14 DAY TRIAL // Users that are experiencing problems with the new iteration of Windows Live Hotmail will need to first make sure that they are running a browser which is supported by the email client.
According to the Redmond company, Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 is designed to play nice with a range of browsers, but the latest iterations of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari have been favored over older releases.
To put it simply, end users need to make sure that they are running one of the latest stable browser releases from Microsoft, Mozilla, Google or Apple in order to make sure that they will come across no issues with the latest version of the Redmond company’s email service.
In addition, the software giant has warned users to steer clear of older releases of Firefox and Safari.
Apparently, customers still running Safari 3 or Firefox 2 will not be able to use Windows Live Wave 4 unless they will be willing to upgrade to more recent versions of the two browsers.
“If you are using Safari 3 or Firefox 2, please upgrade your browser to be able to use the New Hotmail,” the company warned.
Microsoft’s move not to offer support for older versions of Firefox and Safari is understandable, just as it is its focus on making sure that older and obsolete variants of Internet Explorer continue to be supported.
Of course, the software giant is doing nothing more than to ensure that the massive number of users still running IE6 for example are able to use Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4.
At the same time, IE6 continues to be supported by Microsoft as a part of Windows XP, and will be until 2014.
There is one notable absence from the list of Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 supported browsers which I have included below.
Users will be able to notice that Microsoft is not mentioning Opera as one of the browsers supported for the Wave 4 release of Windows Live Hotmail.
However, customers do have plenty of alternatives, including Chrome, Safari and Firefox, not only on Windows, but also on Mac OS X and Linux.
“These are the supported browsers in new Hotmail:
Internet Explorer 6.0+ on Windows Internet Explorer 6.x Internet Explorer 7.x Internet Explorer 8.x (Standards mode) Firefox 3.0+ on Windows and Macintosh Safari 4.0+ on Windows and Macintosh Chrome on Windows – latest major version,” Microsoft stated.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.8 and 4.0 Beta 3 are available for download here.
Chrome 5.0 Stable and 6.0 Dev are available for download here.
Opera 10.60 and 10.70 Build 3483 are available for download here.
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