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Comments: 405 +- Developers: Most Expensive JavaScript Ever? on Tuesday July 21 2009, @07:45AM
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ekran writes "A while ago Opera Software needed more servers. Not just a few servers either — they were planning Opera Mini's growth, implementing Opera Link, and My Opera was also growing quickly.
Most of the major hardware vendors grabbed their specs and came back with offers and sample servers shipped all the way to Oslo for testing. One of the biggest vendors, however, did not do their homework. They shipped the server, but when the Opera sysadmins started up the web-admin interface, they were met with a JavaScript statement that managed to piss off the whole company including the CTO. The script, apparently, locked out the Opera web-browser."
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So who was it ?? (Score:4, Interesting)
I browsed the comments on the Opera blog and I could not find any definitive answer although HP and Dell are mentioned as possible culprits.
So who was the culprit company ??
Now that it is on /., I am sure that a member of the Slashdot intelligence community could come up with the answer. I offer a reward that will be paid in SMP currency, not in NOK. Sorry about that but I do not have any NOK at my disposal.
currencies:
NOK = Norwegian krone
SMP = Slashdot Mod Points
Re:So who was it ?? not (Score:5, Informative)
it's not HP as the link to what they actually buy shows they bought HP blades (http://www.digi.no/504306/her-kjores-egentlig-opera-mini&bid=6)
my money is going on Dell.
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Re:So who was it ?? not (Score:5, Informative)
Ah yes, Dell Remote Access Controllers have a shitty as hell web interface that only seems to work in IE. I think it's supposed to work in firefox but it never has for me.
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Re:So who was it ?? not (Score:5, Informative)
Some of their ethernet switches block non-IE browsers as well. I forget which is which, but I think the PowerConnect 6000s warn about the browser but let you through, and the 5000s just refuse to let you in when running firefox on linux.
My experience is from a few years ago and perhaps they have fixed their firmware since then, I know I filed a complaint.
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Re:So who was it ?? not (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid practice.
The reason for standards isn't to keep companies like Microsoft in check, though it has that result, and that is good for the marketplace. Standards are supposed to reduce costs. In this particular example, the way your iLO team *should* do the job is to first check for html compliance, then check for IE6 - as the largest-share noncompliant browser, then check for any other non-compliant browsers you can't afford to ignore. At that point, you have 3 ways to branch in your code - compliant, IE6, and unsupported.
The software industry is pretty nearly hopelessly fouled up, because of the lack of clear and properly used standards. A large part of this is Microsoft's fault, though not all, by any means. Unfortunately, rather than software getting better, other industries are getting worse. Customer lock-in is an addictive drug, and in the long term is probably as wise, even from a business sense.
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Re:So who was it ?? not (Score:5, Informative)
Browser detection is almost always the wrong way to do things anyway. Test for existence of specific JavaScript properties/methods on objects to find out if they exist. You can generally check for IE-specific behavior just by testing for the presence or absence of JavaScript properties/methods.
if (document.getElementsByClassName) {
/* IE and old browser version */
elts = document.getElementsByClassName("resulttablerow");
} else {
}
By doing this, you won't have to do a browser check at all and your page will "just work" for any browser that implements either the standards-compliant behavior, the IE behavior, or both. You can do the same thing for CSS properties by trying to add the property, then going and trying to read it back for verification. If it isn't there when you go back and check for it, the browser doesn't support the CSS property.
I'm not familiar with Opera's behavior, but in my experience, roughly 99.5% of CSS and JavaScript that works with FireFox also works with Safari and vice versa (as long as you don't try to use bleeding edge HTML5 or CSS3 features). Any browser check that only tests for FireFox is almost always just guaranteed to make a bunch of users mad for no reason.
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Re:So who was it ?? not (Score:5, Insightful)
Except the Cadillac doesn't specifically forbid Ford executives from riding in it, nor does Airborne refuse to deliver to UPS clients.
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:5, Funny)
That's what cubic football stadiums are for.
