The New Hotmail and Web Browsers

Dec 02, 2003 11:01 AM
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Microsoft has released a new version of their Hotmail service.

The good: It looks great.

The bad: They use garbage HTML. Example: <td><font class="G">|</font></td>. So much for best practices. Also, logging in does not put you into your inbox. There is an intervening "Today" page of little use. The up/down arrows for previous/next message are unintuitive.

The ugly: The most important links are JavaScript. This means that you can't open your messages in tabs (in Firebird, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera or Safari) and you can't open them in a new window in any browser. You have to plod through your messages one at a time.


Comments: The New Hotmail and Web Browsers

It's probably because all that ASP.NET crap uses JavaScript all over the place in order to make every (useful) click actually perform a POST operation. They pass around a serialized page object in a hidden form field called __VIEWSTATE. It's useful from a developer's perspective and can save a lot of time and reduce bugs, but yes it barfs all over usability.

But I just pulled that out of my ass, I don't use hotmail, so I have no idea if they're using viewstate or not.

Posted by: Bob Ippolito on December 2, 2003 11:43 AM | permalink

Ever since the newer version of hotmail, I haven't been able to open www.hotmail.com. I even upgraded to IE 6 - I use Windows 98, and there seems to be no way I can continue using hotmail on this machine.

Posted by: Shakuntal on December 26, 2003 6:19 PM | permalink

No more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.