20 06 2008

Firefox 3 and Hotmail Incompatibility?

Posted by: aebrahim in Microsoft, Mozilla, tags: ,

I tried to log into my Hotmail account today with Firefox 3.0, and I got the following error:

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 the cookies and cache doesn’t help. When I log in via IE7, it works fine. This problem started to happen after the upgrade to Firefox 3.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Mozilla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

16 Responses to “Firefox 3 and Hotmail Incompatibility?”
  1. Tomer Cohen says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 12:08 am - Edit

    I’ve seen it long time ago. Seems they filter out every Firefox 3 user and every Linux user.

  2. José Jeria says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 1:00 am - Edit

    Most probably because of crappy browser sniffing.

  3. David Naylor says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 1:30 am - Edit

    Happens to me too now that I tried it. Not that I ever use my hotmail account…

  4. Jason Barnabe says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 1:41 am - Edit

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427610
    http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Hotmail+full+version+does+not+work+in+Firefox+3

  5. ricardo says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 4:22 am - Edit

    I’m having some problems too. Firefox 3.1 will probably solve this, but until then, let’s use IE7. bye =)

  6. aebrahim says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 6:20 am - Edit

    Yeah, this took me a while to notice too because I rarely use my Hotmail account. Actually I upgraded my family’s computer yesterday to Firefox 3 and one of my parents started complaining about problems with Hotmail, so I logged into my account to check.

  7. Derek Buranen says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 6:27 am - Edit

    Does it work with the “User agent switcher” addon set to IE7? It could be as simple as hotmail sniffing your browser as suggested and just pushing you to classic even if the other version would work fine. I’d test, but I don’t have a hotmail address.

  8. gatolandia says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 7:15 am - Edit

    I test with my “hotmail crap account” and get hotmail with a crap interface without images and the same warning, switch the user agent to IE7 and the images load again but i get a warning of the sieze of the screen( i have set to 800×600).
    The problem is the hotmail page wich restrict the browser to IE and the page to a resolution above 800×600

  9. gjph says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 7:23 am - Edit

    See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427610

  10. aebrahim says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 10:40 am - Edit

    Derek, although that might work, I’m not interested to try that because as far as I’m concerned, sites should work with browsers without having to fake user agent strings. If they don’t, that’s a bug for the site administrator to fix, not the end user.

    gjph, looks like the bug has been opened in April. Personally I find it highly surprising that Microsoft haven’t worked out a solution in the last couple of months for this highly visible bug resulting in widespread poor user experience. It’s not as if the Firefox 3.0 betas have not been available for testing.

  11. Chris Cunningham says:
    June 21st, 2008 at 7:20 pm - Edit

    Personally I find it highly surprising that Microsoft haven’t worked out a solution in the last couple of months for this highly visible bug resulting in widespread poor user experience

    Why? It’s in Microsoft’s best interest to perpetuate the idea that using alternative browsers “breaks the internet”. This particular issue has been pointed out to them countless times, so it’s definitely deliberate.

    – Chris

  12. peter scott says:
    June 22nd, 2008 at 1:08 am - Edit

    This is a real pain in the ass… seems that with every new version of firefox, ie, hotmail… whatever… the whole internet experience is becoming more complicated, riddled with conflicts and less user friendly. shouldn’t it be going in the opposite direction?

  13. shantharam says:
    June 24th, 2008 at 9:52 am - Edit

    Hello,
    install IE Tab add-on from firefox website it will render IE compatible websites properly
    Link :
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

  14. shantharam says:
    June 24th, 2008 at 9:54 am - Edit

    I tried with hotmail also its working properly.

  15. Eurasianman says:
    June 24th, 2008 at 9:49 pm - Edit

    Installing the IE Tab add-on for FireFox 3 and changing the “rendering engine” allowed me to view Hotmail Full without issues :)

  16. Ripper007 says:
    November 7th, 2008 at 12:26 pm - Edit

    using the IE add-on in FF3 is not a true fix.
    Try doing that in linux.

    If your going to use IE-addon in FF3, you might as well just use Internet Explorer. thats kindof what it is doing. its just opening up a IE window in FireFox 3 tab. your still using IE. not firefox.

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