Well, I moved on from hotmail and made Gmail my primary email a while back. I guess something I should have just done when Gmail came out x years ago, but I liked some of the features of hotmail such as the calendar, etc. initially and just stuck with it because I was lazy and didn’t feel like I had to follow the bandwagon. But due to the frustrations of hotmail not working worth a sh** in FireFox, my primary browser and the fact that you can’t use it on IPhone finally just ticked me off to the point of migrating my last x years worth of emails (the ones I wanted to keep) and forwarded them over to my Gmail account which I’ve had also for a few years. Thing is, I actually organize the email I want to keep. You don’t see my inbox 1000+ emails, as I can’t stand that mess. You see about 20 folders nicely organizing order receipts, membership emails, you name it…the ones I really want to keep on hand all nice and organized. The search functionality is great but it doesn’t replace organization of your emails.
With that, I noticed I think last week or so that hotmail upgraded their UI again. What I noticed most is that hey, I can now actually use it in FireFox without a problem! Wow…about damn time MS. Now I can click the checkbox next to my email without the checkbox unchecking itself again. Yep, and I am not joking. That’s what happened in the past on every machine I was running the latest Firefox in with hotmail opened in it. So I always had to use IE when I wanted to access my hotmail in the past instead of Firefox. What a pain but not surprising.
Like most good/seasoned developers, we mainly use Firefox. I guess I mean the good developers because we know it has a ton of invaluable developer tool plug-ins and the browser is just better. And if you know a developer is smart enough to use FireFox, then he’s at least up with what’s going on to some degree. If you love IE that’s fine and I’m not trying to put those people down, but if you love IE just because you haven’t tried firefox and its tools, then not cool. That doesn’t go to say that sure, we have to use IE for testing for those companies whereas you’re mainly programming for users that only use IE. But I think today, that’s pretty unrealistic to say that you only code against IE even if you’re coding against an internal website in your company. You should always test against both. The fact is, FireFox is pretty popular, even with some non-developers out there (marketing, etc.). So why not test for both?
I once had a manager in a previous job ask me “hmm using Firefox, why would you ever have that? We use IE here”. Then I knew I was certainly in a mom & pop type development shop. Ok fair enough in terms of testing internal apps if that’s what your users are told to use. But on the contrary, that’s just a really dumb statement. Oh really? Like I don’t test in IE and because supposedly I’m using FireFox on my machine, so the assumption is to this manager that must be testing everything in Firefox only when I develop. Just a really dumb statement to make especially if you’re a manager… showing the inexperience of a manager who supposedly was to know something about development. But obviously this manager also did not know anything about development since probably a good 50%+ of developers out there use FireFox for debugging their code (JavaScript, requests over the wire and much more) as well as just use it as their primary browser for general browsing of all things. And I think it’s funny people still think IE is the only browser on the planet especially when you’re dealing with developers who use browser plug-ins as test tools. Well, not all managers have worked with good coders or in good development shops I guess is my conclusion on that one.
With that said, here’s how hotmail UI now looks in Firefox. I still use hotmail because unfortunately, I have many memberships tied to that email address. But finally, I’m not forced to open IE just so hotmail works well or somewhat “normal”. I guess I have to say thanks MS, because it was truly a pain in the ass previously.
Print | posted on Saturday, November 15, 2008 7:42 PM
