Thursday, 14. August 2008, 12:09:14
funny, coding, hotmail
Hotmail's choice of class attribute for its HTML element if you use Opera to access it just strikes me as very funny.. The output of a
javascript:alert(document.documentElement.className)
command is:
That's right. In other words
<html class="Firefox FF_Win FF_M1 FF_D5 Opera">
Is that what you would call exquisite confusion?
Aside, I hope to have the basic Hotmail working again in Opera 9.2x before the end of the day. After all, what's an insulting class declaration to a browser from the proudly egalitarian Scandinavian peninsula? We're above class, for sure
Saturday, 5. April 2008, 13:46:23
browser.js, hotmail, compatibility, windows live
Once upon a time, there was only
one important free mail service. When I left Oslo University to go to London and knew I was going to loose my student address, this was where I went to get a new mailbox. And even a couple of years later, when I started working for Opera, bugs affecting
Hotmail were top-top-top priority. (Opera 7.51's bug 143675, "Opera deletes random messages from my Hotmail inbox" remains one of the scariest bugs I've analysed. Few bugs match that one in obvious and devastating violation of the user's trust.)
Well, how times have changed... A quick search of bugs filed for the respective services since GMail launched shows that there are roughly 3 times more GMail-bugs than Hotmail bugs in the bug tracker since 2004. Apparently, GMail's popularity has skyrocketed while Hotmail's has dropped, right?
Not so fast. Sometimes I see lists of E-mail addresses wherever random people register for newsletters or sign up for something in a reception. Technical people who tend to use Opera more frequently may lean heavily towards GMail, but among the general population Hotmail / Windows Live Mail is still a giant.
This is why I'm very glad to say that it should now be possible to use Hotmail's AJAXy interface with Opera 9.2x and 9.5. It's thanks to a sophisticated
browser.js patch from
David Bloom and an extra "spoof as Firefox" setting. If you're a Hotmail user, let me know how it works for you!
Monday, 23. August 2004, 09:32:30
websites, hotmail, compatibility
Today we'll have a backstage look at the coding of one of the most important sites out there: they don't come much bigger than MSN Hotmail..
Their junkmail "Block sender" settings screen does not work in Opera. You can add addresses but not submit the final result to actually save the setting, because clicking the "OK" button seems to do nothing.
There are two subtle differences in the code sent to IE and the code sent to Opera.
Firstly, IE gets this code for the OK button:
<input type="submit" class="A" name="OK.x" value=" OK ">while Opera gets
<input type="button" class="A" onClick="return buildAllLists();" name="OK.x" value=" OK ">In other words, IE gets a
submit button whose default action is to submit a form. Opera just gets a button. It will run some JavaScript when clicked and one might expect that the script, if run successfully, would submit the form. But no..
The JavaScript is also different from what IE gets. It contains an error that stops script execution.
The following line refers to the form element that contains blocked addresses. It is supposed to go through all items in the list.
i is a variable that points to the currently analysed item.
while (document.listsForm.destList.options.text != "")The problem is that when
i is increased, it will eventually be a higher number than there are items in the list and then cause an error because the script is trying to get the "text" content of an item that does not exist.
It should have been written
while (document.listsForm.destList.options && document.listsForm.destList.options.text != "")This is however not the only reason it doesn't work: even if I fix the error, it does not actually submit the form! There is nothing in the JavaScript to send the form off - it is obviously written to work with a "submit" button. The guys who wrote the JavaScript didn't communicate with those who wrote the HTML, and neither of them tested the result in Opera..
I've saved a snapshot of the page Opera gets to prove that it is so broken it won't even work in IE:
<
http://www.hallvord.com/opera/hotmailblock/>
Try to go there and click the "OK" button - you will get a scripting error. That's what we call "BAD": Broken As Designed.
WIDGETIZE