Category: Tech

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Sorry for the misleading title, it’s sort of an homage to CNET’s recent coverage of Firefox.*

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, excited by the response to Opera 8.0, promised to swim from Norway to the US if Opera 8.0 managed 1 million downloads in 4 days. (By comparison, Firefox 1.0 managed 1 million in less than a day, and hit 2.5 million by the end of day 2.

Well, they did it, and von Tetzchner has donned a wet suit [CNET].

Tetzchner entered the “freezing Oslo fjord” on Monday and started swimming toward the United States, the company said. Opera’s public relations manager, Eskil Sivertsen, is rowing an inflatable boat alongside Tetzchner “as an act of guilt after making the CEO’s statement public,” according to the Opera Web site.

Full details, photos, and a map are at Opera.com/swim. [archive.org]

Update two days later:

Let me tell you, those PR folks at Opera know how to set up a publicity stunt.

In a “dramatic” update to the saga, Opera’s CEO won’t finish swimming to America after all, as his PR manager’s raft deflated an hour into the day’s swim.

Some choice quotes:

“As much as I don’t want to talk behind a colleague’s back, there is no doubt that we would never have let Eskil assist Jon in the raft had we known he can neither swim nor read maps,” says an embarrassed Tor Odland, Opera’s Communications Director. “I feel partly responsible for letting Jon down, as he cannot possibly continue without the raft.” [emphasis added]

A local farmer spotted the drama from his kitchen window and took surprisingly sharp photos with a remarkably powerful telescopic lens.

“And my mother [in Iceland] will be so disappointed when I call and tell her that I won’t be stopping by for hot chocolate after all.”

The tongue-in-cheek tone of the whole thing is right up there with the Opera Bork Edition that translated the MSN website into the Swedish Chef’s unique form of gibberish. That was to point out the ridiculousness of MSN singling out visitors using Opera and sending them a broken—or perhaps we should say borken—page.

It’s kind of funny how Opera can get away with stunts like this. Microsoft or Apple would be embarrassed to even consider it, and Mozilla wouldn’t dare. These days Mozilla/Firefox is too busy fighting uphill for respect. They wouldn’t risk sanctioning the “Always use Protection” poster, and they wouldn’t try something this wacky. Whatever happened to the days when the IE team deposited a big blue “e” on Netscape’s front lawn?

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*Things like “Mozilla flaws could allow attacks, data access” which didn’t just bury but actually omitted the fact that a fixed version had been released three days earlier, and that the disclosure was made as part of the release. The second-to-last sentence, “All versions of Mozilla Suite prior to version 1.7.7 and all versions of Firefox prior to 1.0.3 are vulnerable.” sort of hints at it, if you know that these are the newest versions, and if you don’t misread it as “through” instead of “prior to.” And the original article on the Opera swim promise misstated the Firefox download numbers using one of the preview releases instead of the big launch, claiming it took 5 days to reach 1 million. They’ve “corrected” it to “within days,” which is technically true—but wouldn’t “in less than a day” be more accurate and better convey the contrast? Compare this to other articles from last week like “Apple patches iSync flaw” and “RealNetworks fixes ‘highly critical’ flaw” and you have to wonder whether there’s a misinformation campaign some editorial bias involved.

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I remember reading a post a while back where someone looked at one of those “personals” spams—the ones that claim some sexy girl has seen your profile and wants to *ahem* “meet” you, and the variations that claim the rendezvous has already been arranged. Whoever it was noticed that one message used four or five names for the same (probably fictitious) woman.

We get a lot of these in some of our spamtraps, and I would’ve just skimmed right by this one except that they’ve upped the ante with two temptresses named Erika & Julia. In fact, that’s exactly how they were referred to every single time, even the line about how you can “get a better look at her beautiful body before you head over.”

Wait a minute. “Her body, ” singular? I thought this was two girls? Are they conjoined twins? Do they psychically share the same mind? Is Erika&Julia sort of a Samneric thing? And why does the message quote someone named Janice? Is she trying to make her profile more attractive by making men anticipate attending to the needs of two women instead of one? I’m confused, and that spamtrap is going to be very disappointed. 😉

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At the end of a post on SSL/TLS and just how much security a “secure” site really gives you, Eric Lawrence of IEBlog posted an interesting thought:

The so-called “browser wars” have fundamentally changed. It’s no longer Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Opera et all. Now it’s the “good guys” vs. the “bad guys.” The “bad guys” are the phishers, malware distributors, and other miscellaneous crooks looking for a quick score at the expense of the browsing public.

We’re all in this together.

I’m not sure I agree entirely. It’s more like a second war has started, one in which former enemies are (or at least should be) allies. I do still think competition is necessary, as evidenced by Microsoft’s sudden reversal on updating IE once Firefox became popular—but more cooperation on security may be something MS/Moz/Opera/Apple should consider.

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Opera BrowserOpera 8 is out, and their website is swamped so badly they replaced their home page with a stripped-down version pointing to download sites. That’s a first.

Unfortunately I can’t get the Linux download link to get me anywhere except back to the splash page, so I’ve only managed to grab the Windows version so far.

I used to be a big fan of Opera back in the days when Mozilla was still in beta, Netscape was obsolete, and IE was… well, a security hole waiting to happen and the dominant browser as a result of monopoly abuse instead of just making a better product. But then two things happened: Mozilla got a lot better, and Opera started to get bloated. And by bloated I don’t mean in code size, I mean in user interface. It was so cluttered that after a while it was just a pain to use.

I still buy new versions as needed (The reg code for 7.x seems to work fine on 8.0), and I’ve got active licenses on both Windows and Linux. But in the last few years I’ve mainly used it for testing (compatibility, small-screen rendering, etc.) and for keeping multiple accounts logged into the same website.

The 8.0 betas have been very nice, though. With all the extra toolbars hidden, I can just use the web. This is one of their selling points: their press release is titled “Speed, Security and Simplicity,” and states “The default UI design is cleaner, more intuitive and allows for easy navigation.”

I don’t think it’ll get me to switch from Firefox just yet, but I may find myself using it more often. And while it’s nice that I don’t have to pay for the upgrade, I wouldn’t mind it if I did.

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Going through the spam traps today, I noticed one message which was sent to 5 addresses on our system. Those addresses broke down as:

  • 1 actual person’s email address.
  • 1 long-dead account used to collect spam.
  • 3 dedicated spamtrap addresses seeded solely by unsubscribing from spam sent to other accouts.

Is it any wonder that people don’t trust opt-out directions?

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I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.

And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!

Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)

(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)

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