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Hotmail Full Version Incompatible With Firefox 3
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?)."
Does using to add-on to look like IE change anything? That would be pretty revealing.
Seen this before certain banks using microsoft's web libraries, and suddenly firefox not being able to enter your banking page. Setting the browser's id as IE and os as windows and suddenly it works flawlessly. So Id guess it smells afoul.
Same behavior in Konqueror(3.5.9). Well, actually, the default Konqueror UA isn't recognized as compatible with the full version interface; but spoofing either an IE or an FF UA changes that. With the spoof in place, the page exhibits the same behavior as described with FF3
So, this problem isn't caused by straight discrimination based on UA string, since spoofing IE had no effect. Something about the website is clearly wonky, though I can't say whether or not KHTML is to blame.
The full version works fine in Opera 9.5...now who says Opera's not a compatible enough browser? ;-)
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
As much as I hate anecdotal "evidence" for things, I can say that I just cleared my junk mail from a full Windows Live mail account (it was Hotmail until they forced me to move it over) just before I came to slashdot. In Firefox 3. No problems. I've never seen that message.
That being said, I also have SUSE, and it occurred to me perhaps there is some special deal going on there to allow it to work fine. But if not, I can't see any good reason to blame Mozilla or Microsoft; the bug was filed with Firefox 3 still in beta, perhaps it was an un-updated extension or the like interfering?
While I don't use Hotmail as my main account (haven't for quite a while), I still use it. And Firefox. No, nobody installed it for me. I am the go-to guy for tech and science (etc, etc, etc.) And I don't have any trouble getting into Hotmail (full) at all. :)
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
Firefox is basically funded by google. You know how the default search engine is google it is because google donates and promotes firefox. Not to mention the firefox "homepage" is google. Firefox received about 66 million dollars in 2006.
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2007/10/22/beyond-sustainability/
Which is fine because they publicly state that. Almost all of the money they make, besides the occasional donation is from google. The mozilla foundation is funded by google.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mozilla-2006-financial-faq.html
Now that microsoft is competing head to head against google in the online arena this is not surprising.
A larger firefox market share translates into a higher market share for google as firefox users are directed towards google.
I do for one, I created it when I first got on the net and have never had a problem with it so never needed to change. And since most of my friends use MSN to chat online I need an address for that anyway. I see no conflict of any kind, hotmail works and does its job as do my non-M$ browsers.
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?)
1) Changing or spoofing agent string doesn't help. Even pretending to be IE, the .js files associated still fail in FF3 WITH THE SAME ERROR.
2) If you look at the page source you can tell that Hotmail is identifying FireFox properly and loading the corresponding javascript, etc specific to FireFox.
So why is the Firefox team assigning this to 'Agent String' or 'Tech Evangelism' again?
You do realise that Outlook Web Access actually does rely on some IE only stuff right? Specifically, it uses a non-standard HTTP verb (SUBSCRIBE), they still haven't moved from using the old XMLHTTP ActiveX control to the new XMLHttpRequest (you can probably forgive them for being slow on the uptake there - they probably can't believe it ever took off - nothing Microsoft invents takes off!), and I imagine some of the Javascript is quite funky too (the "You have new e-mail" popup appears OVER other programs).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Been there since 1996. It had everything I loved at the time, it was fast free and BSD. It didn't even attempt to start your chat client when you logged in to check your mail!
It all went downhill after MS bought them. The first thing that happened was they decided to replace the existing and working infrastructure with MS servers running IIS and of course the hardware requirements went up and reliability went down. There are rumors that they haven't been able to fully complete the process to this day and that somewhere at hotmail some BSD machines are still running, but I'm skeptical of that.
And here I sit, like the husband who stays with his unfaithful wife for the kids. Except this is just a mail server rather than a wife and there are no kids involved, so I guess that's not a very good analogy, but God damn it, hotmail will die before I give up that email address.... or they start charging $ for it.
If I ever won enough money to buy the domain, I would start my own mail service and put a graphic on the main page depicting Beastie pitchforking Ballmer with a caption that says "I fear that there are no chairs here, biatch!"
Not to excuse them for having a crappy site, but do you know for sure that you weren't breaking their terms of service by doing this? With most sites I wouldn't care, but in the case of Internet Banking I might be tempted to just find an alternative bank that did agree to support my browser.
For all you know, the reason they were trying to block Firefox might have been because they knew of a bug that would mis-interpret your banking instructions. (eg. If you told it to pay someone on 6/7/2008, it might be sent by the browser as 7/6/2008.)
If you'd knowingly worked around their efforts to block your browser from using their banking interface, and then they'd lost your money, you might not have much of a legal standing to fall back on.
I got my gmail account by invitation, and I don't believe it ever asked for my phone number. But who knows, it may be different now.
Funny, but true. My wife seems to be unable to log in to Hotmail using IE7, and FF2 & 3 had no problems up until now.