Microsoft behind $12 million payment to Opera

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Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned. Opera disclosed the payment last week in a terse press release that omitted other details, including the name of the settling party and the nature of the dispute.

But a source indicated that the payment came from Microsoft in order to close the books on a clash over obscure interoperability problems. 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. A Microsoft representative said the company does not comment on rumors.

News source: C|Net News.com

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#1 derekge on 24 May 2004 - 17:31

That's why I switched to Mozilla Firefox...

(1 reply) #2 j.reed on 24 May 2004 - 17:34

What about the Opera that made msn sound like the sweedish chef?

#2.1 markjensen on 24 May 2004 - 17:55

LOL

That was in retaliation for Microsoft deliberately spitting out bad HTML if the browser identified itself as Opera.

#3 Rockett15 on 24 May 2004 - 17:56

Go Opera, I actually remember seeing this for myself and there was a whole article on it with multiple screenshots. Personally I have been using Opera since v5.12 and just love it. Hopefully we shall not see this kind of cross-platform interoperability with Microsoft again!

#4 teeone on 24 May 2004 - 18:32

this makes smeagol happy

#5 tlogank on 24 May 2004 - 19:18

this makes so much sense now that the Knowledge Base for Microsoft wasn't working. Glad this was brought public so that we could all know why certain MS sites were not working with Opera.

(2 replies) #6 Nichotin on 24 May 2004 - 20:49

The real problem is that people write html that works with Internet Explorer but looks ass in other browsers. What I'd really like is to see Internet Explorer to be as strict as Mozilla/Opera with the html and not allow all sorts of crappy html.

#6.1 AfroTrance on 25 May 2004 - 09:19

I think its more that some WYSIWYG editors (specifically MS ones, eg Frontpage, err word..

) produce bad code, so if IE stuck to W3C standards, then pages made by microsoft frontpage/word wouldn't work in mircosoft internet explorer, which is a little bit of a problem.
It's no excuse though for Internet Explorer and Frontpage being complete arse.

Last edited by 44047 on 25 May 2004 - 09:24

#6.2 Avenger on 26 May 2004 - 16:12

You ever used FrontPage 2003? It's code isn't sloppy at all.

#7 sesh on 24 May 2004 - 22:14

just so you guys know what the problem here is... it was confirmed that microsoft was sending a completely different sytle sheet to any browser that identified itself as opera.... if you set opera to identify as Mozilla or IE the page worded perfectly. Tests where also done with multiple other browsers and no problems occured.

so mehh... its a deliberate microsoft stuff up and they have to pay.

#8 Lancing on 25 May 2004 - 00:21

Who honestly cares? This isn't substantial news.. lol.

#9 FrankE9999 on 25 May 2004 - 01:17

If Opers would fully implement the W3C DOM they wouldn't have these problems.

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