Microsoft and AOL settle lawsuit

[Vincent]

Microsoft will pay $750 million to AOL Time Warner to settle an antitrust lawsuit filed by AOL on behalf of its subsidiary Netscape last year.

This also gives AOL the right to use IE for the next 7 years without having to pay royalties.

They are also working on getting AOL and MSN messengers to work more smoothly together as well as fighting digital piracy.

Read the full story here at cnn.com

[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.

[Vincent]

Those were my thoughts aswell.  It would be good if the money was paid to AOL.  It's just a pity that they're using IE now instead of Netscape.  (That's how I read it anyway)

[KennyR]

Oh well, anyone would have to be crazy to use AOL anyway.

[mikeymike]

I'm more concerned about Netscape/Mozilla's future as a result of this.  While yes, there are tonnes of people developing for NS/Mozilla, I wouldn't be surprised if much of the work, be it organising effort on issues or whatever, is done by AOL:Netscape employees.

[mikeymike]

$750 million?  That probably just about covers AOL's legal fees :-)

[MarkTime]

I think they will pay up, but according to the article, it hardly dents the 46 billion msft has in the bank, and amounts to a 5 cents a share charge against the expect 24 cents a share profit.

And for Time Warner AOL, they have so much debt,
this will just help some, its not such a bonanza...
I remember the old atari winning $50 million
against sega, and they got the money too...just
when they needed it...but they blew it all and
eventually went belly up....money doesn't help
companies with more fundamental problems.
this will just help some, it's progress, but they have huge issues.

It is ashame netscape is part of this huge conglomerate, their fate will be based on a lot of weirdness, and Time Warner AOL is trying to figure out the safest way to make lots of money, not innovate in the computer industry...

sounds like this deal just secured IE on the world's largest ISP...and thats ashame, cause netscape could, at any time, appear to be reversing their fortunes in the browser war, if AOL had switched...it would be an automatic boost to thier percentages....

oh well...it sucks...but mozilla still a great browser
and will be around for a while.  Thats why
its open source after all, so we don't have to
be tied to such events.

[cecilia]

IE sucks. I now use Opera and will NEVER go back! (not that ever used IE because I liked it!)

Netscaqpe is nice but unfortunately got sucked up by AOL - I knew that was a  mistake when i heard it.

[mikeymike]

I hope I'll never go back to IE.  But that depends on the alternatives, don't it :-)

Hopefully, with a bit of luck, Mozilla will be fully handed over to the community if AOL give up on it.  So development will slow down a bit on it, but it's better than nothing.  Bear in mind that Firebird/Thunderbird are also probably owned by AOL.

Opera isn't quite to my taste in browsers :-)

With an extra bit of luck, particuarly important as the A1/OS4 is nigh, one of the browsers will have their socks pulled up, and I won't have to keep hoping that someone will start porting Mozilla to AmigaOS.

On the email side of things, I wonder if Qualcomm (Eudora) can be persuaded to port Eudora to AmigaOS4.  It's quite a nice email package, though I've moved on (I might come back to it though).

[chris]

Only Microsoft could lose a court case with the result that their position is actually improved.  *sigh*

Chris

[Kees]

What is *actually* wrong with IE ? besides the fact that its microsoft ?

[Paul_Gadd]

What is *actually* wrong with IE ? besides the fact that its microsoft ?

Nothing imo, used with tools like "Adpurger" and it makes a great webbrowser, people especially in the Amiga community attack any product what is made by Microsoft even if it is a great product but what makes it more funny is there is no Amiga equivalents to compare them to  :lol:

Just say IE was ported to Amiga/MorphOS  i would bet money all these anti M$ people would ditch the Amiga mickey mouse webbrowsers and use IE.

[chris]

What is *actually* wrong with IE ? besides the fact that its microsoft ?

It's a little feature-short, possibly even by Amiga browsers standard.  No tabbed browsing, can't block pop-ups, can't block images, can't block cookies.  Also, the caching doesn't seem to work properly in IE6 (forcing you to manually refresh, even though I have it set to "every visit to the page"),  it also loses settings some of the time.  If you open multiple windows the addresses in the drop-down address bar list don't stay in sync.  I'm sure there are more examples.

It does have good points though, but these only extend as far as fast start-up and the ability to view pages which fail on other browsers (but this is often the fault of the 'designer' assuming that everybody is using IE, or using things like ActiveX)

Mozilla works here for 99% of websites and has none of the above flaws, plus I don't trust IE not to broadcast personal data in easily readable formats across the world without me asking.

Chris

[mikeymike]

@ nOMAAM

What is *actually* wrong with IE ? besides the fact that its microsoft ?

Oh please.  Credit me with a little more maturity than that :-)


I've written some of my opinion about it here, but you'll probably find more knocking around that section of my website.  There's not much point in starting an IE-bashing thread :-)

[gnarly]

IE6/Win's CSS engine is fundamentally broken and feature short compared with its compadres (Safari, Op and Moz/Ns).

As a css/xhtml developer thats highly frustrating. IE5.2/Mac on the other hand is a damn good browser (from the designers point of view anyway).