Getting Opera to Work with Hotmail?

theComposer asks: "I use Opera as my browser of choice. Ever since Microsoft changed it's Hotmail interface, I've been having "issues". If I set Opera to identify itself as Opera, Hotmail won't let me look at my mail. I get a screen that tells me to upgrade to the lastest Internet Explorer or Netscape. However, if I set Opera to identify itself as IE, I can log in just fine. Once in (with Opera), I can't check an email and delete it or move to another folder or whatnot. I had no problems using Opera with Hotmail before the interface change. It goes without saying that everything works fine in IE. Does anyone else have these problems or am I doing something wrong here?" It goes without saying that this kind of behavior is expected from Microsoft, nevertheless, has anyone gotten Opera to work with Hotmail? If so, what tricks need to be performed? If anyone else is having problems with a non-IE browser when accessing Hotmail, please share your experiences.

Ummm, why ask this here?

[gss]

It seems kind of pointless to post this here, you'd have luck better going here. [opera.com]

Javascript and DHTML

[kisielk]

These problems with fancy Microsoft site designs seem to be caused by JavaScript/DHTML things, which Opera does not seem to handle very well. I have not tried their sites with the Opera 5.05 preview, but they did not work for me with 5.0. I think you are out of luck until Opera upgrades their software.

maybe partially the cookies

[N-Wing]

Opera 5.11 and 5.12 for Windows (and most likely some older versions and for other operating systems) have 2 interesting settings under "Privacy": Display warning for {illegal domains, paths}. I have them both enabled, and when I visit Hotmail, Opera pops up a dialog saying the site is trying to set cookies with invalid paths. I reject them (since Opera doesn't have a way to manually delete specific cookies), and use Netscape instead. If you accept them (or don't have those prefs enabled), Opera may get confused when you do those other things, once you're logged in.

And/Or, as someone else said, it could also be the JavaScript - Opera's implementation seems a little funky sometimes. (Of course, this is also Hotmail's fault - sites shouldn't rely on JS for navigation.)

Re:maybe partially the cookies

[NutscrapeSucks]

Microsoft does some funny redirection with cookie placement in order to get centralized MSN cookies placed and logged while still not tripping their own privacy feature in IE6.

Info here [pc-help.org].

Web sites developed for MSIE

[hafree]

The biggest problem I come across these days is web sites that were "developed for MSIE" and not for Netscape. The big difference is that if your HTML code is written incorrectly, Netscape will not render it and will force you to correct it, while MSIE will simply do its best to fix it for you and will still display it. The most common cause is failure to close TABLE-related html tags. Fancy JavaScript/dhtml and stylesheets tend to break non-MSIE browsers pretty easily too. I hate to sound conspiracy-minded, but it almost seems as if the creators of Microsoft web development tools went out of their way to find every way to break other browsers, and created their software to putput code that does just this. So when you tell me that Hotmail only works correctly with MSIE, I'm really not surprised.

Re:Web sites developed for MSIE

[Alex Belits]

Not closing TD, TR, etc. tags is ok as long as the same opening tag follows or TABLE tag closes after it, thus unambiguously showing that the previous tag is closed (you can't nest tables without additional TABLE tag). However missing TABLE tag within another page produces an ambiguous piece of markup that can be interpreted in muliple ways -- this is not only prohibited by the standard but is theoretically impossible to render without guesswork. Few tags like that on the page, and it will be possible to make countless numbers of grotesque-looking combinations, formally all equally possible. MSIE (and Mozilla, imitating MSIE) guesses a lot, and makes those pages display "somehow", however formally they are invalid and ambiguous.

Re:Web sites developed for MSIE

[HerrNewton]

Actually your comments on MSIE's rendering engine hold true for Windows only: if IE5 Mac sees a doc-type, it will render to that doc-type. Or should... or at least seems to most of the time :)

Re:Web sites developed for MSIE

[kko]

It does not surprise me a bit to hear MS has created sites that are incompatible with everything else...
Nice monopolist tactics from the buttholes at Redmond....

Cookies

[crisco]

Someone mentioned it already, but it is definately the cookie settings. Try setting your cookies back to 'promiscuous mode' - allowing all the third party cookies and other funk that passport wants to send you. You can also change your browser identifier to Netscape and not get the warning screen. I always set my browser id back to Opera so that maybe it will show up in stats and they'll get the hint that designing to standards would work a little better for their site.

A dandy alternitive to hotmail's website.

[Yottabyte84]

A while ago I found a nifty perl script called 'gotmail [emu.id.au]' which logs onto hotmail and fetches your messages to your user mailbox or fowards them to another email account depending on your prefrence. I have it setup as a cron job, and it works very well. I don't know if it handles attachments, the docs don't say, and I haven't bothered to test it.

Hope this helps someone.

hmmmmmmmm

[jbridge21]

I have both Konqueror and Netscape working through a JunkBuster proxy with no problems; the proxy re-IDs the browsers as Konqueror.

I did have to enable lots of promiscuous cookies; for a full list of the servers you need to accept, reply to this comment.

Enough with these conspiracy theories

[hatless]

It goes without saying that this kind of behavior is expected from Microsoft, nevertheless, has anyone gotten Opera to work with Hotmail?

Oh, grow up. (You too, some of you other editors.) Not everything in this world is part of the great evil Microsoft master plan to crush Scandinavian software developers. The only web developers who even bother testing their sites with Opera at all are the ten or twelve of them who regularly use Opera themselves.

Netscape browsers now have a market share somewhere just north of 5% when the wind is blowing right--and that's the old 4.x Netscape. Mozilla and Netscape 6.x are statistically indistinguishable from zero once you leave Slashdot and Mozilla.org, which themselves aren't exactly big draws in the scheme of things.

Does Opera even account for one half of one percent of all web traffic to mainstream, general-interest web destinations like Yahoo, MSN, Amazon and so forth?

Microsoft isn't trying to sneakily shut out Opera users. They are trying to shut out users who block cookies, but that's to be expected from a web service like Hotmail that depends on ad and cross-marketing revenue for its existence. And they couldn't care less about Opera.

Netscape, however, is another story: with the ongoing antitrust action MS has to continue some degree of support for their browsers, even as they've become economically questionable to support. Just because 1/3 of Mac users (who make up 5% of web traffic) and 95% of desktop Unix/Linux users use Netscape doesn't mean those 2% of the whole are really worth spending development money on.

don't mean to be a karma whore but...

[blndcat]

on Opera's site there is a section called Problems with specific sites. Surprise surprise there is an entry for hotmail.

http://www.opera.com/support/supsearch/supsearch .c gi?options=index&name=604

It seems to be a javascript problem rather than cookies etc. and from the page:
>We are aware of this problem, and are trying to solve it

Lynx

[zerblat]

Strangely enough, Hotmail works fine with lynx (although it's a bit annoying). Of course you need SSL support and you have to accept all those invalid cookies. Also, when you get to a redirection link (http://lw9fd.law9.hotmail.msn.com/...&js=no) , you need to change the last part to js=yes (use shift-e to edit the link).

The new interface actually made things better for us lynx users; IIRC a lot more features (e.g. deleting mail) relied om JavaScript before but they don't anymore.

Not that I recomend using Hotmail with lynx (or using Hotmail at all) but if you're stuck with a Hotmail email address and computer illiterate friends, to whom email==hotmail, you can at least check you're email.

Gotmail is pretty cool too.