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Hotmail Full Version Incompatible With Firefox 3

Posted by kdawson on Sat Jun 21, 2008 02:43 PM
from the smells-like-a-varmint dept.
Bug Microsoft Mozilla The Internet
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?)."
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Submission: Hotmail breaks compatibility with Firefox 3 by Anonymous Coward
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  • The cake was a lie. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21 2008, @02:45PM (#23887785)
    FP.
  • Does using to add-on to look like IE change anything? That would be pretty revealing.

  • I'm not at all surprised (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CaptainPatent (1087643) on Saturday June 21 2008, @02:50PM (#23887845) Journal
    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.
    • 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.

    • Re:I'm not at all surprised (Score:4, Insightful)

      by onion2k (203094) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:59PM (#23888547) Homepage

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dpilot (134227)

      One word: Tying

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

  • Not so friendly to non-MS browsers. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21 2008, @02:55PM (#23887885)

    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.

      • WebCT was put on earth by aliens who are set to destroy us by slowly driving us insane. What other explanation is there?

  • Konqueror issues too (Score:4, Informative)

    by nurb432 (527695) on Saturday June 21 2008, @02:56PM (#23887897) Homepage Journal

    Even the free version wont work in konqueror ( or at least hasn't for me for some time now )

  • Come on Hotmail! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drspliff (652992) <harry...roberts@@@midnight-labs...org> on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:00PM (#23887933) Homepage

    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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by drspliff (652992)

        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.

  • 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.

  • It works in Opera :-) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by David_Bloom (578245) <slashdot@3lesson.org> on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:09PM (#23888013) Homepage
    The full version works fine in Opera 9.5...now who says Opera's not a compatible enough browser? ;-)

  • Sensational, or Novell? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ilikepi314 (1217898) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:11PM (#23888031)

    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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by duguk (589689)
      look carefully, its in the center of the page; if the site doesn't load it redirects back to the old version with a message, in a yellow box on the main hotmail page. its easy to miss - i did too.

  • Firefox 3 Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheNetAvenger (624455) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:49PM (#23888417)

    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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jimicus (737525)

      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.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Blakey Rat (99501)

            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 th

      • Re:Firefox 3 Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TheNetAvenger (624455) on Saturday June 21 2008, @06:10PM (#23889607)

        Because they can't dare to mess with Microsoft giant like a little Norwegian company did?

        Opera sued them big time for messing around with their application along with releasing a dedicated "Bork edition" release which is a legend already

        1) Stuff like this is why you look at the served HTML.

        2) You do realize that the 'margin' setting on the MSN style sheets that caused the problem with Opera was either a stupid MSN programmer doing something NOT MSN, or was a very simple accident, since the margin number it received was from a 'calculation'.

        MSN is NOT Microsoft, you would be surprised how separate the businesses operate, and isolating Opera users with a messed up page would NOT benefit MSN.

        Some interesting MSN info:
        The MSN datacenter managers and site programmers are borderline retarded having worked with them directly, I would bet on it being an accident and wouldn't be surprised if there aren't tons of coding errors that hit all browsers independantly.

        The MSN managers and programmers are the reason Microsoft 'Live' exists, and why MSN groups and other MSN features are all in competition with Live and being replaced by Live services from Microsoft's other divisions OUTSIDE of MSN. MSN is a held over tie to a time when MSN was a folder based compuserve type service and tried to adopt to being a portal site.

        Notice that everything from Windows Messenger to even search moved from the MSN teams and was replaced. All Microsoft products shove live.com as the default home page, not MSN.com.

        If you ever want to see a day in insanity, go hang out with the MSN datacenter people. I feel sorry for sites like Slate.com, etc that have to work through their operations.

        I worked with another 'partner' like Slate and dealing with the MSN people scared the fek out of myself and my team. We even had to fix programming for them and send them instructions for their servers because an 'ok' manager at MSN said his people didn't know how to do something really simple and asked if we would do it for him on the side. Scary...

    • Re:sniff sniff.. smells afoul (Score:5, Interesting)

      by aXi (6533) on Saturday June 21 2008, @02:57PM (#23887899) Homepage
      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:sniff sniff.. smells afoul (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Zibri (1063838) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:33PM (#23888239)

        Great that you solved it, even so; in a geeky way. However you should have called them and demanded they'd support firefox and linux and yadda yadda or threaten to switch bank. Just as people with hotmail trouble should do this to MSN. In case they don't listen: switch mail provider. Gmail still supports firefox.

      • Is this a great idea with banking? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jesterzog (189797) on Saturday June 21 2008, @08:08PM (#23890397) Homepage Journal

        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..

        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.

    • Weird, the MSDN sites (even the subscription download ones) work perfectly fine for me in Firefox.

    • Re:This isn't particularly new (Score:5, Informative)

      by vertinox (846076) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:44PM (#23888361)

      This may not exactly be on the topic, but I've noticed every Microsoft run website that I try to access with Firefox gives me trouble, even with previous versions of Firefox.

      Its not flamebait.

      Support.microsoft.com and office.microsoft.com have quirks with pages loading completely that make it painful enough to use IE instead.

      Its not like I have to visit those sites that often though.

    • Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by laserbeak43 (1097353) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:10PM (#23888019)
      From my experience, The new hotmail has compatability issues with IE7!! LOL

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jeff419 (1112781)
      Um, I think M$ does this to force people to use IE to check their hotmail. Not like that doesn't fit their MO

    • Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by introspekt.i (1233118) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:34PM (#23888247)
      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.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Zero__Kelvin (151819) on Saturday June 21 2008, @03:44PM (#23888359) Homepage

        "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:Hotmail incompatible with me.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Blakey Rat (99501) on Saturday June 21 2008, @04:28PM (#23888829)

        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?

      • I guess you could be a legacy user from way back when...
        Yeah, except that even way back when, hotmail was lame.

      • Re:Hotmail incompatible with me.... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jcgf (688310) on Saturday June 21 2008, @05:53PM (#23889505)

        I guess you could be a legacy user from way back when.

        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!"

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kalriath (849904) *

        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

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ilgaz (86384)

      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.

    • No, you'll be thinking of hotmale.com.

      Boy, I wish I'd registered that way back when, to make my megabucks!

      Rgds

      Damon

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