Search Engine Optimization News Blog

A recent update to Google’s browser Chrome managed to sidestep an issue with Hotmail. Hotmail had been barring the competitor’s browser from entering by checking the user agent. This is unfortunately not uncommon, and is implemented simply because some sites assume certain browsers can’t cope with their HTML/JavaScript/stylesheets. Chrome got around the block by implementing a change which makes it appear more like a Safari browser when encountering *.mail.live.com.

Google’s Matt Cutts spoke up on the 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.

Omar Shahine, who claimed he’s a Microsoft employee, came back with a rebuttal:

That’s a rather naive statement. You think that Hotmail is a web page and you expect a service with hundreds of millions of users and thousands of servers to stop what it’s doing, fix a bug for a browser that the majority of its customers do not use, and spin up an out of band release? We’ve already committed to addressing this issue in our next service release (already started to roll out to the site) which IMHO is an acceptable reaction.

Matt again:

The equivalent code on the Hotmail side would be if (user-agent == Chrome) { render_mode = Safari; } . Hotmail has had months to do this simple change and hasn’t.

Google’s Mark Larson weighed in on the Chrome update note, saying they’re deploying this new workaround “While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix”.

One can’t really make a blanket statement that Microsoft was sabotaging competition. It could be that they just have different priorities than making sure they are compatible with Google Chrome … although it has been pointed out that a similar problem with IE would likely have been fixed almost immediately. (What? Microsoft favoring their own product over Google‘s? You don‘t say!) .

Then again, it could be that Microsoft is simply committed to thorough testing for every new browser. Chrome does make use of rendering agent Webkit (which is also used in other browsers), but Microsoft may see enough differences to feel it warrants checking it in detail.