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"In this instance, Opera is the evil corporation manipulating the system for its own gain."

That's right. When MS was caught with their pants down, they started coming up with lame excuses - lies - like "Opera does not support XHTML", and similar nonsense.

Opera is clearly not "the evil corporation" here. That you claim otherwise just proves that you haven't even taken the time to inform yourself of the facts before posting about the subject.

2. Conspiracy or not, MSN.com was broken several times, and it was using browser sniffing to single out Opera. Recently, the same happened to MSNBC.com. Add to this Microsoft's lies to the press about Opera, and you get a pretty accurate picture of the situation...

3. The founders of the company still own the controlling shares.

5. (Skipping 4.) The shares are only available for purchase in Norway, on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Microsoft is a US company, a foreign company.

"Would we as consumers even have any way to know if some MS VPs purchased large chunks of Opera stock, say, a week or two before the settlement?"

And it's important to note that both current and previous versions of Opera rendered the correct HTML/CSS just fine, so this wasn't a matter of MS not keeping up to date with Opera upgrades.

So for whatever reason, the MSN page was set up to specifically feed Opera users a CSS that did not work. Everyone else BUT Opera got the default CSS (which Opera renders perfectly)

The explanation given on that Wikipedia page you mentioned does not jibe with the technical details provided on the Opera page. Opera is not just making a bunch of sweeping claims, they do back it up with details.

There may be a non-'evil empire' explanation for this, but no one has provided a good one that suitably takes into account all of the details.

c They showed this was not the case. MS server was rendering different content just
for Opera.

"hkmwbz, it is quite well known that you are a slashdot idiot, your karma is a good point to that."

"Opera has no future in mobile devices. They try to put it into mobile devices, but developers don't care about opera."

"In fact, my company specializes on web sites designed for mobile devices primarily target pocketIE, because it is the best."

"The only reason opera has attraction there is that, pocketIE is working only on windows ce devices, whereas opera is trying to put it into other devices too."

"Also, as a typical slashdot idiots you are simply pushing an unrelated issue here. PocketIE vs Opera has nothing to do with the news mentioned in this post. Go and read the fucking article first if you didn't get it. Don't make another stupid allegation, we already know you are an idiot."

"Again, your stupidity shines. You claim it repeats itself over and over, yet you don't show one single proof to support your claim. All you are saying is a lie, it doesn't repeat itself over and over and over. Opera is a shitty browser, we do not support it at all. It is absolutely stupid to support opera. MSN should completely refuse to support it."

But I already covered that in the post you responded to I guess.

Anyway, AC. Sorry, but YUO LOSE!!!!1 :)

Thanks for playing, try again.

I am sure you, too understand why Microsoft gets crap for making other browsers look bad on purpose. To quote another post of mine:

"You mean apart from the fact that MSN is used by millions upon millions of people, and that when they discover that it works fine in Internet Explorer but not in Opera, it gives the impression that it is Opera which doesn't work properly?"

A little Norwegian company which poses no threat to Microsoft, and in fact builds it business on Microsoft products (Windows)

Firstly Opera are a major player in the fast-growing mobile browser sector. They are in partnership with some of the biggest manufacturers, such as Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp and Psion. Opera's small-screen rendering technology is far more advanced than anything Microsoft have, and they know it. Opera are also a powerful voice on the W3C committee (it was an Opera employee who came up with the idea of CSS) and are committed to web standards.

As well as offering true cross-platform support (LINUX, Mac, Windows, Solaris, OS/2, Symbian) Opera is also far more feature rich than anything Microsoft have. If you think Opera aren't a potential threat to Microsoft then you are incredibly naive.

A little Norwegian company which poses no threat to Microsoft, and in fact builds it business on Microsoft products (Windows)

Firstly Opera are a major player in the fast-growing mobile browser sector. They are in partnership with some of the biggest manufacturers, such as Nokia, IBM, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp and Psion. Opera's small-screen rendering technology is far more advanced than anything Microsoft have, and they know it. Opera are also a powerful voice on the W3C committee (it was an Opera employee who came up with the idea of CSS) and are committed to web standards.

