Closed Bug 471184 Opened 16 years ago Closed 13 years ago

mail.live.com / hotmail.com - Dropdown menus do not work on mozilla-central (trunk) builds

Categories

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: wgianopoulos, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

None of the dropdown menus operate correctly in the entire Windows Live website using the current trunk builds.  However, if you use User Agent Switcher extension to change the user agent string to match the Apple Safari string then the menus works correctly.

Therefore, the issue would seem to be that the Mozilla specific code on the website does not work with the current Mozilla trunk, although it does work with previous Mozilla versions.
can confirm this.
Bad sniffing per comment 0.

If Microsoft wants to *block* prerelease versions with an explanation as to why, that's one thing, but simply feeding them broken code because they don't understand that particular user-agent string is just silly.
Blocks: geckoisgecko
Summary: Dropdown menus on hotmail (mail.live.com) do not work on mozilla-central → mail.live.com / hotmail.com - Dropdown menus do not work on mozilla-central (trunk) builds
(In reply to comment #2)
> Bad sniffing per comment 0.
> 
> If Microsoft wants to *block* prerelease versions with an explanation as to
> why, that's one thing, but simply feeding them broken code because they don't
> understand that particular user-agent string is just silly.

Perhaps my original comment was not clear enough.  The issue is NOT that Microsoft is doing anything different for prerelease fersions of Mozilla browsers than it is doing for released versions.

The issue is that they are still clinging to the model of testing for browser "A" and if it it is using browser "A" only functionality to permrom the function, then testing for browser "B" and using browser "B" only functionality etc.

The whole point of the Web Standards Project is that such tests and browser specific code should not be necessary and the target should be to eliminate it wherever possible.

The mail.live.com site currently has some Mozilla browser only code that is dependent on Mozilla only functionality that currently does not work in the 3.1 and later codebase (although bug 462428 might end up changing this so that this code works once again).  However, the code the site uses for Safari browsers works with Firefox 2.0 through the current 3.2a1pre trunk builds.  It would seem that this code is more standards based and not browser specific.

Why continue to support 3 sets of code for a website when 2 will do?

Additionally, from Microsoft's point of view, it is much better form a marketing point of view to be able to say that in support of Microsoft's support of Web Standards, or site works with any standard compliant browser, than to go with the current approach, which certainly looks more like an admission that Firefox is taking over a significant enough portion of the Windows browser market that Firefox support in Hotmail is a requirement and also that Apple has enough market share so that Safari support is similarly a requirement.
Fixed with the patch from Bug 462428 [Regression preventing Minefield from working with latest Hotmail upgrade]. (works for me in any case)
Dropdowns have been fixed indeed as comment 4 mentions, but Hotmail is still not usable in Firefox beta/nightlies due to bad browser detection. The message's body textarea is not active if the UA doesn't include "Firefox".
INCOMPLETE due to lack of activity since the end of 2009.

If someone is willing to investigate the issues raised in this bug to determine whether they still exist, *and* work with the site in question to fix any existing issues, please feel free to re-open and assign to yourself.

Sorry for the bugspam; filter on "NO MORE PRE-2010 TE BUGS" to remove.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 13 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
This was an old bug caused by Microsoft UI sniffing and doing odd things if it determined the browser was Firefox that only worked with Firefox version 2.x.  Closing it at this point is probably just fine.
Product: Tech Evangelism → Tech Evangelism Graveyard
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