The support requests for my Facebook-based application started coming in today:
“This application isn’t working in Opera!”
“I just keep getting redirected! I’m using Opera.”
“Your site is BROKEN! Please fix it IMMEDIATELY SO I CAN ACCESS MY ACCOUNT!! I’m in Opera!”
Odd, because it *used* to work in Opera. After some investigation, it looks like the latest Opera release contains a change in how iframe cookies are handled. In short – it stopped handling them. The new Opera (10.53 at least) seems to reject all cookies set by a remote server via an iframe.
Why? Who can say. I’ve heard the “security” and “privacy” rationales, and I don’t find them particularly compelling. What I do know, though, is that this change in default behavior is going to negatively impact millions of Opera users and website operators. It’s very bad software release practice when a new release breaks existing functionality. Shame on you, Opera.
Fortunately, I already had mechanisms in place to deal with this annoying browser practice – see, this is the exact same way Safari handles third party iframe cookies. I simply started sending my Opera users down the specialized Safari authentication pathway, and voila, problem solved.
It may not be as easy for other Facebook Application Developers, though. If they haven’t specifically dealt with the newer Safari problem, they’ve got some coding to do.
This is exactly why web-based software developers choose to only support specific browsers, usually IE and increasingly Firefox. You never know when an obscure web browser is going to make a major release faux pas.