Some of you may know that I've been using a laptop running Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (used to be 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) for a while now in addition to my Windows Vista x64 desktop. Well, something interesting happened today that really got my blood boiling.
Jennie uses the laptop all the time too. At first she hated it because it was a little bit different than Windows (actually it was more about the difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Office and OpenOffice than it was about the actual OS), but she got used to it and generally doesn't have any issues she tells me about.
Well today she told me that she couldn't send any e-mail from her Hotmail account. Hotmail, of course, is owned by Microsoft. She tells me she usually doesn't try to send e-mail from the laptop so she's not sure if it's always been a problem. Wondering what she's talking about regarding not being able to send e-mail, I check it out. Well, the whole field where you type the body is completely disabled. You simply can't put your cursor there. There are also some controls at the top where you can change the font and mess with other formatting that are disabled.
I was like, "This is weird." I thought maybe it was something stupid and rebooted the laptop, which is something I rarely do since I usually just suspend it. But after it came back from the reboot, it was still the same. The laptop uses Firefox 3.0.3. I have 3.0.4 on the Vista desktop, so I tried Hotmail on the Vista computer with Firefox. It worked fine. I'm like, "Hmm... maybe it's a Fx 3.0.3 bug," so I tried Hotmail on a virtual machine I have running Windows XP that is still on Firefox 3.0.3. It too worked fine.
I got to thinking... you know what? What if Microsoft is, in a way, punishing us for using a non-Microsoft OS? I wouldn't put it past them. After all, similar types of behavior are what turned me on to Linux in the first place.
On the laptop, the Firefox user agent is currently
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092510 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.3. I decided to test something. I found a user agent switcher add-on for Firefox, and I pulled the user agent out of the XP virtual machine's Firefox and changed my user agent on the laptop to
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3, essentially telling websites that I was running Firefox 3.0.3 on Windows XP even though I was really on Kubuntu. Then I refreshed the page. Voila! The text formatting tools and body field were enabled!
Nothing is different. I am still running Firefox 3.0.3 on Kubuntu 8.0.4 with the same plugins and extensions as before, the only difference being that I'm telling Hotmail (Microsoft) that I'm using Windows XP instead of (K)ubuntu. The rendering engine is identical on both operating systems and the user agent switch proves that my setup can handle Hotmail properly. Microsoft is basically blocking us simply because we are using Linux (or because we aren't using Windows). It's completely ridiculous.
Here's screenshots to prove it. Note the toolbar for the formatting above the body field with the Linux user agent vs. the Windows one.
Hotmail on Firefox with Linux user agentHotmail on Firefox with Windows user agent
