shwetank

If a site isnt working properly, then is either the browsers fault or the sites fault (sometimes both, but very very rare ... its usually the site's fault more often than not).

We have a site compatiblity in the core team which takes care of the former. We specifically look for issues in which websites are not displaying and functioning well, and see whether its our fault or the sites bad coding. If our fault, then this group tries to fix the issue for then next build.

If the problem is from the site's end, then the issue goes to a different team. We have a whole department dedicated to it, called 'Open the Web' which deals with these issues. Their job is to contact various websites and ask them to fix these issues. Its kinda a thankless job in the sense that if a website works well, you dont notice it (because, well, its supposed to display/behave that way!)...but if it doesn't, then you really do. So people don't notice all the sites we have worked with in resolving issues,...but do notice when something slips through the cracks as we only have a few people in the team and the web is huge!. We email poeple, call them and sometimes even meet them face to face to discuss compatibility issues. I'm part of the Open the Web team, and Developer Relations Team in Opera.

We also have something called browser.js.

Also, see this http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/11/05/the-lengths-to-go-to-to-get-a-site-fixed

The main problem is that sometimes we cant actually contact the site...for example a bank or something. Sometimes they just wont listen to us, even if we tell them that 'just fix line number such and such something.js from this to this and the issue will be fixed'. I have contacted some shopping and banking sites sites saying that we're one of the more secure browsers available, with automatic 256-bit encryption, ....and they say, sorry, we just support firefox and ie5.5 and above :(

There are also many people out there who code using webkit (or at most moz) only vendor prefixes, which leaves out Opera.

Having said that, there are tons of great people with whom we have relationships with who do care about opera (like fellow redditor and duckduckgo founder yegg), and whenever there is something wrong, we contact them, and they fix the issue straight away.

The best thing would be for developers to test in Opera as part of their webdev work, and we're trying to make sure Opera Dragonfly, our developer tool, improves on and on. With the addition of extensions, we hope more opera fans will create more web dev related tools. We're also trying to make sure our JS engine is super fast, so that the latest JS heavy web applications run quickly. And also working on adding more and more on CSS3 and HTML5 and other upcoming standards like geolocation, web storage, websql, web wockets, etc

Having said all of that, I think the amount of such issues are much less than what he had a few years ago. We can see it in the number of bug reports we get as well as when i generally browser the web myself. Things are improving in this department, and it would be even better if we get more developers (especially in the US) to care more about testing in Opera. Yeah, its one more browser to test on, but you did it for chrome, and doing it for opera wont be the end of the world :) *Plus, if you're facing any particularly issues you can contact me personally and I'll reply back with feedback like a fix or a workaround. *

CTO of Opera invented CSS :)

We ARE working on it...definitely haven't given up, not by a longshot. Thats all I can say right now!

As a guy in Developer Relations and Open the Web, I pretty much have to have all the major browsers installed in my system. Also, I have a mac, but also use Windows and Ubuntu trough VMware at times.

The trash can feature is a little bit like that....try it :)