Looks like Microsoft has got some dirty tricks up its sleeves and is working hard to cage its email service, Hotmail to work only with Microsoft systems. The news comes from Linux users who were earlier complaining on the messages they received for browser updates (despite using the Firefox 3.03 on Ubuntu 8.10 as well as Iceweasel browser users who couldn’t create an account) but later deprived of sending mails or signing up for a new account altogether. If Microsoft is looking forward to have users shift from Linux to use their service, then this is definitely the worst way.
[image thanks to Linux Watch]
I can report that as of yesterday, we could not create an e-mail in Hotmail from Firefox 3.0.3 on Kubuntu 8.04; the body field and text formatting tools were disabled.
Changing the user agent string to “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3″ (spoofing Firefox 3.0.3 on Windows XP) solved this problem.
What Microsoft fails to realize for some reason is that it is things like this that actually drive people FROM their services and products instead of to them.
[Reply]