As well as offering true cross-platform support (LINUX, Mac, Windows, Solaris, OS/2, Symbian) Opera is also far more feature rich than anything Microsoft have. If you think Opera aren't a potential threat to Microsoft then you are incredibly naive.

Umm no. Your facts are simply incorrect.

Opera was being sent a different style sheet, as well as a different html file, than IE or Netscape. This style sheet was not a generic one for non-IE browsers, as was verified to by using wget with a faked user-agent field. There were three style sheets, one for Netscape only, one for Opera only, and one for all other browsers. So Opera was definately specifically targetted with this. And the files sent to Opera contained commands to force them to layout improperly, whereas the generic files sent to IE and unknown browsers displayed just fine in Opera.

You can see screenshots and a detailed explanation of what was happening here.

Microsoft's lies are covered in this press release from Opera.

"We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards."

Opera obviously does support XHTML, and issued a press release in XHTML which points out Microsoft's lie.

This and other lies from Microsoft are exposed in an Opera press release.

"We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards."

Opera obviously does support XHTML, and issued a press release in XHTML which points out Microsoft's lie.

This and other lies from Microsoft are exposed in an Opera press release.

"We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards."

Opera obviously does support XHTML, and issued a press release in XHTML which points out Microsoft's lie.

This and other lies from Microsoft are exposed in an Opera press release.

company which poses no threat to Microsoft, and in fact builds it business on Microsoft products (Windows) claims they have targeted them.

Opera is cross platform and their business is far more then just Windows. IE and Opera compete on the embedded level also which MS does not currently have a monopoly on and can not just make them go away. This is more then Opera running on Windows not working on MSN by chance.

Well, the point is that you shouldn't have to remove it, as (one would imagine) websites should not be going out of their way to identify you as an Opera user so that they can serve you something broken. (Although there are a very small number of sites that do this as a misguided protest over Google AdWords in the unregistered version of Opera - I can't find any references right now.) Opera actually explain how the spoofing works here and point out how you can always still detect Opera.

Opera would have a vested interest in making sure that the string is always there for people who are actually looking for it, to compile market share statistics (there is some discussion of the spoofing problem on that page also).

You know what they say, 'the proof is in the puding' or something...

compelling evidence

I don't use Opera, but I've seen this firsthand.
I also remember a while back where they flat out blocked mozilla from MSN, but the bad public backlash made them reverse it. I actually tried that one for myself and saw that it was real.

Innocent Until Proven Guilty is nice, but lets face it- we've tried that. they've broke the system countless times. they've keep saying "we'll change, honest. I'll never hit you again" and we keep falling for it like an abused wife.

MS won't stop until we actually PUNISH them... perhaps a $20 billion fine would help?
that might knock some sense into them. and for each breach afterwards, another $1 billion fine.
not in software- they'ed just spend $.01 in CD's and ship a couple thousand versions of their latest and greatest OS.

Someone needs to call shananigans on these bastards.
Honestly, I wish Opera didn't have to settle. Theoretically, they could win the case, but by the time they won, $12 million woulda been pocket change for a hobo.

This is probably one of my greatest pet peeves with Micosoft. They fricken abuse the system.
They're just not trustworthy.

Innocent until proven guilty is nice, but how long are we going to wait to finally punish them for the things we KNOW they did wrong?

(sorry, don't take that as a personal attack, I just get worked up over MS).

"Find as you type : Mozilla"

As cool as Mozilla is, Opera often drives the innovation. I don't understand your "3rd parties" comment either. Can anyone submit code to change things in Firefox? Or are you saying that "3rd party innovation" somehow nullifies Opera's innovations?

Excerpt from Opera's privacy policy.

Opera Software has taken much care in the development so that user privacy and security are not compromised. No personal information is collected or shared, and providing ad profile information in the browser is strictly optional. The Opera user's Web usage is not tracked. What is recorded and shared with the advertising service provider is the user's interaction with the relative banner advertising.

I'm not sure what you mean by a sensible business model. It is possible to BUY the product, as well as using a free version (with advertising). I guess "sensible business model" according to some regulars here mean "Give it away for free, and buy lots of lottery tickets or hope some investor will bail you out", but that model actually stopped working 4 years ago.

Opera actually makes money.

Excerpt from Opera's privacy policy.

