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Microsoft Behind $12M Opera Settlement

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thats-a-whole-lotta-bread dept.

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."

3 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Opera: Bork Edition! by thesolo · · Score: 5, Informative
    After one of the first times Microsoft broke MSN for Opera, Opera released a Bork Edition of their browser.
    "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!"

    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?
  2. Microsoft Sends Broken Stylesheets to Opera by Tribbin · · Score: 5, Informative

    To fresh up your mind:
    Here

    --
    If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
  3. Re:Windows Update by MoonBuggy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.