You’ve probably heard the news by now - Opera is suing Microsoft, saying “Hey, wait a minute! Your browser doesn’t support open web standards!” Basically, they claim that evolution of websites and web applications is being slowed down due to the fact Internet Explorer works a bit differently from the other browsers. They claim too much of the developer’s time goes into fixing code for IE and therefore want Microsoft to support open standards as well as remove Internet Explorer from default Windows installation.

As someone, who has ever done a website, I say I have to agree with Opera. I have spent quite an amount of time fixing some sites to work in IE. But Internet Explorer 7 is quite a step forward. Most IE6 problems are gone, so Microsoft is going into the right direction. And it’s the same with Opera. Version 7 has given me some headaches, but Opera 9 is mostly fine. The difference is, Opera users upgrade more regularly, while IE users don’t. But why is this Microsoft’s problem? As far as I know, they have alarmed their users about a “critical update” to IE7. What more can they do? Prevent IE6 from working all together (I wish…)?

I do realize Opera supports more open standards than Internet Explorer, but it’s not all that perfect, really. I think this quote from Kenny Graham at the web standards group describes the situation nicely:

How do you legally distinguish “standards-compliant” from
non-compliant anyway? IE is clearly the worst of the bunch, but I’m
not aware of a browser that doesn’t have any rendering bugs. Would
the requirement be “be at least as compliant as opera”? And if so,
how do you measure that? Acid2? Number of CSS selectors understood?
And which standard? IE renders HTML 3.2 pretty well, if not
perfectly, 4.01 like crap, and XHTML (as xml) not at all.

Microsoft has already had to remove Media Player from the default Windows installation, and now they’re asking them to remove Internet Explorer as well? For the end user this means his or her computer can’t play movies, nor surf the web… Great. From what I can tell, Opera is just being a bit jealous of Microsoft’s market share. But they’ve worked hard to gain it (no denying that). And as much as I agree that Internet Explorer is actually slowing web development down, I can’t believe what dirty ways people are using to bring them down - “Support my standards or I’m telling on you!”.