Saturday, August 25, 2007

Windows Live Hotmail and Firefox Adblock add-on

Few days back there was a query put up by a member at merawindows forum, asking about not able to open the compose or reply to a message window in the full version of Windows Live Hotmail in FireFox. And he had posted a screenshot also. Then, while replying, I was able to identify the cause as one of the addon, adblocker causing this.
Today this problem and its solution was officially posted at the Windows Live Hotmail team Blog.

August 24

Disable Firefox Adblock for Hotmail or switch to the classic version

We’ve had some reports on the blog, and our QA team has confirmed that having the Firefox Adblock add-on enabled for the Hotmail site can make it impossible to compose or reply to a message in the full version. This does not affect Internet Explorer users or Firefox users who do not have the Adblock add-on. Depending on which Adblock filters you’ve created, you may or may not be affected.

The Hotmail team does cross-browser testing, including full Firefox testing – it’s important to us that you can get to your e-mail from anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to test every browser add-on, so sometimes things break, and thanks for your prompt reports of this problem!

While we do not condone suppression of advertising in our product (advertising does fund our product) we realize that users who have enabled this add-on may not understand why Hotmail stopped working.

We’re working how to mitigate this problem in a future release. In the meantime, if you’re having problems composing or replying in Firefox, you have two options:

  1. Disable Adblock for Hotmail. You could also try tweaking your filters, but the foolproof method is to go to Tools --> Adblock --> and select “Whitelist this whole site.”
  2. Switch to the classic version. This means clicking the “Switch to classic” link that you see in the lower left corner.

- Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager


Thanks for this official information. Those facing such a problem can check up this tip.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you pls post an article on how to configure Outlook 2007 with aero.vista account. Is the feature available as yet. Because the outlook Wizard fails to configure it
Thanks
Steven

Vasudev said...

Please check the post : http://vasudevg.blogspot.com/2007/08/configuring-outlook-2007-using-outlook.html
for configuring Outlook 2007 with custom domain as @vista.aero.

OuT said...

on my computer, I resolved the problem by removing this filter from my Adblock list:

http://ads1.msn.com/

to compensate, I've added these 2 filters (no problem stated for now):

http://*.ads1.msn.com/
http://*.rad.live.com/

regards, OuT