Opera Settles $12.75m Lawsuit, But with Whom?

An anonymous reader writes "According to a press release from Opera Software ASA, they have settled legal claims with an international corporation resulting in payment to Opera of net USD 12.75 million. The interesting bit is that the international corporation is unknown. Dagbladet speculates that Microsoft is paying up. They reason it has something to do with this."

Anything to do with browser technology...

[manavendra]

...and you can bet your last dollar you'd hear Microsoft has something to do with - and quite sadly it usually ends up on the wrong side - patent infrigements, monopolistic policies, etc..

More information is needed...

[WordODD]

I really enjoy the Opera interface, but I am a FireFox diehard as many other people here are, so I wonder why Opera? Why not FireFox, or one of the others, Mozilla, etc. etc.? I'm sure its Slashdotly correct to assume that MS and the MSN website issue are the reason for this money but perhaps its something much less sinister. Mod me down if you want but I think putting something like this on the front page is just spreading unnessecary FUD.

Great...

[Bishop, Martin]

Now that they have a hefty some of money, maybe Opera should realise their browser would be a lot better if they just open source it.

makes sense

[sofar]

Microsoft has a lot to lose and taking down opera (or being caught doing something that looks like that) would seriously hurt their current EU legal status (monopolizing a competitor on the browser market). I'm sure microsoft will have settled this on very strict terms with Opera.

Opera however can use the funds to publicise itself FAIR wihtout slandering M$. That would be the wiser choice.

Re:Microsoft?

[dave420]

It could have been an honest mistake, as anyone who works with CSS and various browsers on a daily basis would tell you. It's certainly not uncommon for different CSS files to be sent to different browsers, and it's not uncommon for certain style sheets to break their intended browsers.

I understand why people jump at microsoft every chance they get, but to pull accusations out of thin air is pretty mad :)

Re:Great

[Liselle]

An interesting read, but not exactly an objective review. He's whinging about something trivial that's part of getting accustomed to a new browser. The browser takes getting used to, and it not for everyone, but it's very customizable.

On the blog post you linked to, there's a comment about 1/3 of the way down by someone named "sas", doing a possible "review" of Firefox in the same manner that Opera was treated. I thought it was pretty on-target (and funny), especially the parts about the extentions. ;)

Re:Microsoft?

[somethinghollow]

I've been debating this issue in my head for a long time. I even had a discussion with some tech journalist somewhere about it. But, basically, I don't see anything wrong with Microsoft blocking out whatever browser it choses. Here is my reasoning (at risk of someone telling me how my reasoning sucks by totally misconstruing it):

Lets pretend I run a club. While my club might be a really great, there are other clubs in the city, and they are really great, also.

I'm a bit of an elitest, so I only want people to come in that dress a certain way. So, I get my bouncers to stand outside and only let in the really attractive women in really nice cloths and guys that I think they might want hanging around them.

Well, it turns out that may be a good portion of the people that show up at my club, but I am still turning people away. These people go to other clubs since they can't get in mine.

Now, lets pretend that the pretty people don't spend as much money once they get past the door (some don't even get past the lobby), and the not-pretty people spend a good deal of money. My profits decline rapidly. I end up losing money in the end, but since I'm rich, I keep the place open. Other clubs are racking up dough.

Since I got tired of running my analogy about 1/2 way through, the quality of the analogy declined, but I'm sure everyone gets the point. If I am Bill Gates, and clubs are Internet Portals, and my club is MSN.com, and other clubs are other Internet Portals, and the bouncers are User Agent Detecting Scripts the point comes to light.

It's bad business to lock out people; but it is their business, and, assuming they aren't breaking any anti-discriminatory laws, they should be able to run it however they want. Sure you have a right to get pissed at them. But you also have a right to go somewhere else and tell everyone how shitty my bouncers are and how this other club does as good of a job anyway and has a better DJ. Make flyers and print stickers. Really stick it to me. You might even be able to convince some of the pretty people to start coming to the other club. You may even want to open your own club.

I'll admit that I'm ignoring that they have a monopoly and give out their browser home page set to MSN.com. If that is your complaint, don't bother replying. Otherwise, this is how I see it: A poor business decision.

Re:Great

[Jugalator]

I don't use the mail or IRC client so I disabled them in the Preferences. I use Opera 7.50.

Too many things going on

It has just one more menu than Firefox (the standard Windows menu), the average menu size is maybe 3-4 items larger than Firefox's, and I have only 5 buttons in the toolbar (back, forward, refresh/stop [in same button], home, wand). 1 search field, 1 address field.

Can't say anything is in non-obvious places either. I mean, how hard can it be to find the proper menu option when you only have 3 non-standard menus at an average length of maybe 12 items? (I consider File, Edit, Window, Bookmark, Help to all be very standardized or straight forward with the regular options).

Re:Microsoft?

[curator_thew]

Nice attempt at reasoning, but _arbitrary_ restrictions relating to sale/use of your product are viewed as discriminatory. I say _arbitrary_ because you can discriminate on objective reasons, even if they are "my nightclub is about stylish people, so we only let in those well dressed and with good attitude".

