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Hotmail Full Version Incompatible With Firefox 3

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 21, @03:43PM
from the smells-like-a-varmint dept.
Bug Microsoft Mozilla
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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Firehose: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, @03:45PM (#23887785)
    FP.

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

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, @03:55PM (#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.

  • Konqueror issues too (Score:4, Informative)

    by nurb432 (527695) on Saturday June 21, @03:56PM (#23887897) Homepage Journal

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

  • 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.

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

    by David_Bloom (578245) <slashdot@3lesson.org> on Saturday June 21, @04:09PM (#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, @04:11PM (#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?

  • Firefox 3 Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheNetAvenger (624455) on Saturday June 21, @04:49PM (#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:Firefox 3 Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TheNetAvenger (624455) on Saturday June 21, @07:10PM (#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, @03:57PM (#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, @04:33PM (#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.

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

      by vertinox (846076) on Saturday June 21, @04:44PM (#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.

    • 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, @04:59PM (#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.

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