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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.
IIRC, Outlook Web Access has done this for at least the past 5-6 years. Load OWA in Firefox (Windows or Linux), and it looks all choppy with bad frames and images and such. Change the User Agent, and it magically looks almost identical to the same page in IE!
I find it funny that Microsoft goes to these ends... what do you gain by doing that? Do they claim it's because other browers don't work?
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
I have problems with hotmail on windows with FF2. When the enhanced page first loads, it loops in a javascript and hangs the browser. This happens almost every time. And because the FF people apparently don't know how to show the "stop script" dialog and actually pause the script so I can click the button, it usually takes me several minutes to get into my hotmail with continuous clicking of the "stop script" button. It's made hotmail unusable, so I switched to yahoo... And not microsoft has the opportunity to break that, too. Antitrust officials? Bah... They're ignorant or this shit wouldn't happen.
Remember when MS skewed pages being viewed by Opera, but if you told Opera to identify as IE, they'd work just fine? Opera won their lawsuit against MS for that. Perhaps another lawsuit should be in the works.
The Author FTA said it best:
"Conclusion
All things said, I prefer Gmail."
Hotmail has a nasty habit of deleting all of your email if you fail to login at least once every 30 days.
I vacationed and forgot to login... lost 5+ years worth of email (thankfully, I mirrored important messages to Yahoo)..
'Hotmail of Borg' was "kind enough" to not delete my contacts or account, but they were "sorry" that all of my email was deleted. Nothing to see here move along....
Now, I have been very happily using Gmail since 2004 (but I do have a free Yahoo account that has 8+ years worth of emails also. Redundancy good.)
Hotmail is now totally obsolete IMHO and they treat their customers like dog crap. This is obviously planned by Microsoft. They are about to buy Yahoo to "try" to compete. The mass Exodus (Migration) of all of my Yahoo Email is already underway in preparation for the great FUBARing to come once Microsoft obtains Yahoo and incorporates it into their collective.
I use Gmail 99% of the time now. Thank you Google! (If only Google would now write a compatible OS to make MS Windows obsolete, (even if left beta for years) I'd still buy it!)
Look, I've been using smartphones since the P800i. I've used Symbian phones, Palm phones and even (for very short amounts of time) Windows CE phones. THEY ALL FUCKING SUCK. This sounds harsh, even crass, but it is unfortunately the truth. Nothing to do with marketing or spin or anything like this. The iPhone is the only phone I've ever owned that I don't hate. Not because it has more features or because it is prettier or anything like that, but simply because it works, it doesn't crash, and it's easy to use. It doesn't make me jump through hoops to enter appointments, it doesn't force me to enter tons of data to join a wireless network, it doesn't come with crappy sync software which never works. It just works exactly like a smartphone should work, and that is why there is no alternative to the iPhone. No other smartphone works as well.