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 ...
How nice of you to assume what you want is what everyone wants, I never use full screen but if I did you can still use tabs. Either way its nice to have the option.. Dont worry IE will introduce tabs in a while and youll claim OSS (which opera is not) stole that..
You not using it is not the point, many people do and like it and IE cant do it.
Ugh. I HATE third party download utils, I like one consistent interface.
Please tell me who firefox including a download manager with it makes it a 'third party' app.. Its part of the browser and again you not liking it does not mean nobody does. Beside it is as easy to disable as setting cookie handling in IE.
I usually run through the annonymizer.com proxy that blocks ALL that crap, although MS needs to improve the basic browser, which I've heard they're doing with the next XP service release.
Using a third party tool to do popubblocking huh?, So when IE builds in popup blocking will they be copying from Mozilla/Opera/FireFox?
MSIE is ubiquitous enough to create de-facto standards. Why should you be surprised if competitors use those de-facto standards rather than require users to re-learn everything? The latter approach actually hurt Microsoft once upon a time converting people from WordPerfect to MS Word (back in the Word 2.0 days).
And, as has already been pointed out, Opera is not open source, but a proprietary commercial product.
They did, and I wasn't happy about it at the time, I actually thought Apple should have won at least something in their lawsuit against Microsoft. But Apple waited too late to launch their poorly organized lawsuit, and eventually turned into a train wreck once Woz and Jobs both left, although Jobs little black and white Mac did more to kill Apple than anything, if they had just made that thing color. Job's Next system was the best personal computer I had ever used, at the time, but it was marketed wrong and practically impossible for the average person to get one. A string of misteps by Apple and Jobs right at the time Microsoft put a GUI on the IBM clone market and the rest is history. I still wish Apple well, it's very disturbing to see them now relegated to third place on the desktop behind Finland's Linux, now morphing into a music company and rumor is they're soon to out of the pc hardware business completely, making software only.
Set your start bar to stay on top, then you can jump to a different browser session with one click, always visible. What's the big deal?
So when IE builds in popup blocking will they be copying from Mozilla/Opera/FireFox?
Depends on how it's implemented, guess we'll have to wait and see.
Disagree, one of the best things Microsoft did was to standardize the ridiculous differences between the menus in WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. While they were doing that, WP and Lotus were screaming "WE'RE STAYING DOS, FOREVER." LOL.
Perhaps, but I remember seeing people with the quick reference cards quietly cursing Microsoft for changing their familiar keystroke combos...
Yeah but secretaries b!tch about anything they can. Good thing they're not in charge.
That's a bit kludgy. Under XP, it's not so bad because the bar groups multiple windows for an application together, but try that under Win 98, though, and you'll see a different story.
Besides, changing tabs in Opera can be done with a simple keyboard shortcut . You could to change application windows, I suppose, but then you'd also have to cycle through any other open apps.
Sorry, I forgot that the psoting software would remove brackets (and text within them)... I meant to include the actual shortcuts: (CTRL+Enter) to tab between Opera tabs, (ALT+Enter) to switch applications under MS Windows.
Not the first time. From Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire
In the early 80's, Microsoft's Multiplan[now MS Office] lost out to Lotus 1-2-3 in the marketplace. According to one Microsoft programmer, a few of the key people working on DOS 2.0 had a saying at the time that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to break down when it was loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done," the employee said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.
"$12 million. Big deal. Micro$oft paid them out of petty cash."
Bump.
(Probably just collected loose money from the sofas in the corporate lounge)
Mozilla's Firefox is my primary browser.
Actually the 98 style would be more similar, being a list of them side by side you could access with a single click. WXP by default will stack them, which would require more than a single click to switch, but that is a start bar setting that can be easily changed.
You sound like what you accuse Linux Guys of doing, giving workarounds because the product cant do it!
And ALT+TAB to switch between any apps including browser sessions. Tabbed browsing is a feature, no doubt, but I like my browswer window as big as possible and IMO it just eats that precious space. Can you turn it completely off, if you want? I would hope so, surely possible. Still just an inconvenience, IMO.
Since MS owned the web site that did that, what legal duty did they breach? They don't have the duty to make sure Opera's software runs right, and if I want to disrupt things on my property to keep my competitor from gaining a foothold, I get to do that.
Not really, most people by default have their start bar stay on top and the browser windows line up side by side and you single click the one you want. So that's hardly a workaround for something the product won't do, didn't stop you from making a poor analogy, however.
now morphing into a music company and rumor is they're soon to out of the pc hardware business completely, making software only. I hope thats true I would pay 200$ to run OSX on my PC but I wont pay for the hardware Apple sells (It is far better than the i86 stuff but I dont need it).
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