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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."
This is starting to happen a lot lately. Microsoft is having money taken, because they try to push the little guys around.
Hopefully they'll learn from this mistake. Probably not, if an AU$800 Million fine from the EU isn't enough to change their business practices, nothing will.
At least the one company that truly stands for browser innovation will have some more cash to spend on product development. Pity it's just a drop in the ocean to Microsoft though.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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?
Microsoft business practices aside, I really, really hate the fact that IE development is at a standstill. Microsoft has said they won't release a new IE until Longhorn.
Meanwhile we have to kiss web standards goodbye to please 90% of the public using IE.
Amusingly there's a work-around under development called IE7, mentioned on Slashdot a while back.
But the fact is Microsoft is keeping us from adopting things like CSS2, PNG and SVG more than anything else.
.: Max Romantschuk
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For a small company like Opera, the settlement is significant, I'd imagine. Not only did they get their main beef settled, they get a little cash infusion to boot.
But these snippets from the article
The deal marks the latest in a string of settlements from Microsoft, which is seeking to simplify its business by clearing up potentially damaging legal claims.
and
Microsoft has effectively abandoned significant browser development efforts.
make me wonder, what has Microsoft got up its collective sleeve? They cornered the browser market and now they'll give it up without a fight? Why should they make an effort to clean up their legal image when it didn't seem to phase them for such a long time?
I don't doubt that whatever they've got planned, history indicates it's probably part of a well thought out business or marketing plan. Other thoughts?
So David is really responsible for the rampages of Golliath, eh?
... eh? This makes no sense.
...
... but thank you anyway, U.S. Justice System, for ensuring that my rights as a consumer, and my ability to weild choice are protected in the browser marketplace ...
Opera accepting the money has nothing to do with Microsofts shady business practices. WTF?
By your reasoning, a woman is as guilty as a rapist for the rape committed
A $12million settlement, which is a punishment for having done something wrong, followed by well-propagated news on the reasons for this punishment, is the only safeguard this industry has from future shadiness of this nature... you saying that "Opera are 'as responsible'" for this is just ludicrous, and underlines a serious lack of understanding of the nature of responsibility
Microsoft attempted to weild un-defeatable might in an attempt to squeeze competition out of the marketplace, and 'get rid of a company that is clearly annoying them', and the justice system caught this, and ruled for the little guy, as it should, punishing Golliath all the while.
Go Opera! If I wasn't so satisfied with Safari, I'd switch
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
1 Write good software
2 Wait for MIcrosoft to steal it or disable it
3 Profit!
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
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.
yeah, but the story is bullshit. For one, Microsoft have not admitted liability, they have just settled out of court
A little Norwegian company which poses no threat to Microsoft, and in fact builds it business on Microsoft products (Windows) claims they have targeted them. It's a non-story. On one occasion all non-IE browsers were locked out of MSN. This was quickly reversed, and certainly wasn't targeted at Opera.
On another occasion an incompetent programmer worked around a bug with margins on UL (instead of setting margin: 0 to give lists no margin, you had to do -30px to reset the default 30px margin to 0) - but the bug wasn't actually present in Opera, so the text was overlapping.
The stupid conspiracy theorists claim that the programmer who wrote the style sheet was somehow acting on company policy to 'get Opera'. I call bullshit on that. Microsoft is a big company - and even in my small company, my manager doesn't direct how I write my style sheets. I mean for fuck's sake! A simple coding error is treated as a big conspiracy.
Here's what Wikipedia says on the whole story:
In October 2001, the MSN web page was changed to lock out most non-Microsoft browsers, shortly after the launch of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. According to initial statements by Microsoft, this was because other browsers did not support XHTML correctly, and users should therefore upgrade to its own Internet Explorer. This issue also affected other browsers in similar ways. Microsoft backed down after being confronted with proof showing that, if anything, other browsers were better at rendering XHTML than Internet Explorer.
In February 2003, Opera Software employees discovered that the MSN home page sent a different style sheet to Opera users than it sent to Internet Explorer. The style sheet sent to Opera users, a generic 'site.css', contained the style rule ul {margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;}, which created a 30-pixel negative left margin, causing content to appear overlapping other content. The Internet Explorer style sheet did not contain this rule.
This gave the impression something was wrong with Opera. The Netscape 6 style sheet also specified the same -30px margin, to work around known bugs in that browser (bugs not present in Opera). This same code was present into the supposedly generic style sheet, which was served to Opera by a Javascript checking routine which specifically detected Opera. This was either a deliberate decision by a programmer to make Opera look bad, or was simply the action of someone who was aware of Opera's existence, but unaware of its CSS capabilities (which are in fact better than those of Internet Explorer), and hence chose to send the browser a generic (albeit badly coded) style sheet.
PS. Don't forget, for Microsoft it's quicker to pay $10 million and get them to go away than to even investigate. Lawyers are expensive, and if you think in every case settled 'justice' was done, you are incredibly naive.
this is one of my gripes about some websites. i noticed shutterfly has a "Click Next if you wish to skip future warnings and use Shutterfly with this unsupported browser." great, i can make the choice to puruse a sub-"standard" website if i still want to. sometimes i think they forget that they are offering goods/services that i can find somewhere else.
Yes, I have RTFA. Yes, I have a girlfriend. Yes, I'm new here. And no, I don't want a free iPod.