Opera Settles $12.75m Lawsuit, But with Whom?

An anonymous reader writes "According to a press release from Opera Software ASA, they have settled legal claims with an international corporation resulting in payment to Opera of net USD 12.75 million. The interesting bit is that the international corporation is unknown. Dagbladet speculates that Microsoft is paying up. They reason it has something to do with this."

Comments

Microsoft?

[Liselle]

I'm an Opera zealot if there ever was one. The issue with MSN was absolutely infuriating. For those who didn't RTFA: MSN.com sent a different style sheet to any browser that specifically identified itself as Opera. The style sheet had less content, and broke the layout of the page. It was one of the most asinine things I've ever seen, because it could only have been done intentionally.

I am also suspicious of Microsoft, but I doubt it has anything to do with the MSN debacle. All they did was just send a poorly-rendered page. It's underhanded, but most websites don't comply with W3C spec anyway. I suppose it's possible that Microsoft paid Opera to make it go away, but there's little proof.

Re:Microsoft?

[RedSteve]

Read the article (or at least the google cached article), and you will see that Opera's research showed that MSN was feeding opera a debilitated style sheet that had list items falling off the left edge of the screen. The code in question is

ul {
margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;
}

The research further showed that if you fed this same sheet to MSIE, it behaved exactly the same way -- that is, it fell off the left side of the page. Further, anyone who has ever done anything with style sheets would never feed that -30px declaration and expect anything productive to be done with it. That MSN fed it to someone else's browser but not theirs is suspicious at least.

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

That instruction actually fixed the page in Opera 5. In short, the special style sheet was an attempt to fix bugs in Opera 5.

I love Opera myself, but that little episode was pure FUD.

Now if you want some pure anti-Opera stuff, visit this link in Vancouver's (admittedly crappy) Translink website. If you look at it in Opera ID=Opera you get a blank page, use ID=MSIE and it works. I've emailed their admins and they refuse to fix it.

Obligatory google cache

[Randar the Lava Liza]

Why is it the most interesting link is always /.'d first? Ah well, here's the "something to do with this" link cache.

Light on the content aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's Opera's press page.

Nary a word about it.

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

And in related news...

[Sheepdot]

... slashdot pays a few million to an unknown company with apologies for driving their bandwidth to the ground.

Full text (sorry, no pictures):

Why doesn't MSN work with Opera?
[Update Feb 7: After this page had been referenced by Cnet, The Register and Slashdot, MSN changed their setup so that Opera7 no longer receives the distorted style sheet. Opera6, however, still does]

Microsoft and MSN have a history of trying to stop people from using the Opera browser. When trying to access MSN.com using the Opera browser, there are two visible problems. First, for the user it looks like Opera has a serious flaw so that many lines are partially hidden. Second, the page shows less content than users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (MSIE) see.

The purpose of this page is to document, in technical terms, what is going on. Did the Opera programmers make grave mistakes? Or is it something wrong on the MSN site? If so, is the Opera browser targeted specifically? (Executive summary: no, yes, yes)

To analyze the problem, the first step is to download the files as they are served to the browsers. When requesting a page, the browser sends along a "User-Agent" string which makes it possible for the server to identify which make and version the browser is. Here are the User-Agent strings used by the three browsers (when running on Windows XP) in this test:

Browser User-Agent string
Opera 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]
MSIE 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Netscape 7.01 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01

When downloading pages, browsers sometimes modify the content before saving the pages to disk. For comparison purposes it is therefore important to use another to fetch the files. In this test "wget" was used. The table below shows the files fetched by "wget" when told to identify as Opera7, MSIE and Netscape 7.01, respectively. The test was run around 2PM Oslo time on Feb 5, 2003.

Files Bytes Command used to fetch file
opera7.html 39436 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]" --output-document opera7.html http://www.msn.com
msie6.html 37253 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" --output-document msie6.html http://www.msn.com
ns7.html 37379 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01" --output-document ns7.html http://www.msn.com

As can be seen in the table above, each browser is sent different HTML files. If you open the files in your browser of choice, you will see that that the file sent to Opera7 has less content in (although it is bigger) than the version sent to the Microsoft and Netscape browsers.

To understand why there are differences, we need to peek inside the HTML files. This part of the analysis is quite time-consuming, but by now we have some experience. It turns out that MSN sends different style sheets to the different browsers. This can be seen in the first LINK element of each of the three files. The style sheets are:

Browser File Bytesize Command used to fetch file
Opera 7.0 site.css 521 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.0 [en]" --output-document site.css http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site.css
MSIE 6.0 site-win-ie6.css 2036 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" --output-document site-win-ie6.css http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site-win-ie6.css
Netscape 7.01 site-all-nav6.css 1926 wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01" --output-document site-all-nav6.css http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site-all-nav6.css

As can be seen in the table above, Opera7 receives a style sheet which is very different from the Microsoft and Netscape browsers. Looking inside the style sheet sent to Opera7 we find this fragment:

Translated Text from dagbladet.no

[hyfe]

Translating properly is hard.. but I'll give it a try just for the heck of it :)

Headline: Secret Million-settlement

Picturetext: MSN: This is how the broken MSN looked like.

