Hotmail and Firefox

I have not yet updated to Firefox 3 as I have heard of problems and people not being able to connect to the internet after downloading?

Yesterday Hotmail did a update and I can no longer write emails..I can enter 'To' and 'Title' but cannot write the text part of the email, the box is greyed out.

Has anyone else had this problem? ...would it help to update to Firefox 3 If not can anyone recommend another email which would work better with Linux? ...thanks

 

You can use Internet Explorer:
IEs 4 Linux - Internet Explorers for Linux
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux
Which requires wine
http://www.winehq.org/
Personally I stopped using hotmail and moved to gmail because things like this were always going on.

 

+1 on not being able to reply/write messages. I have used hotmail for 10 years now. Only the last two years have there been any kind of trouble with it. Maybe because they constantly try to "improve" it these days ? Why fix something that works ? I also moved to gmail,
but I have so many contacts and accounts everywhere that uses my hotmail account - and you know: Hotmail doesn't allow auto forwarding to other accounts than "their" own - so I am forced to go on using it... I'm about to give up this Linux adventure now. All these stupid issues every month or so... It's too time consuming.

 

Microsoft owns Hotmail so it is written to work with Microsofts browser.
"Why fix something that works?"
Well, it depends who the fix is for right...
It's not like Microsoft (or anyone) give you free email out of the goodness of their hearts.
Good luck with your return to Windows, though personally I've never found that any *less* time consuming

 

ahhh... you know, you're right... I'm sorry for letting off some steam here. Yes, Windows is even more time consuming, not to mention all the virus issues... Oh well.

 

Just sent a note from Hotmail using Firefox 3.03 under Ubuntu 8.10. No problem.

 

After worrying about possible headaches of installing FF3 and removing FF2 and dependencies etc. I ended up installing Opera in addition to FF2, and modifying the Hotmail desktop config file(webmail.desktop) and the main desktop icons config file, group-app.xml , to change the apps order to get the Hotmail shortcut as the second item in the 'Connect' group.

Hotmail entry in /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml
<app sequence="1">/usr/share/applications/edesktop/webmail.desktop</app>

/usr/share/applications/edesktop/webmail.desktop
Exec=opera http://www.hotmail.com

So I now have a link dedicated to opening Hotmail in Opera right there when starting the AA1 up, next to the FF icon.
I don't really use Hotmail myself but my wife does and it was very frustrating for her when she couldn't use it on the AA1, all happy now though and the Opera install was easy and totally trouble free.

 

I was also having the problem with Hotmail not working, googled and followed the instructions at:

http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/07/inst ... e-one.html

Now running Firefox 3 with no problems, no noticable decrease in speed from the optimised FF2, Hotmail and everything else working ok.

 

Microsoft intentionally busted the thing so that Linux users running Firefox 2 can't write emails. Here's the fix:

1) in address field enter: about:config
2) In the line: general.useragent.vendor
... change the value from "Fedora" to: Firefox

Cheers.

 

RBIL,

I was having the exact same problem with Hotmail's web mail that everyone else here was having. I followed your little tip about changing the config name from Fedora to Firefox and it worked great. Very simple and easy. Thanks!

On a side note, is there something in that whole list of config values that will let me activate Firefox's update feature? I actually like using Firefox 2, but I'd like to be able to upgrade to the latest version (2.0.17 or whatever it is) and when I click "Help", the "check for updates" option is grayed out. Is there a remedy for this? Also, since I'm not upgrading to Firefox 3, but rather upgrading version 2, will that bust any of the Acer software? I don't know if that makes sense, but hopefully there's an easy answer for this. Thanks!

 

Slow response here, I had the same problem but fixed it with this post:

viewtopic.php?f=31&t=1256&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=desktop+script

Depends how adventurous you're feeling as his script changes lots of things, overall well worth it I think.

Oh, and Hotmail works fine (until MS change things again!). Hope the link works, not totally sure what I'm doing.

 

rbil: A big thankyou from me and my sister - we can now return to emailing!!

Thanks

 

Firefox 3 is really *very* solid these days and there are more and more extensions that do not work well with FF2.x. Back up your entire Mozilla directory (if you are paranoid), make a note of your extensions, uninstall FF2 and give Firefox 3 a try. I am 97% sure that you will be happy that you did. You might also enjoy working with Google Chrome as well for certain tasks, just install it as you would any other program and decline to set it as your default browser. We have to use all these Gigabytes for something.

 

I'm too scared to mess about with set up as I am useless with the techi side of puters

After swopping to Gmail, just checked Hotmail out of curiosity and it seems it now works ok :roll: ...think I'll stick with Gmail though