Comments on: Microsoft behind $12 million payment to Opera

A confidential settlement ends a litigation threat in a simmering dispute over interoperability problems affecting Opera Software's browser, CNET News.com has learned.

Opera??

There is always a question of compatibility and Microsoft is always the target. If a smaller company created a product that was not compatible with other similar products and it became popular there would never be any questions asked. In fact they would be praised. Microsoft creates a standard and then people cry fowl. Sure they use their money to secure and grow their market share but why shouldn't they? They have worked hard for it and consumers have let it happen. It?s not as if there aren?t other options, people just don?t care to change. Oh yes I am not a Microsoft fan or devotee. I personally use and prefer a Mac.

[Jonathan]

MS Does NOT follow standards

MS does not create nor do they follow standards. Period. End of story. This isn't debatable. They simply don't. IE is quite possibly the world's worst implementation of the W3 standards. They are barely in compliance with Kerberos standards. (Do a google search and see.) and they are legendary with their embrace extend extinguish practices.
You say if this was any other company no one would care and you would be right because no other company is a monopoly (Not a bad word mind you.) and no other company owns 90% of the OS market. Look at the BS slime ball tactics MS has pulled in the past. Simply do a news.com search and find the article from about 2 years ago where MS locked out anyone running anything Mozilla from msn.com why? At first it was claimed on the page displayed to Mozilla users that Mozilla did offer a good enough ?experience? and to go ?upgrade? to IE. MS held this stance for all of half a day and amazingly enough their page started working again. Funny isn?t it. This is simply another slime ball BS tactic on the part of MS to ensure its dominance of the browser market. Why? Because the browser has the ability to allow cross platform compatibility with OS?s, applications, etc. Tell me what would happen to MS if their OS was compatible across OS?s? You can bet their market share would start slipping. This is just another means to control the market no matter what the tactic no matter how low they have to go. That company has show us just how low a company can go without hitting the legal boundaries of the US and even then it could be argued that they HAVE danced across those boundaries from time to time only to step back over again.
Thanks for your insight but MS can NOT be treated like ?another company? No monopoly can. They play by a whole different set of rules that are exclusive to the monopoly club. And contrary to popular belief a monopoly isn?t a swear. It isn?t bad. But its what you do with that monopoly is what makes a company a good or bad thing and MS is about as far from being innocent as Nixon was. He wasn?t impeached but there was sure a stink there. Ditto with MS.

[djysrv]

re; Opera & MSIE

As a new user of Opera I found version 7.5 was released very quickly from beta and it shows. The toolbar customization features are quirky and don't stay put once you've changed things. The new RSS reader seems like a convenience rather than a real feature. It takes a lot of manual care and feeding. The tabbed browser is nice, but the window for viewing web pages is small unless you close toolbars or unless you have a 19 inch monitor. The mailer is OK, but again is not world class despite a database approach to message management.

Bottom line - enthusiam is not a substitute for technical excellence.

[unknown unknown]

Why Opera

Why would Microsoft want to target Opera? It represents a very small portion of browsers used. Microsoft and Mozilla have a big advantage over Opera, both are completely free (no ads and no registration fee). With Opera one either has to put up with ad ware or pay $40.00. Opera is compliant with the some standards, but there are quite a few it isn't.

[George Cole]

pay $40.00

http://www.analogstereo.com/jaguar_xk8_owners_manual.htm

I think the problem here is...

I think what the whole stink about this was was that Microsoft did this on purpose and targeted the Opera browser specifically. The fact that only certain of Microsoft's page causes this problem is a bit wonky in my opinion.

That said Opera is a very nice browser, their e-mail program kind of sucks in that it doesn't have enough features for advanced users. Even their address book doesn't have fields for company name, company contacts, etc.

Probably, the easiest thing for Opera to have done is to just make Opera work like IE. IE has won out and having any browser handle pages differently is just asking for problems. Sure you could make the browser smaller and faster and add other user features to make it better than IE, but the page rendering should have worked like IE.

Honestly, even if Microsoft broke their pages on purpose, I don't see where that is any ones business buy Microsoft. In the end that is bad publicity for Microsoft, the fact that they would do this, or not fix the problem and not really a problem for Opera. It is after all Microsoft's web site and if they don't want it to work with any other browser that is their business and their possible loss of business.

Robert

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Simplistic solution

The primary reason that IE displays standards
compliant web pages differently or incorrectly
is because of bugs in the browser itself. Since
they maintain a monopoly postion on the desktop and browser market there is no motivation to fix these
problems. In fact, these "bugs" have become a
standard in of themselves because MS has no
motivation to fix them which forces other browser
makers to incorporate these "bugs" into their own
browsers to maintain IE compatability. What's wrong with this picture?

[Earl Benser]

Not All Is True...

Shutterfly works fine with Safari 1.2 and Opera 7.5. Apparently,
Shutterfly came to realize that MS and IE are problems, not
standards

[Jetsoftdev]

Safari Too?

Periodically I get a server 1011 error when accessing msnbc.com
from Apple's safari. I wonder if Microsoft is doing the same
thing to Apple's Browser?

[technewsjunkie]

What is total in Billions for settlements '04

I'd like to see the total in Billions of dollars that this company
can pay to keep it out of court. How many other companies can
by off the competition in this manner?