Microsoft and AOL settle lawsuit

[System]

Somehow this sounds less like a settlement and more like a compromise to work together.  My bet is that AOL never actually sees a dime.

[System]

There's no reason why MS won't pay. $750 million is an absolute pittance. We're talking about one of the only companies that made an outrageous profit during the dotcom era & still kept it during the downturn.

What I am puzzled about is how AOL wanted this IE-for-free deal, and for *SEVEN YEARS*!.

I thought they had their own browser

Really this just confirms to me that Netscape and Mozilla really are still a crock of ####, no matter how much meta-wanking you want to do over the Open nature of the browser and it's Standards Compliance, it's still slow and clunky and going through another 5-year-rewrite..

[System]

As for IE being "fundamentally broken", you'd be sorely mistaken.

Internet Explorer's sole fundamentally broken aspect is the coders who maintain it: and how goddamned lazy they seem to be at coding and fixing bugs and adding sorely needed features. The inside of IE is perfectly fine, but it's going through a development slump I guess you could match on the Amiga with Voyager 3.3

How long has PNG been an internet standard and how long has IE *not* supported alpha channels and gamma correction properly without invoking an ActiveX object?

The difference between Opera, Mozilla, KHTML and IE is that the former groups actually give a toss about the browser and making the web work for people. Microsoft don't care about the internet anymore. It's passé.

They've just changed their entire development strategy to "services people want" instead of "products we think people need", at which point people don't want "a browser" per se, but "secure shopping" or more abstract applications of the browser.

Basically: nobody cares what the logo is spinning in the corner anymore. Not even Microsoft.