsers to render our websites and run our web apps properly. Approaching 20% of the user browser share, Firefox is the forerunner in providing us with just that. It’s not only acceptable to encourage and celebrate it’s success, it makes great sense.

Of course, as near as I can tell from my short time in the field as a paid ‘professional’, developers don’t need a lot of excuses for a party.

Anyone going to be celebrating in Bellingham?

Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way.

This week’s comic is not about Microsoft. The history of Internet Explorer’s many issues with standards compliance is well documented elsewhere, including various frustrations listed in this blog and in many of my posts over at Mindfly.

This week’s comic is about expecting a certain standard from someone when you are not living up to those standards yourself. In this case, of course, I’m discussing web standards and the big flap they cause in the development/design world due to the various browsers’ speeds at implementing them.

If you’re a designer, and you’ve ever had to make a website trying to find out how to make a website look correct in Internet Explorer, than you understand how important web standards are. It saves us time, which means it saves businesses money, and ultimately all the happy little people surfing the web get to see their favorite website about cute puppies the way that the site’s designer intended it.

So when someone says: “Hey, browser makers, get on board with styles already,” I’m going to be right there holding a sign and trying to pretend that protesting in the middle of winter in Seattle isn’t cold and demoralizing.

Everything in moderation, though. When Opera went to the European Commision to try to force another browser maker to change it’s feature set through legal actions, we start to muddy the line between “good activism” and “bad business behavior”. When Håkon Wium Lie, Opera’s CTO, then at several different points (including in this article/rant at The Register) outlines a very specific, detailed list of what Microsoft needs to do in order to be compliant to Opera’s view of a browser maker’s responsibility, things go from bad business to hypocrisy.

Why hypocrisy? Simple. Mr. Lie’s little list is incredibly specific, as expected of a programmer, and includes several points that must (his word) be adhered to. The one of most interest to me at the moment is the closing one:

“5. Commit to interoperability. It is important to ensure that Microsoft remains committed to supporting web standards, even beyond Acid2 and Acid3. If two or more major web browsers, in official shipping versions, add standards-related functionality that’s generally considered useful to the progress of the web, and described in a publicly available specification, Microsoft must add the same functionality.”

Is this a good idea? Why yes, yes it is! Nothing frustrates me more than finding a good CSS3 property (or CSS 2.1 property) that would solve a design issue I have with a website, only to discover that a couple of the leading browsers don’t have it, thereby making it of limited use. This is something I experience on a weekly basis (if not more frequently), and probably the largest source of frustration with my job.

However, Microsoft isn’t the only browser that needs to do this. After all, what good is it if only IE was keeping up with standards? Yes, it has the dominant share in browser usage, but there’s a good 25%-30% of users who are using other browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Opera. We wouldn’t want them suffering because their browsers aren’t keeping pace.

Generally, of the four browsers, IE is in fact the one that typically is behind the game. But while going through several CSS3 properties last week, I found myself looking at three that Opera was not yet using, but that were in use by at least two other browsers.

What’s that? Is Opera not living up to the standards it’s expecting of others? Why… that would be very hypocritical of them, wouldn’t it? They’d NEVER do that!

Well, as it turns out, yes they would.

The properties in question (and this isn’t a complete list, I’m sure, just one that came up from only an hour or so of looking) are as follows: border-radius, outline-offset, and word-wrap. The first two are implemented in Firefox and Safari. The last one is implemented in Firefox and (gasp!) Internet Explorer. All three are documented in publicly available specifications.

Opera can’t render any of them.

Now, granted, outline-offset will appear in Opera 9.5. As of yet, though, I’ve seen nary a peep about those other two, and I doubt that’ll change before 9.5 goes gold.

Frankly, Opera, you need to stop focusing on legal action against your competition. This kind of behavior is belittling, and ultimately serves as little more than a PR stunt as long as you’re failing to actually keep your own browser living up to the standards you’re yelling at others for failing to uphold.

We get it already. Microsoft sucks. Now stop poking the big dog with a stick and go grab a larger share of the market by showing everyone how cool Opera really is.

With Internet Explorer, there seems to be only two opinions: people love it or hate it.

When it comes to web developers, it seems to be pretty much hate. Granted, I’m on that page, as I’ve spent more than a few hours of a client’s budget trying to get IE7 (let alone IE6) render a site properly. Or even close to properly. I’d say almost half of my posts so far at my Mindfly blog are a testament to this fact.

But there is a point where people get rabid. I explore that theme in this week’s comic.

I understand that crucifying Dean Hachamovitch (the dev team’s general manager and author of this heavily hated/loved IEBlog entry - and no, I can’t pronounce it) might be going a bit too far. For that matter, displaying Jeffrey Zeldman in a Pontius Pilate role might be taking metaphors to excess. But I can’t help but feel that when it comes to browsers, we’re so full of rhetoric that any actual message, be it pro or con, usually gets lost in the rabid barking. Ultimately, they’re not evil zealots, nor saints. They’re just guys making code. It just happens to be code for the most widely used browser on the web… which probably means they need more coffee breaks than most of us to stay calm.

In case it needs to be said, I’m not encouraging anyone being hung up on a cross. That’d be bad form.