Ingress: An american company must pay one year of earnings(one year of opera's earning that is, the sentence was unclear in norwegian too) to Opera software. Why is a secret.

(Dagbladet.no): Opera software has just reached a settlement in a legal dispute with an american company. According to a stockmarket note issued today, the compensation given to Opera was 89 millions.

The company was not one of Operas existing customers.

- We have presented a few fact against this company. We agreed to avoid taking this court. A part of the bargain is not telling which company this is, says technical manager Håkon Wium Lie in Opera software to dagbladet.no

- Is this about the mobilephone reader or the pc-version?

- This issue is not a pirating or patent issue. In the settlement we do not give away any rights concering our products, and we shall continue making good products, says Lie.

It was after a substantial amound of documentation was sent over to the american company that the settlement came to be. As a consequence, this will not come before the court.

Last year Opera made 78 million kroners (about 10 million dollars). This settlement therefor equals one year of revenues.

- However, this year our ambitions are far greater, claims Lie.

Accusing Microsoft

Dagbladet.no doesn't know which company entered the settlement with Opera. It is however formerly known that since 2001 Microsoft have been blocking out Opera customers on purpose from their net pagers.

On his private webpages Wium Lie have in detalj explained what happens when a user enters the netpage msn.com with Opera.

He has documented that MSN sends a seperate version of their pages that looks worse on Opera and Netscape. On these pages, the page looks broken and weird. Among other things, part of the content is being placed outside the margin. MSN fixed the error after being by Opera, however older version still have trouble.

Read also: 'ditch Internet Explorer'

Quick and dirty translation of the article

[venomix]

Here's a quick translation of the norwiegan article. I'm Swedish so nor my english or my norwiegan is perfect, but you should get the picture.

[translation]
Secret millon-dollar settlement

An american company will pay about a years revnue to Opera Software. The reason is secret.

Opera software has recieved a sum of money after entering a settlement with an american company. According to a press release that Opera send out today, the settlement has given the company a compensation of 89 million norwiegian kroner (NOK).

The company is not one of operas existing customers.

- We have laid forth some facts against a company. We have agreed not to take this to court. It's also a part of the settlement that we
don't tell which the involved company is, says the technical director Håkon Wium Lie of Opera software to Dagbladet.no

- Is this about the cellphone browser or the
pc browser?

- It's not about piracy or patents. We don't give
up any rights in the settlement and we will
continue to deliver good products, Lie says.

It was efter sending a large amount of documents to the american company that the settlement was reached. Thereby this issue won't go to court.

Last year Opera made of profit of 78 million NOK. The settlement thereby brings in a years profit to Opera.

- Although this year we have widely larger ambitions, says Lie.
[/translation]
The rest is just about the old msn/opera issue.

Link from The Register

[Anonymous Coward]

Contains no more info, but in english so Americans can read it too.. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/18/opera_lega l/

Re:Great

[Tiram]

If you find the Opera UI cluttered, simply remove those elements you don't need. My Opera UI has four buttons and a status field, and shows the time and my browser ID -- that's it. Practically anything can be removed simply by right-clicking and choosing "Remove from toolbar", or by choosing "Customize toolbars". Even my mother can do it. If you still think it's cluttered, hit "F11" and surf with keyboard shortcuts in full-screen mode. Let's see anything Gecko-based do that!

Another interesting article

[The Wannabe King]

This aritcle is from a source that is far more reliable than Dagbladet, which is a tabloid newspaper of the worst sort. It's in Norwegian and says much the same as the Dagbladet article, but adds some paragraphs at the end (in bold) that are quite interesting. Translation follows:

[Digi.no is interviewing Håkon Wium Lie from Opera]

Digi.no reverses the question and asks whether Opera and Microsoft have had any contact on the coding of MSN. This ordinary question should give Lie no reason to be silent, but he refuses to answer.

He only says cryptically: "Microsoft has fixed a lot, but there are still some versions of Opera that won't work".

When digi.no asks "Can we expect that this is solved in the near future?", Lie says that he "unfortunately cannot comment on this."

Re:More information is needed...

[Tiram]

Neither Mozilla nor Opera are serious competition for Microsoft on the desktop, but Opera is a very serious competitor for MS on devices and mobile phones, and devices and phones is where the money is, after all. That's why Opera.