Opera tolerating MSN.co.uk goes live

Strangely, its better under IE

By James Watson • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 8th November 2001 11:43 GMT

Free whitepaper – PowerEdge energy Smart brochure

Microsoft's UK-targeted portal, MSN.co.uk, is now live with the XP colours, nearly two weeks after MS's 25 October Win XP launch and MSN's global look and feel relaunch.

What's more, the site seems to be accepting browsers other than those created by MS. Although not widely tested yet, a cursory attempt with Opera 5.0 and 5.12 (identifying itself either as Opera or Mozilla 5.0) worked with no major issues. Of course, page layout isn't quite as slick and smooth as when viewed in IE 6.0, but referrals to MS upgrade servers aren't found, which is encouraging.

However, it seems not all the world's MSN portals are ready though, the folks down under have yet to enter the fold.

A visit to MSN.com worked fine in Opera, although popping along to South America's MSN.com.br returned another familiar message:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
Type mismatch: '[string: "."]'
/include/browser.asp, line 45

IE, of course, had no problem.

Sharp Opera

Opera signed up Sharp as a new customer this week. Sharp will use the Linux-based Opera 5 browser in its Zaurus SL-5000D handheld computer. The device runs on an embedded Linux operating system and uses a Java application environment.

Lineo, Trolltech and Insignia Solutions provide the remaining software for the gadget. It uses 206MHz Intel StrongARM system-on-chip processor and features a built-in keyboard available underneath a sliding panel. ®