Getting Opera to Work with Hotmail?

theComposer asks: "I use Opera as my browser of choice. Ever since Microsoft changed it's Hotmail interface, I've been having "issues". If I set Opera to identify itself as Opera, Hotmail won't let me look at my mail. I get a screen that tells me to upgrade to the lastest Internet Explorer or Netscape. However, if I set Opera to identify itself as IE, I can log in just fine. Once in (with Opera), I can't check an email and delete it or move to another folder or whatnot. I had no problems using Opera with Hotmail before the interface change. It goes without saying that everything works fine in IE. Does anyone else have these problems or am I doing something wrong here?" It goes without saying that this kind of behavior is expected from Microsoft, nevertheless, has anyone gotten Opera to work with Hotmail? If so, what tricks need to be performed? If anyone else is having problems with a non-IE browser when accessing Hotmail, please share your experiences.

Comments

Enough with these conspiracy theories

[hatless]

It goes without saying that this kind of behavior is expected from Microsoft, nevertheless, has anyone gotten Opera to work with Hotmail?

Oh, grow up. (You too, some of you other editors.) Not everything in this world is part of the great evil Microsoft master plan to crush Scandinavian software developers. The only web developers who even bother testing their sites with Opera at all are the ten or twelve of them who regularly use Opera themselves.

Netscape browsers now have a market share somewhere just north of 5% when the wind is blowing right--and that's the old 4.x Netscape. Mozilla and Netscape 6.x are statistically indistinguishable from zero once you leave Slashdot and Mozilla.org, which themselves aren't exactly big draws in the scheme of things.

Does Opera even account for one half of one percent of all web traffic to mainstream, general-interest web destinations like Yahoo, MSN, Amazon and so forth?

Microsoft isn't trying to sneakily shut out Opera users. They are trying to shut out users who block cookies, but that's to be expected from a web service like Hotmail that depends on ad and cross-marketing revenue for its existence. And they couldn't care less about Opera.

Netscape, however, is another story: with the ongoing antitrust action MS has to continue some degree of support for their browsers, even as they've become economically questionable to support. Just because 1/3 of Mac users (who make up 5% of web traffic) and 95% of desktop Unix/Linux users use Netscape doesn't mean those 2% of the whole are really worth spending development money on.