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:5, Funny)
volkswagen beetles are a measure of volume
football stadiums are a measure of area
round trips to the moon is a measure of lenght
parsecs are a measure of time
shitloads are a mesure of weight
bajillions are a dimensionless quantity
and the measure of power is a universal constant: 1.21 jigawatts
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ATD (Score:5, Funny)
What's the current SMP/NOK exchange rate?
The same as the current SMP/ATD (Alterian Dollar) exchange rate. The problem here is the Vogons mod everything down except their own poetry.
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Vogon Poetry (Score:5, Insightful)
You asked for it, ladeees and gentlemen! It may not be that grand masterpiece, Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in my Armpit One Midsummer Morning, but I think this little joy from Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz should be enough to warm your hearts:
Oh freddled gruntbuggly, ...[drowned out by moaning and screaming]
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits
On a lurgid bee
That mordiously hath bitled out
Its earted jurtles
Into a rancid festering
Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles
Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts
And living glupules frart and slipulate
Like jowling meated liverslime
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me
With crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon
See if I don't.
Cheers!
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For those new here... (Score:5, Funny)
currencies:
NOK = Norwegian krone
SMP = Slashdot Mod Points
The uncyclopedia will explain:
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I browsed the comments on the Opera blog and I could not find any definitive answer although HP and Dell are mentioned as possible culprits.
Funny story. I have a large Dell LTO tape array, and it has a web-based management tool. Part of the management web pages generate on-the-fly images in XBM [74.125.47.132] format. IE had a security flaw in the parsing of XBM images, and since XBM images are so rare, Microsoft simply disabled XBM images entirely.
So, I am forced to use firefox to manage the tape array.
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:5, Funny)
That must be terrible, being forced to use a non-broken browser. I'm so sorry!
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Re:So who was it ?? (Score:5, Informative)
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More servers (Score:5, Funny)
I think they still do.
HP probably (Score:4, Interesting)
Had the same thing on the webadmin interface for one of their ILO's. Or more precise, it wouldn't work on anything but IE. Hadn't seen that for quite a while.
Why "fire" and "moz", not "gecko"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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let me take a guess (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember kids, IBM Hardware = Good. IBM Software = Kill it with fire.
Re:let me take a guess (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess it was IBM.
The IBM Blade Chassis management software works perfectly fine in Opera with no popups or warnings at all. It's actually nicer to use in Opera than Firefox.
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From TFA, the actual code... (Score:5, Informative)
if (is.opera)
{
window.location.href="config/error.htm";
}
Conspiracy theorists unite!
Re:Warn and continue (Score:4, Informative)
Got a file stuck? Open a cmd prompt, run 'handle filename' to get a list of file handles for that file. then 'handle -c <HEXHANDLE> -p <PID>'. There ya go, file is forced closed and you can delete it.
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Re:Warn and continue (Score:4, Informative)
Or just use Unlocker: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ [ccollomb.free.fr] , it catches failed attempts to delete/move files and pops up a window showing you what's locking the file.
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Like every other Opera user (Score:5, Funny)
I'm going to go out on a limb, and say.... (Score:5, Funny)
Not that Opera doesn't have serious funding... but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this javascript would be more expensive, most of the time
.
.
if (is.explorer)
{
window.location.href="config/error.htm";
}
At least someone knew what Opera was. (Score:5, Funny)
The British cartoonist Giles is said to have made himself practically sacking proof by one of his cartoons. The Duke of Edinburgh remarked that "The [Daily, owned by Beaverbrook] Express is a bloody awful newspaper."
Giles promptly did a cartoon of his employer being led off in chains by Yeoman Warders, watched by the Duke, with the caption
If large corporations would only use common sense, (Score:5, Insightful)
This nonsense would never happen.
I started as a web developer in the mid-90s. I know how hard it is to develop for multiple browsers and versions. When Netscape and Internet Explorer 4.0 came out, they quickly gained the majority of market share. Many colleagues did not want to keep their sites compatible with 3.x browsers because they felt it was a pain. I would always hear the sentence, "They only have a 5% market share."
