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dirty tricks from the gang at microsoft
May. 19th, 2004 09:44 amthis story on slashdot was pretty interesting. It details a settlement received by the alternate web browser company
opera, from an "unidentified international company." Speculation is that the company in question is Microsoft, and the issue relates to a problem with how Opera's browser (often called the best of the alternate browsers, and one of the only ones attempting to sell its product, rather than distribute it for free,) displayed the MSN portal page.
The meat of the story? Testers using a bot that could emulate different browsers found that opera, and opera only, was being served a subtly (and apparantly intentionally) flawed version of the page, one that distorted the content and made the browser look like it was malfunctioning.
I've worked in internet customer service for a long time, and for most of that time, the largest part of my task was trying to explain the complex jumble of kludged together garbage that is the modern internet. Getting someone to believe that the problem with the "add payee field" when they visit your site is a "known bug" in the table designations in MSIE 5.21 for the mac, when it isn't really a known bug at all, but a correction of a misconception that has ruled the way websites were designed for the last ten years, is a complex task at best... Most people only know that it is broken for them, and all they want to hear is: "i've fixed it" and not, "this can not be fixed; it results from microsoft's arrogance in demanding that webpages conform to a flawed standard that they are making up as they go along." And it doesn't help that every site designer in the world has been strong-armed into designing for microsoft because of the popularity of their product, and the endless stream of yammering complaints from the teeming legions if their web experience isn't 100% fun for every second of the day. It is easier to insert the fixes for IE (or code exclusively for microsoft) than to build a webpage that behaves properly according to the W3C consortium's standards. Web programmers used to have a joke: "How many Microsoft product developers does it take to change a lightbulb? :: None, they just declare "dark" to be the standard user experience." But it is not a joke anymore. Microsoft did declare "dark" as the standard, and so many people have been living in the dark for so long, that they think that their web experience SHOULD be dark.
And now we have microsoft intentionally screwing up webpages that it shows to its competitor's products. They know that opera isn't going to be able to convince their paying users that the problem is an intentional slight from microsoft, and with microsoft dishing out content from hotmail, msn, slate, corbis, etc. they could sabatoge a small (but visible) chunk of Johnny Opera's web experience. This isn't the first time that microsoft has intentionally used its bully pulpit to skew the performance experience for a specific competitor. The Windows Media Player has been used to distort an industry competitor's products twice in the past. Once when they abruptly stopped supporting Real Audio's file format by actually releasing a disguised "downgrade" to the WMP that took away support for RAM files, and again when they used WMP to play MP3 files at a lower quality than their own WAV file format. When Amazon.com started audio downloads, we'd get these messages: "Everyone says these MP3's are the way to go... so I downloaded some from your site. But when I play them on my computer, they sound sucky. What Gives?" Welcome to the dark, audio listener.
Mystery is continually unhappy with the way that Hotmail has been behaving with our various browsers on the Mac, and I wonder now, if I shouldn't get a trial copy of iCab (which supports altering the HTTP header that identifies the user's computer type and browser to a server,) and take a look at the HTML and stylesheets served by that service to my computer. Who knows? if microsoft really is paying opera to keep quiet... maybe they would pay me too.
EDITED to Add:
CNet confirms that microsoft was indeed behind the settlement.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+behind+%2412+million+payment+to+Opera/2100-1032_3-5218163.html
opera, from an "unidentified international company." Speculation is that the company in question is Microsoft, and the issue relates to a problem with how Opera's browser (often called the best of the alternate browsers, and one of the only ones attempting to sell its product, rather than distribute it for free,) displayed the MSN portal page.
The meat of the story? Testers using a bot that could emulate different browsers found that opera, and opera only, was being served a subtly (and apparantly intentionally) flawed version of the page, one that distorted the content and made the browser look like it was malfunctioning.
I've worked in internet customer service for a long time, and for most of that time, the largest part of my task was trying to explain the complex jumble of kludged together garbage that is the modern internet. Getting someone to believe that the problem with the "add payee field" when they visit your site is a "known bug" in the table designations in MSIE 5.21 for the mac, when it isn't really a known bug at all, but a correction of a misconception that has ruled the way websites were designed for the last ten years, is a complex task at best... Most people only know that it is broken for them, and all they want to hear is: "i've fixed it" and not, "this can not be fixed; it results from microsoft's arrogance in demanding that webpages conform to a flawed standard that they are making up as they go along." And it doesn't help that every site designer in the world has been strong-armed into designing for microsoft because of the popularity of their product, and the endless stream of yammering complaints from the teeming legions if their web experience isn't 100% fun for every second of the day. It is easier to insert the fixes for IE (or code exclusively for microsoft) than to build a webpage that behaves properly according to the W3C consortium's standards. Web programmers used to have a joke: "How many Microsoft product developers does it take to change a lightbulb? :: None, they just declare "dark" to be the standard user experience." But it is not a joke anymore. Microsoft did declare "dark" as the standard, and so many people have been living in the dark for so long, that they think that their web experience SHOULD be dark.
And now we have microsoft intentionally screwing up webpages that it shows to its competitor's products. They know that opera isn't going to be able to convince their paying users that the problem is an intentional slight from microsoft, and with microsoft dishing out content from hotmail, msn, slate, corbis, etc. they could sabatoge a small (but visible) chunk of Johnny Opera's web experience. This isn't the first time that microsoft has intentionally used its bully pulpit to skew the performance experience for a specific competitor. The Windows Media Player has been used to distort an industry competitor's products twice in the past. Once when they abruptly stopped supporting Real Audio's file format by actually releasing a disguised "downgrade" to the WMP that took away support for RAM files, and again when they used WMP to play MP3 files at a lower quality than their own WAV file format. When Amazon.com started audio downloads, we'd get these messages: "Everyone says these MP3's are the way to go... so I downloaded some from your site. But when I play them on my computer, they sound sucky. What Gives?" Welcome to the dark, audio listener.
Mystery is continually unhappy with the way that Hotmail has been behaving with our various browsers on the Mac, and I wonder now, if I shouldn't get a trial copy of iCab (which supports altering the HTTP header that identifies the user's computer type and browser to a server,) and take a look at the HTML and stylesheets served by that service to my computer. Who knows? if microsoft really is paying opera to keep quiet... maybe they would pay me too.
EDITED to Add:
CNet confirms that microsoft was indeed behind the settlement.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+behind+%2412+million+payment+to+Opera/2100-1032_3-5218163.html