Secondly, it's more severe when the discrimination relates to a competitive product, and even more so when you are a dominant company. When you're building a large content service on the one hand, and owning a viewing technology on the other hand, and in both cases you have a dominant market share: then arbitrary restraints on competitors are pretty serious issues that regulators will tackle.

I note also that recent Microsoft has been doing a _lot_ of out of court settlements, it seems as though they want to pay off problems. Equally, the large anti-trust rulings mean that Microsoft is skating on thin-ice and has the scrutiny of the regulators who would use such activities as future evidence in antitrust actions.

Better to reach a settlement which involves a confidentiality clause in which the supposed activities won't in the future be disclosed or used in any regulatory action.

Wise commercial move Microsoft!

Re:Great

[barzok]

Opera is the first browser I've used where the default toolbar/menu configuration was cumbersome. That's a sign. I shouldn't have to customize the hell out of it upon install just to make it usable.

If you still think it's cluttered, hit "F11" and surf with keyboard shortcuts in full-screen mode. Let's see anything Gecko-based do that!

Firefox seems to be doing it just fine right now. Mozilla seems to be doing it too.

Re:Great

[jkabbe]

Firefox is called the "lean, mean browsing machine".

It should be called the "lean, mean crashing machine" because that's what it does 3-4 times a day for me.

Microsoft the humanitarian

[fleener]

Nonono, by keeping the payer's identity secret, *cough*, Microsoft doesn't have to live up to their past claims of needing to pass the cost onto consumers.

Re:Microsoft?

[RedSteve]

But WHY would their generic sheet feed a declaration for unordered lists that called for the list to have a left margin that goes 30 pixels off the left side of the containing box (or page if the UL is a direct child of the body)? Even a poor css author would have a hard time pulling that declaration randomly out of his or her bodily orifice of choice. At the very least, it should have been caught during testing...if they wanted to provide any quality assurance at all.

Re:Microsoft?

[lazyl]

The key point that you're missing is that MSM.com's behaviour is designed to make the user think that Opera has serious bugs. There is certianly no justification for that.

Your analogy only works if MSN were to completely and visibly block Opera; which they actually tried with every [com.com] non-IE browser a few years ago. That didn't work out for them.

Re:Microsoft?

[Reziac]

But if MSN was deliberately breaking Opera -- why not do the same to Netscape and Mozilla?? After all, they're more of a market threat than Opera. And why restrict the breakage to Opera7? That doesn't seem to have much point. And Opera's own analysis page says the CSS sent to Opera*6*, and to Netscape, was NOT broken.

Given that, it does look like a case of stupidity rather than malice. There's not much point in only breaking a single version of a minority browser, especially when that version is still so new as to be not yet widely adopted even by its fans.

I'd guess someone at MSN tested their CSS with a broken beta of Opera7, and built an Opera7-specific CSS to account for said breakage, but never tested again with the release version.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Reziac]

I use Mozilla with a User-Agent toolbar, specifically to deal with sites that only do a dumb string check for User-Agent.

Set to "real UA" your site works fine.
Set to "IE", it redirects as specified.

Note that it is locking out MOZILLA if it *calls* itself IE.

IOW, your lockout script is just as broken as IE, because it only does a UA-string check, not a browser capabilities check.

Re:Great

[NanoGator]

"Bottom line is, you start depending on the features unique to opera and you WILL become dependant on the browser. "

Agreed. It's a pity they don't show the cartoons in the advertising bar anymore. I actually switched back to the ad supported version hoping to encourage them to keep plopping them in there. Wouldn't it be cool if they took comics like Dilbert or Get Fuzzy and had them appear regularly there? Certainly made me more attentive to the ads. Small price to pay for some entertainment.

Re:Great...

[evil-osm]

I really fail to see your argument here. Opera is a fantastic browser and generally is the first to provide new technologies (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, mouse gestures). Mozilla and other open source browsers also eventually added them as well, however Opera pioneered alot of them. Opera is also very very stable, intuitive, and extreamly fast. The only complaint I have is that not all sites (1 in ~40) don't work exactly as they should. Not a huge deal, however as they activly fix the browser if you post up sites that don't work. Open sourceing everything isn't always "the solution" (in some cases it is), and if you plan on complaining about why they are not open source, perhaps you should also provide reasons why you think that they should be. Never complain without something to A) back it up, and B) some sort of positive solution and reasons why the solution would work.

Re:Block out MSIE

[Blakey Rat]

And the Macintosh version of IE which supports CSS correctly and is a pretty damned good browser in its own right? Why would you force Macintosh users to switch browsers when the one they're using has no rendering errors and no security holes?

Microsoft does make good browsers, just not on Windows. This code just makes you into an asshole to Mac users.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Ads are visual clutter and noise. They have to be to draw your attention, that's what they're for. I want them out of my way because I'm trying to get work done dammit.

Well, if you're really trying to get work done using Opera then surely you, or your employer, can afford to pay the registration fee to get rid of the ads.

Good software (such as Opera) is always worth paying for.

Short answer: Embedded devices.

[hkmwbz]

Opera might not be competing on the desktop, but they certainly are on the embedded side. Microsoft's embedded browser is crap, a stripped down version of desktop IE.

IE has won the desktop war long ago. But Opera is still a thread on devices.