Getting Opera to Work with Hotmail? 17
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
Javascript and DHTML (Score:1)
maybe partially the cookies (Score:1)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Info here [pc-help.org].
Web sites developed for MSIE (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Web sites developed for MSIE (Score:2)
Re:Web sites developed for MSIE (Score:1)
Re:Web sites developed for MSIE (Score:1)
Nice monopolist tactics from the buttholes at Redmond....
Cookies (Score:2)
A dandy alternitive to hotmail's website. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hope this helps someone.
hmmmmmmmm (Score:2)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:1)
http://www.opera.com/support/supsearch/supsearc
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 (Score:1)
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.