Windows Live Goes to College

Tobias writes "BetaNews is reporting that Microsoft has struck a deal with 72 different colleges to use Windows Live for their email services. The problem with this is that Windows Live does not support any browsers besides IE 6, does not support POP or IMAP, and does not support email forwarding." From the article: "The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live. They would likely create a Windows Live Messenger account, start a blog and organize their favorites under this e-mail account -- especially if they plan to continue using it, Microsoft says."

Comments

It does work on Firefox

[figleaf]

I am not sure were that IE6 only blurb came from.

Re:It does work on Firefox

[Edward Scissorhands]

No, IT DOES NOT WORK ON FIREFOX. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the functionality on Firefox is limited. When you access Windows Live Mail Beta on Firefox you are getting absolutely NO ajax-style features. There is no preview pane. There is no interactivity whatsoever. There is even a bolded error message telling you that you are in "Hotmail Classic" mode which is even less featured than the old Hotmail interface. The bolded message suggests that you navigate to the "options" menu and turn on the full interactive Live Beta experience. You can do that in Firefox, but NOTHING HAPPENS and you will be greeted with the same bolded message whenever you look at your inbox. It tells you that you need to be using IE to fully use Live. It's completely unusable without ANY javascript functionality, you know.

It doesn't work. Microsoft is dragging their feet on Firefox support because, once again, their programmers do not know how to write to standards. Either that, or their managers are telling the programmers to wait on implementing a "workaround" for non-IE browers.

My guess though is that it's the former-- Microsoft simply doesn't hire employees that know or care about web standards. These guys are probably just learning about Firefox and the DOM as they go. They've only ever written to Microsoft's own JavaScript extensions.

In other words, they are incompetent.

Re:Windows Live Supports Firefox

[rm69990]

Yeah, most of Windows Live does. Try using Windows Live Mail with Firefox...it isn't pretty to say the least. All of the features that make Windows Live Mail better than Hotmail are gone, and some of the features that make Hotmail usable are gone as well. You can't even mark a message as unread in Live Mail while using Firefox. No drag and drop, no preview pane. I have a Hotmail account that was using Windows Live Mail, but it is useless on my Mac, so I have now switched back to the Hotmail interface. My main email is gmail though, thank god.

I invited my non-tech friend to Gmail, and she used it as a second email account for a while. After trying out Windows Live Mail, she switched to Gmail on her main account, not liking the direction Hotmail was going.

CS department != IT

[a16]

A uni's CS department has absolutely no relation to the general mail services, or student network, of the university. Whether the CS department is badly managed or wonderfully managed, they will likely hate the people who run the main network if it's anything like my experience.

My uni has a decent CS department, who run everything for their department themselves. We have access to their solaris machines and we have all of the normal mail (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) services, and can SSH to the machines etc. etc.

The university however (and anyone on any other course) has to make use of crappy Novell Netware webmail. I could easily see them moving to this new MS system if the managers high up in the IT department were sent enough free copies of Office by MS, or whatever they are bribing them all with.

When this list is published, expect to see a lot of top uni's with deccent CS departments in there. And whether or not they have a decent CS department or not, we can't say "oh it's ok, they don't have MIT so it doesn't mean anything" - MS are still going to be forcing literally hundreds of thousands of upcoming young adults into only knowing their own proprietary system.