Internet and you, and a little bit of the dark way to browser discrimination


Internet is a fine thing. If you a want to learn about a subject, just search. Wikipedia is surtenly one of this good places to get lost. I`ve got lost on Wikipedia many times, reading about a subject and then followed a link to the next subject and the race was on.

The pure and green world of the web

I like to see internet as an haven of knowledge. If you want to learn about something strange and obscure, you will probably find it on internet. You can also find more in dept information on sertain subjects you would know more about. I`m sure many people have learned how to program from the internet, or read about some new fashion trends. All that is good, information is a good thing. And as you probably know, knowledge is power.

Welcome to the dark side

When internet was a baby, this was not so importont since most of the users were professionals who used simple pages (in todays view). But this evolved, since marketing powers and public users only grew bigger and bigger. The demand for flashy texts and animated gifs combined with other requested did something with the internet.

People behind the browser made a solution for this in a dirty way, they implanted their way to show you a homepage. Because of this, we got a lot of different standards that we today are still have problems with. Even worse, the people behind Internet Explorer started to go «their» way. This made a lot of problems for other browsers, users and code monkeys. They had to make (and still are) one code for one browser, and another code for another browser (mostly IE hacks).

The narrow path back to the light side

The only greater thing than to all the knowledge you can find on the internet, is the standards that some organizations have worked hard to implement.

Also browsers started to follow standards, but again, Internet Explorer was not one of them. They still followed their own way of implement things, and in some point they still are. Today there are many good browsers, I can name Firefox, Opera (made in the mountains of Norway) and Safari as the three big ones (that are independent from Microsoft). and they do a great job, personally I use Opera.

Out of the path

Despire all this effort, some webmasters do not care of standards. They are discriminating their users by not let them in on their pages, just because they have the wrong browsers. Opera did actually identify as Internet Explorer in the start because of this.

One of this discrimination pages are thesite belonging to Stockholm Gamla Stan. It looks like they have done a little effort to exclude us Opera users, shame on you. When you try to access their page from Opera you will get this message:

Opera Software ASA

Opera Software ASA is the name of the Norwegian company that develops the excellent Web browser Opera.

However, the stealing of images, text, software i.e. on the Internet is a problem for serious web publishers and others. We believe strongly in a open Internet without or with small limitations but we need to have som basic rules. Not stealing is one of these according to us.

Opera Software ASA is curently not working together with other major web browser producers in making it possible by programming the browser to disable the right click function on the mouse.

Because of this we can not allow the use of the otherwise excellent Opera web browser on StockholmGamlaStan site.

We sincerely apologise for this inconvenience

The Chief Editor
StockholmGamlaStan

Of course, this is in the best a result of lacking knowledge. Every Opera user knows if you right click a page, you can set your browser to cloak as Firefox or Internet Explorer. When you have done this, the road to Gamal Stan is still free of worries.

But wait? What about Safari and Firefox? Well, in Safari you can just drag your pictures to your desktop (they have blocked the right clicking, but I love this function), in Firefox you can just right click and choose «Save as..» And do I have to mention the possibility of a screen shot?

Maybe we should send them a mail and tell them??

Maybe we should send them a mail and tell them?? Read more about the Geek conflict here: http://flaglima.com/?p=736

Thanks to @prebenlm on Twitter for giving me the idea to write this article.

Update: Looks like Stockholm Gamla Staden likes to follow the dark path and instead of their silly message above, they just send you to opera.com. I like to call them for webbullies because of their behaviour. Also read more at the tag #webfail on Twitter.