Google fakes out Hotmail for Chrome support
Google has added a patch to its latest beta and stable versions of Chrome to make the browser work better with Microsoft's Hotmail site.
With the patch, Chrome tells Microsoft's site it's actually Apple's Safari browser, sidestepping a compatibility issue that had caused problems using the site. "While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we're deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com," Chrome Product Manager Mark Larson said on a blog announcement. It also fixes a problem sending mail from Yahoo Mail, he said.
The patch is in Chrome 1.0.154.46, which also fixes a severe security problem.
Matt Cutts, Google's chief Web spam fighter and a high-profile company blogger, was less delicate about the Hotmail issue. "Normally you think of web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and speed of iteration matter," he said in an online comment about the matter.
