5 Responses to “Windows Live Mail: Hotmail revamped”

1. Brady J. Frey says:
   January 27th, 2006 at 4:25 am

   Looks uninspired to me, though I like to see a 3 column view on webmail. I’ll stick to http://www.roundcube.net/ and my own server, atleast I can style it how I want:).

   I will say, a good improvement over the old, but MS designs have always been one step behind the rest of the market.

2. microChasm says:
   January 27th, 2006 at 6:45 am

   It doesn’t work yet in Safari in MacOSX but it says they are working on it. I’ve also tried Firefox , Opera and I see the same behavior, but they state they are working on compatibility.

   Here’s the message:
   “Is something missing? Sorry, we?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re not yet done building all Mail Beta functionality for this browser. Learn more”

   “Is something missing? Read this.
   We just started building this version of the Mail Beta that works for all browsers. We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re not done yet, so some functionality is missing right now. You can read your mail right now by clicking on the Inbox.

   Note that the web browser you are using does not yet support all Mail Beta functionality. You can still use this browser to access basic Mail Beta functionality, like reading and composing messages. We will make more functionality available for this web browser soon.”

3. Tim says:
   January 27th, 2006 at 7:14 am

   Yeah, the “propriety” thing is a drag. I was offered an invitation to the beta test.

   I was grumpy when I discovered that I couldn’t complete the signup process in Safari. When I switched to Firefox and found the same problem, I gave up.

   Still, Apple is not immune from the same thing - see the current furore about photocasting or read the spray that Chris Clark delivers to Apple over the same issue - http://decaffeinated.org/archives/2006/01/26/iphoto6preferences3

4. Brady J. Frey says:
   January 27th, 2006 at 7:21 am

   Apple has their issues on Safari, namely because of their lack of XML, SVG, and some Javascript support (it’s why some graphical editors don’t fly in Safari) — but that’s something we know is improving — but they DO have much advancements in their CSS support.

   Opera has it’s bugs, but mostly rendering, same for Firefox — in the end, there’s no reason why this SHOULDN’T work in these alternative browsers save the arguable fact that these web developers are inexperienced in standards… and there’s no excuse for that anymore. As many of us have argued, you aren’t a professional in this industry if you aren’t doing it right.

   I put Safari on debug, and faked that I was IE — there’s lots of crap proprietary code in that — you can do the same for Opera, though you don’t have to turn any debug on.

   But you’re right, Apple has it’s moments — though we can argue that RSS is not a standard fully supported, yet, and Apple had to grow. XHTML/HTML, CSS and Javascript are well docuemented standards, and there’s no excuse but pure laziness on Microsofts part for not doing it right the first time; we expected that, though, since IE 7 is only a bug fix, not an upgrade in standards. Apple, on the other hand, while behind, as made great strides and has upgraded their browser multiple times this year to catch up — can’t say that much in IE 6, with the lack of any real upgrade non-security based for the past 5 years.

5. Tim says:
   January 27th, 2006 at 7:34 am

   Good tip! I should have thought of faking the user agent.

   Maybe I was just too willing to be grumpy with Microsoft! ;-)

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