[hoppipolla]

> Opera would be great if it handled nonstandard html gracefully for me

We put a huge amount of effort into handling "nonstandard" html, including fixing the standards so that they represent the reality of what browsers have to handle.

In this case our failure is clearly a bug that we should fix. I don't think anyone disputes that.

In general, site-compatibility is a hard problem. People often depend – intentionally or not – on the specific behaviour of particular browsers. When this causes sites to break in Opera we try to analyse the breakage and adopt some strategy to fix it. Hallvord is one of the people responsible for this and, if you read his blog you'll see that it's not a trivial undertaking; pinpointing an error in tens of thousands of lines of closure-compiled, minified JS makes for an interesting challenge, for example.

If we find the problem's a bug in Opera we obviously try to fix that bug. If it is the site doing something broken we typically try to contact the site owner to get it fixed. In either case we may also try using our browser.js system to make a short-term "sitepatch"; a hack using a combination of UA string manipulation, javascript and CSS that changes the behaviour for a specific site and which can be rapidly deployed. In this instance sitepatching likely isn't reasonable, so we will have to work to find the solution that will unbreak the site as quickly as practical.

[brudgers]

I gave up on Opera because it was unusable on a small site that I use regularly. The site's owner licenses vBulletin and hires some local web guy to customize it (local being rural Pennsylvania).

I was the only person using Opera on the site. It wouldn't be a surprise if I was the only Opera user the web guy encountered all year.

IE, Firefox, Chrome all worked properly. Using Opera was turning me into a whiner as far as the site's owner was concerned. And he was justified, using Opera was just a luxury that was creating a PITA for him...on a site he was providing gratis.

I suspect his site was broken in terms of standards. But from my standpoint, it was Opera that was broken.

Don't misunderstand me, I chose Opera originally because I admired the project's goals. I still admire the feature set Opera provides. For me, it's tradeoffs became increasingly impractical. I want my browser to deal with the problem of broken sites in real time, not contact the site's owner for a long term solution.

[hoppipolla]

To be clear, we aren't running some idealistic enterprise where we value standards compliance over real world usefulness. Indeed Opera has historically been more willing to implement IE quirks than other browsers, a policy that has recently come to cause problems because some sites punt us down an legacy-IE-only codepath that we don't work with, rather than a standards codepath that would work fine.

Our sitepatching is specifically designed to solve problems in real time rather than needing the site owner to make any changes, or for the user to upgrade their Opera.

Did you report a bug on Opera for the site that you were having difficulty with? Often half the battle is knowing that there is a problem, and having good steps to reproduce. With those things we likely could investigate whether we have a bug that needs to be fixed or whether the site is treating us differently to Gecko/WebKit for some reason, and come up with a solution.