Windows Live™ Mail Beta stiffs Linux users.

2006-12-27T13:44:00.000-08:00

So, I'm lame. I have a Hotmail account. But, before you execute me for my lameness I must confess sins of Microsoft as well.

I logged into my hotmail account on my Powerbook G4 (Look ma, it's OSX!) and get a little invitation to try out the Beta of Windows Live Mail. Seeing as how the regular hotmail.com email sucks I figured it couldn't get any worse. Deciding I would tempt fate, I moved my account over to the new Live Mail Beta. Guess what? I'm totally underwhelmed. The new Yahoo mail is way cooler. Oh well, at least they bumped my space up to 2Gb.

So, I go downstairs to my Linux PC later that night and log in again. The suckiness got turned up big time. Then I notice this:

"This version works better with your browser. The full version of Mail runs on Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher (make sure you check the system requirements before you install it). The full version also works on Firefox 1.5."

That's good to know, thanks for sharing. Too bad I'm using Firefox v1.5 in Linux and on my Mac, so what gives? I figured Microsoft is tipping the table away from Linux once again, so I set out to prove that is indeed the case. Please, feel free to play along. All you need is Firefox and a user agent switching plugin. I used User Agent Switcher.

If you already have a hotmail account, or you have a new beta account try this:

If you are using Linux try changing your user agent to:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061025 Firefox/1.5.0.8

Then log into hotmail.com. You should see the full version in all of it's glory.

If you are using Windows or a Mac and you already get the Windows Live Mail in it's full version, try changing your user agent to this:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20061027 Fedora/1.5.0.7-8.fc6 Firefox/1.5.0.7

Then try logging into hotmail.com. What do you get? The watered down, super lame and crappy "lite" version. Congratulations you dirty Linux user, you get stiffed. I wonder how Novell feels about this?

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I didn't recover more than one lame point out of the enormous deficit that I've accrued for just having a hotmail account, but that's ok. Someone's got to be lame, it might as well be me.

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Windows Live™ Mail Beta stiffs Linux users.