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?)."

Comments

The cake was a lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

FP.

Re:The cake was a lie.

[Oktober Sunset]

MS is MS, they are the collective, resistance is futile.

Not so friendly to non-MS browsers.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use Safari, eventually the site saves your info to the cache - even if you ask for it not to save your username or password. Once your info is in Safari's cache, loading hotmail.com to try to log in gets you into an infinite loop bouncing between a couple of addresses. You have to stop the loading, go empty the cache of everything from live.com, and reload hotmail.com. Perhaps some of the fault is Apple's, but I've never had that problem with any other website while using Safari.

It's probably just Microsoft being Microsoft.

Re:sniff sniff.. smells afoul

[aXi]

I mean setting user agent to IE/windows helped.. However later they added some extra code, and even blocked that. The only way I could bank then, was by downloading the login page and editing it to remove the IE/Windows detection bit.. And guess what ? I could enter and use the rest of the site no problems whatsoever..

Re:User agent switcher

[Vectronic]

Tried as well, no go... even masking as FireFox/1.5 doesn't work, even though it says in mail.live.com that FireFox 1.5 is compatible.

As a side note, it doesn't work in Opera 9.51 either, I didn't notice since I prefer the classic version anyways...

It does however work if you set the site preferences as Mask As Internet Explorer (in Opera) although it seems to run really poorly, masking as FireFox goes to Classic.

Re:Hotmail incompatible with me....

[introspekt.i]

I think the bigger question for the film is:

"Why are FireFox users using Hotmail?"

I guess you could be a legacy user from way back when..buuuuuuuut...eventually you have to stop using Geocities.

Re:Hotmail incompatible with me....

[Zero__Kelvin]

"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.

Re:I'm not at all surprised

[aceofspades1217]

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.

Firefox 3 Javascript

[TheNetAvenger]

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?

Re:Hotmail incompatible with me....

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows that Al Gore invented the internet. He also has AlGorithm named after him, so he is a programmer too.

Re:Hotmail incompatible with me....

[medeii]

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.