Why Would You Block Google and Opera?

Blocking the Googlebot looks to me like death on the web, but fortunately for CVS.com, the online pharmacy, it left a small window for escape when it allowed the Open Directory Project and thus Google was able to pull a description snippet for the search results. A bad idea, anyhow, and perhaps somebody should look into it after viewing Matt Cutts’ video on how to protect your files, if that’s what they were after.

Opera is not supported by the site for a couple of years now and all requests for help that users have submitted have hit the same "we’re working on it" wall of inactivity. Needless to say, nothing actually was done in the meantime, no periods of crashes or access denied to all because of "work in progress". The situation angered the big people at Opera after a while and they decided to do something about it, regardless of the "efforts" from CVS.

Enough of the "You have landed on this page, because we do not currently support your web browser and/or browser version" message, from now on the browser will do all the work. As Daniel Goldman of OperaWatch.com said, they modified the ua.ini that modifies and changes the code of the webpage before the browser renders it. In other words, the .ini makes the website think that it’s Firefox knocking at its door, not Opera. It’s the dev team’s solution when dealing with sites such as this one, that just don’t care about the users using the unsupported software.

The ua.ini will be automatically updated every two weeks, in order to accommodate all changes that might appear over that period of time. The downside to it is that no Opera visitors will appear in the log, so the online pharmacy won’t have any reason now whatsoever to fix the problem. You win some, you lose some, it seems.

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