Opera Software has taken much care in the development so that user privacy and security are not compromised. No personal information is collected or shared, and providing ad profile information in the browser is strictly optional. The Opera user's Web usage is not tracked. What is recorded and shared with the advertising service provider is the user's interaction with the relative banner advertising.

I'm not sure what you mean by a sensible business model. It is possible to BUY the product, as well as using a free version (with advertising). I guess "sensible business model" according to some regulars here mean "Give it away for free, and buy lots of lottery tickets or hope some investor will bail you out", but that model actually stopped working 4 years ago.

Opera actually makes money.

"a source indicated that the payment came from Microsoft in order to close the books on a clash over obscure interoperability problems"

But this is not the only case of bad journalism. Another example:

"Opera is looking to move past the PC to distribute its Web browser on devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants

Now, I am not saying that it cannot possibly be Microsoft. It probably is. But this is pure speculation, and CNET is portraying it as fact. And they seem to focus on one single site, rather than the on-going problems with Opera and Microsoft sites due to browser sniffing and singling out Opera, and Microsoft's blatant lies about Opera in the press.

"a source indicated that the payment came from Microsoft in order to close the books on a clash over obscure interoperability problems"

But this is not the only case of bad journalism. Another example:

"Opera is looking to move past the PC to distribute its Web browser on devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants

Now, I am not saying that it cannot possibly be Microsoft. It probably is. But this is pure speculation, and CNET is portraying it as fact. And they seem to focus on one single site, rather than the on-going problems with Opera and Microsoft sites due to browser sniffing and singling out Opera, and Microsoft's blatant lies about Opera in the press.

"The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork!"

"The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork!"

so you're saying they both appear screwed up, or they both appear OK?
The CSS is b0rked or intented to look ugly - i used wget like they did here: Why doesn't MSN work with Opera? and did get the broken CSS when masq'ing as IE ... Or maybe the author used a old version of IE screwing up CSS completely and making it look somehow better ...

Why? The only chance Opera has to compete with Internet Explorer and Mozilla on the desktop is by inventing and adding new features to their browser.

Opera has many great coders and inventors working for them, such as Håkon Wium Lie the creator of CSS. How can mozilla compete with such a experienced and professional team?

Opera has included many features in their browser, like email, newsreader, rss feed and irc, and still their installer is only 3.5 Mb, and the fastest browser out there.

Wasnt it opera who invented mouse-gestures?

In my eyes the main challenger for Opera would be Google if they decided to make a browser, but their first rule in their philosophy say:
"It's best to do one thing really, really well. - Google does search"
So i guess they will focus on search.

*cough* Firefox Opera *cough*

I haven't seen a popup ad in ... wow ...

here you have it here the email client is the one gmail got it's ideas from. wouldn't be surprised if it gets the default non-webbased email frontend to gmail - so much both fit together.. PAT

NetFront is a Japanese mobile-only browser. Obviously, it can't measure up to desktop browsers like Opera and Mozilla, so the company relies on FUD and lies to make people choose their garbage over Opera. But that's a different story I guess.

Shoulda been running Opera (saves your browsing windows through restarts). No I don't work for them...

Even Opera 2 had a newsreader and could send mail!

"I just could not fathom paying for it (or should I say the bloat that comes with it), particularly now with the likes of Mozilla Firefox and such."

"I think Opera should step back from the bloat, release an updated minimalist version (as it once was back in the day), and sell it online for $5. Will that happen? Probably not. Will alot of people pay for Opera in it's current state? Probably not."

And what do you know about how many people pay for Opera? Check out their revenue reports. They make millions off their desktop products.

Off with the rose-tinted glasses please. Just because not everyone does this kind of integration doesn't mean that Opera can't pull it off. Plenty of money in the bank seem to prove you wrong.

>> that I am still thinking of buying it to reward the company

Do or do not. There is no "thinking of buying."

Seriously, folks. If you like Opera, just buy the damn thing. The price is extremely reasonable ($39 buy, $15 upgrade) for an app that you probably use constantly. I know that, on my machine, the only software that gets used more than Opera is the operating system itself!

