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

Great

[Karamchand]

..because even if they don't get enough paying customers they have more money again to continue developing the browser with the world's best user interface!

Re:Great

[bhtooefr]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or serious. It really does have a good user interface (7.50 got better - it's an acquired taste if you used 7.23, but it's easier for someone who didn't use Opera before), but paying customers do seem to be a bit rare (I tune out the Google ads, myself).

Re:Great

[Sheepdot]

..as opposed to the browser (internet explorer) with no paying customers but a streamlined interface.

So streamlined and easy to use that it installs all sorts of fun tools without any of those silly, annoying, installation confirmation steps.

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!

Re:Great

[barzok]

Opera is the first browser I've used where the default toolbar/menu configuration was cumbersome. That's a sign. I shouldn't have to customize the hell out of it upon install just to make it usable.

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!

Firefox seems to be doing it just fine right now. Mozilla seems to be doing it too.

Re:Great

[bigtrouble77]

I use Opera at home and installed firefox on all 50+ of the work machines I administer (because it's free).

I find opera, by far, to be the superior browser for these reasons:

1. It's faster
2. It has a much better UI out-of-the-box
(I mean features, not visuals)
3. It has a hugely useful hotlist menu
(file transfers, personal notes, dictionary,
and finally links to newest slashdot articles)
4. Tabbed browsing is 10x better
5. User Profiles are organized better
6. Ultra customizable

I don't find the UI confusing at all. Albeit, I do adjust it to look nothing like the default settings. Version 7.5 is very stable, unlike some of the earlier builds and site compatibility is as good as firefox.

Bottom line is, you start depending on the features unique to opera and you WILL become dependant on the browser.

Re:Great

[NanoGator]

"Bottom line is, you start depending on the features unique to opera and you WILL become dependant on the browser. "

Agreed. It's a pity they don't show the cartoons in the advertising bar anymore. I actually switched back to the ad supported version hoping to encourage them to keep plopping them in there. Wouldn't it be cool if they took comics like Dilbert or Get Fuzzy and had them appear regularly there? Certainly made me more attentive to the ads. Small price to pay for some entertainment.

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?

[N3WBI3]

Well I cant say I sent one (I use mozilla) but the really odd part is if you fed the style sheet from IE to opera (or changed operara to answer IE) the page worked perfectly!

Is this proof? no.

Re:Microsoft?

[Liselle]

It could have been an honest mistake. They say never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, of course. But some of us remember a few years ago when MSN blocked all non-IE browsers from accessing their site, and even went so far as to redirect people to a page telling them to download their goat-kissing IE browser so it would render properly.

In this case, I'm calling malice. :P

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?

[curator_thew]

Nice attempt at reasoning, but _arbitrary_ restrictions relating to sale/use of your product are viewed as discriminatory. I say _arbitrary_ because you can discriminate on objective reasons, even if they are "my nightclub is about stylish people, so we only let in those well dressed and with good attitude".

Secondly, it's more severe when the discrimination relates to a competitive product, and even more so when you are a dominant company. When you're building a large content service on the one hand, and owning a viewing technology on the other hand, and in both cases you have a dominant market share: then arbitrary restraints on competitors are pretty serious issues that regulators will tackle.

I note also that recent Microsoft has been doing a _lot_ of out of court settlements, it seems as though they want to pay off problems. Equally, the large anti-trust rulings mean that Microsoft is skating on thin-ice and has the scrutiny of the regulators who would use such activities as future evidence in antitrust actions.

Better to reach a settlement which involves a confidentiality clause in which the supposed activities won't in the future be disclosed or used in any regulatory action.

Wise commercial move Microsoft!

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.

Re:Microsoft?

[Reziac]

But if MSN was deliberately breaking Opera -- why not do the same to Netscape and Mozilla?? After all, they're more of a market threat than Opera. And why restrict the breakage to Opera7? That doesn't seem to have much point. And Opera's own analysis page says the CSS sent to Opera*6*, and to Netscape, was NOT broken.

Given that, it does look like a case of stupidity rather than malice. There's not much point in only breaking a single version of a minority browser, especially when that version is still so new as to be not yet widely adopted even by its fans.

I'd guess someone at MSN tested their CSS with a broken beta of Opera7, and built an Opera7-specific CSS to account for said breakage, but never tested again with the release version.

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.

Slashdotted - pay up

[GatorMan]

In related news, OSDN/Slashdot to pay 'cost of loss' for the disrepectful way in which, after posting a link to Opera's site, the server melted in less than 8 comments.

More information is needed...

[WordODD]

I really enjoy the Opera interface, but I am a FireFox diehard as many other people here are, so I wonder why Opera? Why not FireFox, or one of the others, Mozilla, etc. etc.? 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. Mod me down if you want but I think putting something like this on the front page is just spreading unnessecary FUD.

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.

You'd be wrong

[Chuck Chunder]

Opera always has the word "Opera" in it UA string no matter what it identifies as.
The masquerading is only intended to allow Opera to work with sites that don't know about Opera (ie foolishly test for only IE or Netscape and throw an "unsupported" browser otherwise). It isn't intended to hide the fact it's Opera for sites that know about it.

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/

No

[Chuck Chunder]

As the link clearly shows.
Using Operas "IE" identity (the ones with MSIE in them) Opera got sent Opera specific stylesheets.
When they changed Opera to Oprah they got the MS IE stylesheet. Thus the site was specifically looking for the word "Opera" in the UA string before sending the screwed up style sheet.

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."

To sum up Asa's blog post...

[hkmwbz]

"Opera sucks because it isn't Firefox."

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.