Opera Admits @Font-Face Bugs In Opera 10

by Richard Fink on September 30, 2009

For sheer balls, you have to admire Opera’s CTO Håkon Wium Lie. Over the past couple of years he has: 1) filed an antitrust complaint with the EU against Microsoft for it’s failure to support “fundamental and open web standards” in Internet Explorer 2) addressed a group of professional font designers and advised them to, essentially, give away their work for free 3) publicly accused Microsoft of having a monopoly on fonts 4) written an article about font-linking for a major web design publication without a single mention of licensing issues.

The Fat Lady Farts

After all the noise, Opera goes and gets @font-face wrong.
We recently reported Opera’s non-standard @font-face syntax, but apparently the problems go deeper than that.
They’ve owned up to it on their developer website:

Opera's Apology On Their Developer Website

A demo page showing the problem here: Web Fonts Problem

A demo page showing the hack for fixing here: Web Fonts Workaround

Of all the things to screw up on, it had to be @font-face, of course.
Ouch! That’s gotta hurt.

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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo October 1, 2009 at 8:32 am: Why so hostile?
Divya October 1, 2009 at 9:32 am: Same question as Tor, why is this “apology” such a big deal?
Richard Fink October 1, 2009 at 9:44 am: Hi, Tor
Was just checking out your use of web fonts at designalized. Nice. I’ll be adding it to my list of Web Fonts On Parade.
I’m sorry you found the piece “hostile”. Critical, yes. Sarcastic, yes. I was aiming for those, but not hostile. If any particular words or phrases crossed the line into hostility, please identify and let me know.
I am frustrated, however.
I have had Opera installed on every PC I’ve used at home and at work since around the year 2000. At the time, Opera was shipping with an advertisement in the upper-right of the toolbar and if you wanted a copy that didn’t have the advertisement, the price was $25.00 US.
I paid the $25. Not because the ad bothered me, but to support the product.
The reason I started was because Opera stuck to the W3C standards tightly and I wanted to check the way I had to write pages for IE, against what, I always assumed, would ultimately be the way I could write for all browsers. I used it for some general browsing also. (IE, unbelievably, still doesn’t have a built-in session manager.)
My main point is summed up by the English expression: “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
I don’t mind Håkon making a lot of noise and being theatrical – it makes the world interesting. But for heaven’s sake, when the time comes at least get the implementation right!
Plus, it makes the folks at Opera less credible overall.
Practice what you preach, is all I’m saying.
Hope this clarifies. I save my hostility for stuff that’s a lot more important than Cascading Style Sheets!
Cheers, Rich
Richard Fink October 1, 2009 at 11:05 am: Hi, Divya
First, see my answer to Tor.
Second, it isn’t a big deal. But worth noting? Yes.
A more interesting question, I think is, “Would it be a big deal if this bug popped up in the next release of IE?”
Because if you don’t think that the blogosphere would be howling about it if it was a bug in IE Next, then we’re using two different Internets.
(BTW – I think, but am not sure, that IE’s current implementation of @font-face does have issues with weights similar to the way Opera behaves now. I think, at least in some scenarios, you do have to give the different weights different names and juggle a bit using font-family to get bold and oblique and whatever other weights are involved, working right. I’ve yet to test.)
But to get back to the question: Is it not a big deal because technically it’s not a big deal? Or is it not a big deal because Opera’s market share is very small and Opera users (like me, remember) are frequent upgraders and therefore web designers, as a practical matter, can just ignore the problem completely because, presumably, soon it will afflict so few users?
Sorry to be that blunt about it, but that’s what the calculation comes down to.
That Opera’s market share is still so tiny, after this many years, and especially after having been the only real alternative to IE6 for several of those years, is strange. Something is amiss.
Cheers, Rich
Enrique Ramírez October 1, 2009 at 11:45 am: Ouch.

Quite a mistake from Opera. Yet, still a mistake. It is a big deal, and it’s quite a dissapointment for the Opera community. But having the balls to get out there and say “Hey, we screw up” is reason enough not to take any credibility away from the Opera crew.

As you point out, if IE did the same, it’ll all be sticks and stones over the IE team. But then again, IE has a history of flawfullness whilst Opera has done things right so many times a “small” bump on the road is not reason enough to burn them altogether.

It is embarrassing, disappointing and kinda discouraging, but still, a minor tech issue on a (yet) rarely implemented functionality for a very small market share.
Richard Fink October 1, 2009 at 5:25 pm: @enrique
Fairly stated.
However, that “rarely implemented” functionality will take off like a rocket very soon. @Font-Face is already supported in the large majority of user agents. (Safari and IE)
Once FF3.5 hits “critical mass”, web fonts will fly like crazy. Expect some weird pages.
@Tor
Your page, Design Commandments, looks wrong in Opera 10. But like I said, it looks great in Chrome, Safari, and FF3.5.
Are you planning on changing it to work with Opera as it now stands?
Will you be doing an IE version with EOT? I’d love to see what changes are needed for it to render correctly cross-browser despite IE and Opera’s requirements.
Later… rich
Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo October 2, 2009 at 12:42 am: What doesn’t look right in Opera, Richard? The fonts embed in the newest Opera on WinXP. Altho’ the rendering is not great. The newset Chrome doesn’t embed, but it does in your version? I don’t bother with EOT for IE…, but made a page for easy to remember how to webfont: http://m70.no/webfonts
Richard Fink October 2, 2009 at 7:28 am: Tor,
Love your page, dog. Made me laugh. And useful, too, a double win.
My musical taste runs more to Be-Bop (as in Charlie Parker, circa 1950) than Hip-Hop, but I’ve got to start listening more, really.
(I’m a musician and I find something to like in just about any style.)
Anyway, I put together a page of screen shots showing the differences in rendering between Opera 10 and FF 3.5 for your Design Commandments page:
Web Font Rendering Analysis
Needless to say, there should not be a difference in bolding.
RE: Launching Chrome with Web Fonts Enabled – Paul Irish has done the work. Check out:
http://paulirish.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/chrome-exe-remote-fonts-switch.png
http://paulirish.com/2009/chrome-and-font-face-a-summary/
Cheers, Rich
Enrique Ramírez October 2, 2009 at 1:36 pm: @Richard
Agreed. Then again, I’m quite possitive that, when @font-face booms, Opera will be ready to go.

Not saying it’s not important. Just saying it’s not critical.

@Tor
Man, that’s awesome. I was going to search for a way to get my .eot files done, but you’ve just saved me a couple of minutes googling. Awesome.
op October 22, 2009 at 9:20 am: also opera 10 doesn’t render otf at all (depending the build)
Richard Fink October 22, 2009 at 12:41 pm: @op
I’m using the latest build of Opera 10 on Windows XP. OTF files don’t seem to be a problem.
Patrick November 19, 2009 at 11:14 am: This is not the only bug that Opera has. I made a screencast showing that if you use two different tabs of the same page, the second one does not display the font:
http://screenr.com/bWN

And the workaround suggested by Opera does not make any difference.

Pat
Richard Fink November 19, 2009 at 11:48 am: Thanks Patrick.
I’ll check it out.
Not sure what you mean by the “workaround suggested” doesn’t make any difference, though. Only on the second tab, or on any tab, or what?
The Opera devs must be pretty aggravated over all this and I’m sure they are most definitely working on it. Of that I have little doubt. And, thankfully, those of us who use Opera – even if it’s only a part of the development process – are frequent upgraders so let’s hope this situation turns out to be very temporary.
Regards, rich