Mozilla Seamonkey - Hotmail Problems

[bevills1]

Recently I began having problems with Hotmail in Seamonkey. The first problem was noticed about a week ago which was that I was unable to compose new email because I was unable to get the cursor to appear in the text field and could therefore not compose the body of any message. The second problem began a couple of days ago which was Hotmail goes to the compose new message page about 5 seconds after opening Hotmail which makes it impossible to even read messages or do anything else. No such problems occur using IE7 which is what I must use now for all Hotmail use. I tried changing password, but the problem persists for using Hotmail in Seamonkey. Has anybody experienced similar problems or know a possible fix?

[El Heggunte]

Probably the ACTUAL problem is in Hotmail itself, not in Seamonkey.

Some months ago, "all of a sudden" I could not use Opera for uploading to my Skydrive folder anymore.

Evidently, Microsoft will keep doing anything to "convince" everybody to use Internet Exploder.

[jman98]

Although I think El Heggunte could be right, I suggest you try some testing to see. Try using Firefox and Chrome. It would be interesting to know if they have similar problems. If so, then Hotmail may indeed be deliberately behaving badly with non-IE browsers. However, if Firefox and Chrome work OK, this might be a SeaMonkey issue. I believe SeaMonkey has its own code base and this could be a problem specific to that.

This is not what you want to hear, but given Microsoft's history of not playing nicely with non-Microsoft products, you might want to consider that it might be best to get a Gmail and/or Yahoo account and use those instead. Yahoo sometimes has availability issues but I wouldn't in good conscience advise anyone to get a Hotmail account. I know you'll say that "too many people" already know your old Hotmail address to change, but it's not as hard as you think. A few years ago I had an account that a friend who used to run a small ISP hosted for me for free and his mail server died and never got repaired. It was free so there wasn't much I could do about it. I started using my Yahoo account and told my friends and family to start using that. I can only think of maybe 1 or 2 people who I wasn't able to contact to tell but life goes on.

[jimdagys]

I always use Firefox and never had a problem using Hotmail or Skydrive. I think it is pretty nifty to be able to store so much for free. Out of sight, out of mind. I use Skydrive as one of my file backup methods. I have a whole 900MB movie stored there (use Winwar to chop the file into the required 200mb pieces).

[Ai Haibara]

Do you have any extensions like NoScript, Adblock Plus, etc. installed? To be sure, you can try running Seamonkey in safe mode (relatively recent versions of Seamonkey should allow you to restart in safe mode through Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled), and see if the problem still happens, there.

Or, if all else fails, try one of the extensions that allows you to change the useragent string, and see if pretending you're using Internet Explorer changes anything.

jman98: Actually, Seamonkey isn't that far from the Firefox codebase, these days. It also means SM tends to require a lot more memory/resources than it used to, unfortunately. (I normally use Firefox, but also use Seamonkey on my Linux tower.)

[bevills1]

I already have Gmail and Yahoo accounts with no problems in either of them. Somebody suggested I delete cookies and clear cache in Seamonkey after which I now get "XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: </div>.
Location: https://snt114.mail.live.com/mail/home.mvc?n=1440596015
Line Number 308, Column 7:" after restarting Mozilla and logging into Hotmail. I even tried logging in via http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/hotmail/home to be sure nothing's wrong with my Hotmail link in Bookmarks.

[jman98]

I don't keep up with Opera any more, but if you can get it for free it might be interesting to install it and try to use it. Opera has a feature where it can send an ID string to pretend to be another browser and it would be very interesting to see if logging in with Opera set to pretend to be IE works and fails when it says it's Opera. I don't know of any way to do this in Firefox or Seamonkey, but if there is a way to do it with those then you should definitely try it.

[bevills1]

Downloaded and installed latest Seamonkey version which fixed the problems that indicates the version that was running was the source of problems.