To me this was and still is a ridiculous attitude. You're OK randomly raising your middle finger to 1 in 20 potential customers visiting your site? What if that 1 in 20 is the wrong person? Obviously, in this case, they definitely raised their middle finger to the wrong people.
But this gets even worse, because Opera is not obsolete and is fairly standards-compliant. To top it off, the vendor specifically broke the web site for the browser they were too lazy to design for, rather than doing something that makes sense -- like investing time and money to reach a small but tech-savvy segment of the population.
All told -- shamefully -- it makes me feel a little Schadenfreude that it bit them in the rear.
You think the code is bad? Take a look at page 5! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.digi.no/504306/her-kjores-egentlig-opera-mini&bid=5 [www.digi.no]
Notice anything odd about the large 48v DC power cables? Like the '+' and '-'... on the wrong lines...
Forget a javascript issue, that there is a pretty huge installation issue.
-Rick
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Re:You think the code is bad? Take a look at page (Score:5, Informative)
48V DC is an odd beast, with odd standards going back to the early days of the Bell System.
In a 48V DC system, the positive side is grounded. This is to prevent corrosion on phone lines in the ground that happens more readily if the system is negative ground.
Since positive is ground, the "live" wire is negative, or -48VDC. Since this is the wire you don't want to lick, or allow to touch the chassis when powered, it is colored red in many deployments. The black wire is ground, you can lick* it all you want.
* -48V DC won't really sting you much if you just touch it unless your hands are wet or you touch it with a wet part of you like your tongue.
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Well I learned something new today (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for that, now I feel kinda like an idiot. At least I am now a smarter idiot than I was half an hour ago.
-Rick
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Don't do it like this, please, outside telecoms (Score:4, Informative)
(b)If deploying a system like this, IEC says the positive wire should be BLUE and the negative should be GREY. If the wires are completely isolated (i.e. neither is grounded or connected to PE) the positive wire should be BROWN. In the US (Opera isn't in the US) the wiring convention is WHITE for the return and BLACK for the negative wire. Just DON'T ever use red and black and reverse their normal functions. 48V can make very impressive arcs.
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Heh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Classic case of a company not knowing what their product is used for.
Opera != Work Browser.
Opera == Bestest P0rn Browser ! Swift image resizing, superior mouse gestures, and remaining responsive even after a gazillion tabs are opened.
It's like turning up with your purpose-built race car at the city center, and whining about speed humps.
Ah, memories of days past.... (Score:5, Funny)
I just visited opera.com with Firefox (Score:4, Funny)
... and it worked. It displays just fine. Are they trying to make their competitors look good or something?
Re:I just visited opera.com with Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
Opera web site is actually a pretty impressive piece of code. It has all that nifty stuff like drop-down menus, and yet it also renders perfectly in Lynx (with menus as lists) - disable CSS and JavaScript in your browser, and you'll see. Meanwhile, it validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict [w3.org].
It shouldn't be surprising, however, given that Opera guys are pretty keen on all Web-related standardization efforts - they've played a big role in initiating HTML5 effort (and are still very active in its development), before that they've participated in past W3C HTML/CSS standardization efforts, and they push for open standards (such as SVG) otherwise.
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is common to deliberately add a check that breaks the whole stuff when some 'unexpected' condition happens. You know, assertions.
Which one is better? Not working at all, or seems like working but a not-so-commonly-used-some-sort-of-admin-command somehow gets screwed and the web browser fires a do-not-touch-this-unless-you-want-complete-meltdown-command because there was some minor difference on the javscript engine parsing some parameters? Yeah, can be extremely rare, but if it isn't tested, nobody can be sure.
Obviously, the best thing to do would be to test all possible conditions. However, if you can't, then there can be three choices:
1) Leave it to the users, Nah, I'm not gonna test it.
