Hotmail Doesn't Work With Linux Firefox 2.0

An anonymous reader tips a column up at freesoftwaremagazine.com in which the writer discovers that the latest UI enhancements that Hotmail has recently introduced don't work with Firefox 2.0 under Linux. The writer concludes that the webmail interface has been artificially limited by basic user-agent sniffing. The solution is simple enough — spoofing the User Agent that Firefox reports.

Comments

Re:again with the user agent excludes?

[Kjella]

The other half of the story that you forgot to mention is that Opera 6 had a non-standard 30 pixel offset that Mircrosoft "undid" by placing it 30 pixels to the left. When Opera fixed this in Opera 7, msn.com broke because they applied it to all Opera versions. According to how slashdot wants to treat IE, Microsoft should just have let MSN be broken on Opera 6 in the first place, but Microsoft went out of their way to make it render correctly on a competing browser. While not perfectly handled by MS, it's hardly an unusal practise and is why IE requires you to "opt-in" to IE7 and IE8 fixes through DOCTYPE/meta-tags.

It's after all quite a bit of work to always assume that the next browser version will be perfect, thus applying no hacks so that every time for every version released you have to go through "nope, still wrong" and issue an update to support the new version. in practise many would rather assume that everything that was wrong is still wrong and just remove hacks for the things that were fixed. This case was really blown way out of proportion on slashdot and made to seem like Microsoft has done some kind of malicious hack to fuck up Opera, when it was quite the opposite. But don't the facts get in the way of a good rant.