And please don't use the excuse "well, they just got a 12.5 million dollar settlement" as a reason to not send in your pocket change. We all know that their lawyers will get the lion's share of it anyway.

Just my 2 cents. The rest of it went here.

The original page explaining the whole debacle only specifically talks about Opera 7, so I can't tell whether Opera 6 worked or not at that point. If it did, then your explanation is completely valid and it would seem to be a innocent error. If not, then there would be no reason for MS to specifically check for Opera if it wasn't going to bother testing compatibility (since the regular MSIE content actually renders fine!)

Thanks

The original page explaining the whole debacle only specifically talks about Opera 7, so I can't tell whether Opera 6 worked or not at that point. If it did, then your explanation is completely valid and it would seem to be a innocent error. If not, then there would be no reason for MS to specifically check for Opera if it wasn't going to bother testing compatibility (since the regular MSIE content actually renders fine!)

Thanks

While that might reflect his personal opinion as a member of Mozilla.org, it certainly doesn't mean that he is right in his bias against Opera. After all, Opera offers a heck of a lot more useful stuff when installed than Firefox.

Just because it doesn't behave exactly like your favorite program, doesn't mean that it sucks! He might have something useful to say, but when he gives the impression that unless Opera is exactly like Firefox, it will always suck,

Oh, and the screenshot is totally wrong. That's not what Opera 7.5 looks like by default at all.

And finally, read this comment: "Posted by: sas on May 13, 2004 02:54 AM". It takes the piss, but it's rather spot on and proves a point. Anyone can make anything look bad by posting biased reviews like that.

"I'm sure its Slashdotly correct to assume that MS and the MSN website issue are the reason for this money but perhaps its something much less sinister."

Yeah, I'm sure any company would be willing to hand out several million dollars just to keep someone quiet and not go to court. And this company is one which is not a customer or partner of Opera, it's got nothing to do with patents or anything like that. So it is probably a competitor. But who has done bad things to Opera anyway? The Mozilla Project surely cannot pay this kind of money. AOL? The ones who took over Netscape when IE had already won the browser war anyway?

For chrissakes, this is Slashdot. Someone submits an interesting story about a newspaper speculating about Microsoft doing evil again. Big deal. It's not like Microsoft has a good reputation to uphold here on Slashdot anyway.

If it's something much less sinister, why would they be willing to pay this kind of money for it? And not only that, what much less sinister company could afford it?

So yeah, again, this is Slashdot. We like to bash MS. Why? Because, quite frankly, they deserve to be bashed. And they keep proving that again and again. It's an OSS site. It reports on bad things and rumors about Microsoft. It always has. If that bothers you, then perhaps Slashdot is not the site for you?

After all, there are plenty of pro-MS zombies out there running sites that spread FUD on behalf of MS. Why aren't you out there bashing Paul Thurrott's FUD against Apple? SCO's FUD against FOSS? The numerous journalists who are nothing but kiss-asses for Microsoft?

Slashdot is an OSS community site which happens to post about interesting stories and rumors affecting nerds and geeks everywhere. You may not like it, but then perhaps Thurrott's Win SuperSite is more down your alley...

Here's their press release about it:
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/

And, of course, the follow-up

Here's Opera's press page.

Nary a word about it.

But hey, don't let that stop you from flaming Microsoft.

Opera blocks it too. at least 7.5 beta does

(Which rocks btw IRC, RSS, improved mail all integrated...a revelation)

Okay, so has anybody done a nice oss email app to replace the proprietary piece of Psion crap that comes with Px00? (EPOC Email Version 2.10)

At least you can get Opera for it, for free...here

Neither Mozilla nor Opera's homepages use tables, but they do use CSS.

Submitter: He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'"
CowboyNeil: This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.

Actually, Mr. Cowboy, you just validated their business plan.

While the idea of free wireless Internet access is fun for the user, there's still the annoying fact that someone's paying for your bandwidth. Ideally, geeks like us would be more than happy to open their broadband connections to the world -- I would, if I could get broadband in rural east Texas.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough altruistic geeks per square mile to sustain that "business model". So someone has to pay the bill. Why not advertisers?

I run Opera, but I'm too cheap to pay for it. So I have a banner ad built into my browser. I even click it sometimes -- out of curiosity, or to send Opera some ad clicks. I'm willing to put up with advertising to get the product, and lucky for me, the model is working.

