Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!
Posted on 05/25/2004 7:10:09 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
It seems an article I read a while ago was right. Microsoft has no problem doing anything unethical or illegal -- they just pay up and continue their business because the profit is more than the fines or settlements.
Opera is a great browser, but I dumped it because there were too many pages that I had trouble reading.
MS ping, plus a good browser in the news (although not one I use).
$12 million. Big deal. Micro$oft paid them out of petty cash.
They weren't on MSN, were they? :)
Microsoft's dominance in the browser market has seriously hurt the Web. Although they're not the first -- Netscape was doing the same thing in the beginning days. There are standards out there, and Mozilla and Opera meet those standards, but Internet Explorer is broken. Sometimes to do fancy stuff that works on IE designers forget the standards and write so that IE can understand the page, but that sometimes breaks those standards-compliant browsers.
Even Microsoft's IDE, Visual Studio.NET, is broken in its standards. The other day it told me that "min-width" in CSS was invalid. BS! It's perfectly valid, but VS.NET doesn't understand it, likely because it writes to IE and IE doesn't understand min-width and max-width.
Try the latest version. Much better than IE. Now that Microsoft has admitted breaking other browsers, the rendering issues should go down, one hopes. I suspect they also built it into the web creation tools so that other sites also did not conform to the international standards but worked with IE.
That's exactly what I was talking about. Microsoft can pull these stunts because it can afford to pay for them. However, for Opera, $12M is quite a bit of money.
Opera should realize that it ain't over until the fat lady sings.
LOL
To the extent I've used it so far, VS.NET creates pretty compatible code, but to do things that are in the standards that IE doesn't understand, you have to write it yourself. FrontPage used to work pretty much only with IE, but it is a bit better now, although things still work best with IE.
But in this case, Microsoft detected the Opera browser and purposely sent bad code to it, such as the page having a -30 pixel right margin. The site rendered perfectly when Opera was set to spoof the IE6 headers.
Yeah, but the precedents are building up!
Having been branded a Monopolist seriously constricts what Micro$$$$$$$$SHAFT can get away with...This "interoperability" cr*p has been the KEY to their commercial success.
I dropped it in favor of Mozilla Firebird (now Firefox), which is an even better browser, in my opinion.
But there are still some sites that write in tags for proprietary Internet Explorer stuff. Mozilla is getting better at reading them, but not always. ESPN is one of the worst offenders.
Where can I get Firefox?
Do you have an argument or are you just being Bush?
How awful that Microsoft doesn't design all their products to meet the needs of their competitors. The nerve.
thanks
That's not exactly what they did. Web browsers identify themselves to the server; that's part of the protocol. If the browser identified itself as "Opera", MSN deliberately served up a broken stylesheet, different from the one it served up to MSIE, that made the page look ugly. When the opera browser was modified to identify itself as "Oprah" (there is no "Oprah" browser), MSN worked just fine. IOW, MS went out of their way to design their product to make their competitor look bad. Incompatible by design and intent.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.