Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!
Posted on 05/25/2004 7:10:09 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned.
Opera disclosed the payment last week in a terse press release that omitted other details, including the name of the settling party and the nature of the dispute.
But a source indicated that the payment came from Microsoft in order to close the books on a clash over obscure interoperability problems. On at least three separate occasions, Opera has accused Microsoft of deliberately breaking interoperability between its MSN Web portal and various versions of the Opera browser--charges that the software giant has repeatedly denied.
A Microsoft representative said the company does not comment on rumors.
Reached by phone, Opera executives refused to name the company involved in the settlement or describe the nature of the legal claims, citing a confidentiality agreement.
"We forwarded a few facts to a big international corporation and settled before we took legal action," Opera Chief Technology Officer Hakon Lie said Tuesday. "This resolves an issue very close to my heart."
The deal marks the latest in a string of settlements from Microsoft, which is seeking to simplify its business by clearing up potentially damaging legal claims. In the past year, the company has agreed to pay billions of dollars to wrap up litigation with Sun Microsystems, digital rights management developer InterTrust and Time Warner's Netscape Communications division, among others.
While the Opera payment is relatively tiny, it underscores ongoing ripple effects in the browser market that stem from the overwhelming dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Having used its desktop operating system monopoly to help trounce its primary rival Netscape, Microsoft has effectively abandoned significant browser development efforts. That's left companies with negligible market share such as Opera and Netscape's Mozilla open-source project to lead innovation in the field.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
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.