Hotmail Doesn’t Work With Firefox 2.0
According to Mitch Meyran at Free Software Magazine Hotmail is crippled in Firefox 2.0 for Linux. The fix? Spoof the user agent to be Firefox 2.0 for Windows. Another fix is to use Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Anyone else experience this problem? There does seem to be a few reports of this.
Tags: crippleware, firefox, free software magazine, linux, Mozilla, user-agent
February 9th, 2008 at 6:29 am
See here. The problem isn’t that hotmail rejects linux outright, it’s that it chokes on the vendor string (e.g. “fedora”) in the UA.
Maybe all this excitement will persuade the hotmail peeps to fix their fragile UA sniffing, and maybe accept non-firefox UAs while they’re at it?
February 9th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Considering the arrogant tone he used when writing tech support, and the negligent and imprecise description of his problem, it is no wonder he got a useless reply. Such requests don’t deserve a reply at all.
February 9th, 2008 at 10:38 am
The user agent wars are far from over, web discrimination (probably a kind of racism) is happy and alive. I think the fight against this is something we should take serious at Mozilla, and there are good ideas for it, like an extension that warns users about sites that discriminate against some browsers and provide hook for active evangelism by the interested community.
February 10th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Robert Kaiser: Very true, it’s a common practice. That’s why you should detect features, not browsers. It’s much more reliable. Not to mention, when a website supports a feature, it magically starts working. No developer intervention needed.
February 25th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
The problem I have with my hotmail account when using firefox is that I can’t see who the message is from in my message box.
February 27th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I have the same problem as Marianna. Hey Windows…Fix your glitch, IM using gmail from now on. Goodbe Microsh#t!