I hope ad-supported wireless access takes off. I wouldn't put my money in the companies, though... anyone remember Bluelight?

When I installed NT4 with SP6a there was a big improvement! Getting all the right drivers was a pain, and until I got that there was some instability, but now it's rock solid. Explorer is amazingly fast. (The "desktop upgrade" that you can get with IE4 makes it slower but it's still faster than Win98SE. I uninstalled it.) IE seemed to run faster. Applications in general don't crash, and if something crashes it won't mess anything up and can be run again without a reboot.

I ended up IERadicating IE and installing Opera and then web browsing was fast. For IM I installed Miranda IM and that is fast too. It's almost like I never needed to upgrade from a 133 MHz Pentium. NT4 may be a pain to install but it's fast and quite usable.

The only bad things about NT4 are the poor DirectX support and worse support for DOS games than Win9x. In this case I can live with that. That computer is too slow for most DirectX stuff anyways, and I don't care about old DOS games nowdays.

I'm sure this will be modded down, but if you have received the mail seemingly linking to https://web.da-us.citibank.com/signin/citifi/scrip ts/email_verify.jsp but really going to the server below, you will know that this is all true, and that we should all help out, spamming these spammers. Thanks...

This scammer is mail-spamming people and using the new phishing technique to trick them into submitting their details:

http://www.infouserupdate.us/scripts/sys.php

HELP US FIGHT THE SCAMMERS AND USE A BROWSER CAPABLE OF SUBMITTING FORMS IN THE BACKGROUND (like OPERA), and submit AS MUCH CRAP AS YOU CAN!

SPAM THE SPAMMERS!

http://www.infouserupdate.us/scripts/sys.php

HELP US FIGHT THE SCAMMERS AND USE A BROWSER CAPABLE OF SUBMITTING FORMS IN THE BACKGROUND (like OPERA), and submit AS MUCH CRAP AS YOU CAN!

SPAM THE SPAMMERS!

I've seen this already. Sliding windows across the text, with a "close" button that's the only thing I will ever click. When will these advertising bozos figure out that if I'm going to all that trouble to block their ads, then I'm not in their target market anyway?

Even the spammers are smart enough to figure that one out. I've received about a spam a month since I changed my domain registration email address from "domains@" to "domspam@". Before I changed over, I was receiving one or two dozen a day, even though most bounced when the account's purposely low quota filled up.

I guess popup blockers have become too easy to use. Now that my mother-in-law, queen of "click anything", can install it, the spamvertizers have to find another way to infiltrate her system.

I'm looking forward to a future release of Opera with "pop-in blocking" built in.

• Total Commander -- previously known as Windows Commander. A file manager. (and here's how I set it up)
• Proxomitron - HTTP proxy with regex support
• Bandwidth Monitor Pro - lets me set up a transparent bandwidth graph in a screen corner that really doesn't interfere with anything else (replaced DUMeter on all my systems)
• ParaWin - provides additional keyboard layouts
• SQLyog - although it has plenty of issues, this is still the best MySQL front-end that I've found to date
• Opera Browser - still the fastest and most convenient for me

Thunderbird, Mozilla, PuTTY, EditPlus, Winamp

After that, it depends on my OS. For most of the Linux installs I do, the next few things I install will be MySQL, OpenLDAP, Apache, and PHP, which takes care of most of my needs. My Windows box (which, I admit, I use at home) is a little more fun:

2. iTunes
3. Whatever freeware Shisen-Sho app I can find
4. Starcraft
5. Several games later, OpenOffice.org

Let's be honest: does a computer really need anything else? I certainly don't think so.

7zip lacks multi-part archiving with error recovery volumes, or any other kind of error recovery information, so I use WinRAR instead. You get what you pay for with WinRAR.

WinRAR
Ad Muncher
Opera
Foobar2000
Paint Shop Pro
the current Kazaa Lite variant of my choice
OO.o

That's all I ask of my Windows machine.

Stop applying aesthetics to it. It's just a document, not a work of art .... Consistency looks better than perfection.

As for the original poster, why not give XHTML with CSS a try?