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Microsoft Behind $12M Opera Settlement
An anonymous reader writes "According to CNET it has been confirmed that Microsoft is behind the $12 million dollar payment to Opera (speculated earlier here). The payment was to avoid legal action over interoperability issues with Opera's web browser and Microsoft's MSN portal.
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."
Microsoft was purposely serving up broken style sheets for Opera; changing the user agent to something other that Opera would cause MSN to render correctly. For more on that, see the Opera article Why doesn't MSN work with Opera?
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As this article in BusinessWeek points out, Microsoft is trying to settle and partner rather than fight in court.
what innovation?
tabed browsing, opera.
gesturing, opera.
Je ne parle pas francais.
No, that's a different thing entirely. Windows Update uses ActiveX controls to work out what you need and those are only compatible with IE, as I'm sure you know. There's no legal precident saying they must rewrite code if another browser doesn't support it.
What they did to Opera was deliberately send broken code in order to make it appear that the browser was faulty. The code sent to IE worked fine in Opera but MS went out of their way to alter that code when sending it to Opera. If you went to MSN using a IE5 browser agent string in Opera it would've worked fine. If you went to Windows Update using that same browser agent string in Mozilla you wouldn't get an error but I very much doubt that the site would work.
If they settle, they're guilty. Thats how the public sees it and in truth that's the way I see it.
So what that there is a clause in there. If they pay money out, then they have something to hide, and they're only paying it off so when they lose in court, it will be MUCH more than the payoff. So yes, it would be cheaper than being found guilty.
If they WERE right, they could take it all the way to court knowing that they would win...and then having the other side pay the court costs. MS didn't do this, they knew they were wrong and GUILTY so they decided to pay their way out...again.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
But this is not the only case of bad journalism. Another example:
This is just wrong. Opera isn't just "looking to move past the PC". They have been doing this for years. Just a quick look on opera.com shows press releases about this back in 2000. In 2001, the Sharp Zaurus had Opera on it.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.
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Excerpt from Opera's privacy policy.
In fact, Opera is an exemplary company, and even allows their developers to interact and answer questions on USENET and other forums. I've been a registered user of Opera for some time now, and I've always been amazed by their level of customer support and service.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.
What MS is doing is not fine. They are detecting that you are using Opera and making Opera look bad by serving it bad code. It is not "perfectly legit" at all.
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As for your comments about conspiracy theories, this isn't just something which has happened once. Opera has been specifically detected and served broken code on several occasions on MSN.com, and lately on MSNBC.com. In addition to this, a Microsoft spokesperson lied about Opera to the media.
You are criticizing others for assuming too much, yet you don't even bother to inform yourself on the matter.
This isn't just one case of a bad style sheet on MSN. This is something which has repeated itself over and over.
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Microsoft's lies are covered in this press release from Opera.
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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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
CSS2 makes web design a whole lot easier. You can properly separate content and presentation. Have the content generated in semantic markup by a script and then just change the CSS when you need to change the presentation.
PNG is a nice lossless image format. It is more flexible than GIF and is not encumbered by patents (The GIF patent is still valid in some countries). In a browser that properly supports it, PNG allows a full alpha channel, which makes it possible to do some very nice effects.
One of the best things about SVG is that it's XML, and so is part of you pages DOM. You can put the SVG directly into XHTML, and even control it from Javascript (or any other scripting mechanism that supports DOM). This makes it an incredibly flexible tool. If you render SVG using the Adobe plugin then the SVG content does not appear within the DOM tree.
How many websites out there use it? Only one that I use regularly and it's not exactly something that 99.9% of others will use.
No, most websites don't use it because if they did then IE users would not be able to view their site.
Should MS be forced to integrate Flash into the browser just because some websites use it (you would all go fucking ballistic if they took Shockwave over to do so)?
No. Flash is proprietary. CSS2 and SVG, however, are W3C standards and should be supported by any browser.
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