Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Hotmail Full Version Incompatible With Firefox 3

Posted by kdawson on from the smells-like-a-varmint dept.

An anonymous reader notes that Hotmail's full version doesn't work with Firefox 3. Users get the following message when they try to log in: You are temporarily on the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail due to an error encountered during login. Before trying again, please clear your cache and cookies. (Clearing cache and cookies doesn't fix it.) At least 8 other bug reports have been duped to this one. The fault apparently lies with the Hotmail site, not Mozilla — maintainer Dave Garrett assigned the bug to Tech Evangelism, explaining: "I'll... move this over to TE, as my guess is this [is] the site's fault (just bad user agent sniffing?)."

18 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. I'm not at all surprised by CaptainPatent · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IE comes with MSN as the default page and has links to tons of Microsoft products and services whereas Firefox leans away from most Microsoft-based sites. I'm sure these bugs will be fixed eventually... but I'm also pretty sure Microsoft wasn't too worried about launching Hotmail without Firefox support.

    --
    Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
    1. Re:I'm not at all surprised by onion2k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm sure these bugs will be fixed eventually... but I'm also pretty sure Microsoft wasn't too worried about launching Hotmail without Firefox support.

      How long they take to fix it depends on whether they feel people are more likely to change their browser to fix a problem accessing their email, or change to a different email provider. While it's a great deal easier to change to a compatible browser it's not a foregone conclusion that people will necessarily take that route, especially if they're trying Firefox because they're dissatisfied with IE - if they're already trying to defect from the MSFT camp then a problem with Hotmail on FF3 will drive them further away.
      --
      http://twitter.com/onion2k
    2. Re:I'm not at all surprised by dpilot · · Score: 2, Insightful

      One word: Tying

      (IANAL, but I can recognize a duck when I see it waddle and hear it quack.)

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  2. Come on Hotmail! by drspliff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With a large dev team, lots of server admins, lots of marketing and a massive user base - you mean they don't test at all with other browsers while their in beta?

    The only way I could see this happening is if theres an internal policy to use _only_ IE for browsing (unlikely), or if developers were not allowed to.

    1. Re:Come on Hotmail! by drspliff · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I was just trying to push some arguments that there was no way this could happen unless Microsoft specifically had policies in place to not test with latest browsers.

      The developers there are nice people if you ever meet them, and the incompetence is unlikely to be on their behalf.

  3. Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... by jeff419 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Um, I think M$ does this to force people to use IE to check their hotmail. Not like that doesn't fit their MO

  4. Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... by strabes · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Solution: switch to a decent email service.

    --
    Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
  5. Microsoft! The incompatible company! by timtiminator · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In 80's and 90's everyone was like "get a compatible" meaning get a PC with DOS or Windows. Now it seems like Microsoft is the incompatible company! Examples: Internet Explorer not standards compliant, Vista not compatible with many business applications that ran well on XP, MS Office not supporting ODF... Does this mean that Microsoft is going down the same path as Commodore and OS/2?

  6. Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Why are FireFox users using Hotmail?"
    Not everyone reads Slashdot. Most people who use Hotmail don't necessarily know or care that it is a Microsoft service, or think everything in the computing world was designed by Microsoft. I recently overheard a discussion in the library about Tim Berners Lee and how he was the guy who invented "the Internet" (He really invented the web, which is not the same thing as almost all of us here know, but the better illustration of my point is coming.) What did his friend say?: "I though Bill Gates invented the internet." I was too busy trying to keep from puking to point out that Gates not only did not invent the Internet, but actually originally said the Internet was just a fad.
    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  7. Who cares by rduke15 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Who cares about hotmail anyway? Isn't that the obnoxious service which adds advertisements to all the mails sent by their users? (And most users not being aware that they are sending spam at the bottom of the mails they write.)

    Well, in fact Yahoo does the same thing. Strange that the MS/Yahoo deal didn't work out. As far as treating their email service users, they seem to behave the same.

    1. Re:Who cares by Ilgaz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yahoo lets Safari 3, Opera 9.5, Firefox 2 (3 has documented issue) users to use their (New) Yahoo Mail and (Beta) My Yahoo. They are way complex and beyond anything those MSCE monkeys could code BTW. My Yahoo beta is essentially a full feature RSS reader masked as a webpage.

      I don't see any comparison between Yahoo and Hotmail really. It could only serve to get idea about what would happen if MS really acquired Yahoo.

  8. Re:It works in Opera :-) by HappySmileMan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Nope, IE has the issues, and Opera accomodates that crap.

  9. Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why do you care what site it is? The simple fact is that every web browser should work with every web site. Period. Would your opinion be different if this was for Yahoo Mail or Gmail?

    --
    Comment of the year
  10. Re:Firefox 3 Javascript by jimicus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So why is the Firefox team assigning this to 'Agent String' or 'Tech Evangelism' again?

    I haven't RTFA but at a guess I'd say it's likely that Firefox is being fed broken js/HTML by Hotmail.
  11. Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... by medeii · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Some of us signed up with Hotmail before Microsoft acquired it, or haven't felt inconvenienced enough to switch. I only use it for site registrations anyway, I've got my own domain for my 'real' email.

    --
    got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
  12. Re:The cake was a lie. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I think my brain just exploded. Shasosa, try that again only use proper formatting and terminology which resembles coherent thought.


    Yes I know I'm responding to a troll, thus the Anonymous Cowerd approach.

  13. Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... by witherstaff · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As a developer I keep a hotmail account around to test that emails from the site go through without triggering their spam filters.

    However I don't trust their spam filters to work. I keep flagging EVERY single message from MSN as spam and I still keep getting them.

  14. Re:Firefox 3 Javascript by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Um, not if IE is using non-standard js, that isn't supported in Firefox. I think that's kinda the problem. Hotmail's code for Firefox doesn't work because MS broke it, and the IE js isn't compliant.

    What are you suggesting here? That Microsoft went out of their way to find some exact combination of Javascript functions that:
    1) Works in IE
    2) Works in FF2
    3) But doesn't work in FF3
    4) Was installed before any FF3 betas were around (since this has been reported for every version of FF3.)

    Seriously? Do you think that's even technically possible? Hell, do you think the combination of points 2 and 3 is even technically possible?

    It's a billion times more likely that this problem is caused by a obscure error in FF3 that didn't exist in FF2.

    --
    Comment of the year