2) Launch a big warning message and blame the users if something goes wrong, or
3) Make it never work when some unknown condition is reached.
Number 1 is perfectly reasonable when the worst consequence isn't so bad. For example, a web forum interface, or things like Facebook. Maybe number 2 would be better in most cases. But, if an untested scenario may cause huge, irrecoverable damage, number 3 may be the best choice. (You should remember that the product in question was the server management console, which can bring the whole datacenter down when things go wrong.)
My opinion is that, deliberately excluding Opera was a quite reasonable idea. Trying to sell a product that deliberately excludes Opera (web browser) to Opera (the company) was the stupid idea.
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing one obvious factor. There are a lot of great browsers written using pre-existing code. Omniweb is a great Mac browser that uses Webkit for HTML, and Spidermonkey for Javascript. The behavior of that javascript is known, but browser detection routines for every minor browser made of major software is ridiculous. You write based on standards, and test in a few major browsers. #2 is the only option. NEVER BLOCK A USER.
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you hire a good developer your site should work for all browsers. It's not fucking rocket science.
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you hire a good developer your site should work for all browsers. It's not fucking rocket science.
more to the point, try doing less 'fancy schmancy stuff' and you'll find that simple web forms and UI's work JUST FINE with all browsers. even lynx.
I am not a fulltime web devel (I write software, not web pages) but I have been able to get some web sites up and running that use the form/cgi paradigm and they work across ALL browsers. what's not to work?
oh, you want flash and blinking and 'as you type' stuff that happens?
go elsewhere, then. go write some stupid windows program if you want to 'act that way'.
but that crap does not belong on serious web apps. 'web masters' (what a joke..) have ruined the web with all the blink/fancy crap they try to pull off.
the web was designed so that you would NOT have to check (!) what browser you are sending data to.
why the hell SHOULD a server-side program care how you render data? you've done your job, you tagged paragraphs as paragraphs, lists as lists, images as images. you did what html was designed to do!
just annoys the hell out of me that the web was NOT designed for 'making remote word processors'. it just was never meant for such things. we have twisted this nice interoperable (key term that has lost its meaning, sadly) web into some overly complex beast that 'needs' to know how you render data. or worse, wants to TAKE PART in the font sizing, spacing, colors and so on. what a huge mistake; and its already too late to fix the web at this point; too many idiots are trying to make web programming just another bloated GUI.
in a way, I wish we didn't have such fat pipes or such fast processors. maybe then we'd see a return to sanity and some level of minimalism. that's what web UI's were *supposed* to be. tag the elements and stay the hell away from FORMATING.
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Re:ok so the company lost money... (Score:4, Insightful)
Though to be fair, if you're the kind of person who a) ows a Rolls Royce Phantom (or a Bugatti Veyron, or a Mercedes-MacLaren F1, or...) and b) shops at 7-11, you probably qualify for the Disabled spaces... Mentally.
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Re:From +1 INFORMATIVE now down to 0 INFORMATIVE? (Score:4, Funny)
I'd mod you "-1, Annoying as hell typing syntax".
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Re:I'm more curious who did their QA (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget this was demo hardware from companies responding to a tender. At this point Opera was still evaluating the hardware. Two things seem to have happened:
- the software was implemented with an abort for Opera, either because QA was not done for Opera.
- the vendor didn't appear to know what the primary product of Opera was, and what the browser requirements of their admin interface were.
While the first scenario is bad enough, the second is just unforgivable, since it shows to the customer that the vendor apparently made no attempt to know who their customer was.
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Re:Technically it's correct behaviour (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically, you admit your code is probably wrong, but you can't be bothered to fix it? Fine, but don't complain when your code stops working or fails in someone's browser and you lose business as a result.
The way I see it, this is only incidentally a story about stupidity. Not working in a standards-compliant web browser is a good indicator of poor web application quality. The cited behavior of deliberately failing in Opera would make me unlikely to pick the product, even though I'm a Firefox user.
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