19 March 2008

Annoying Horizontal White Lines in Hotmail


When using Hotmail in Firefox I get annoying horizontal white lines running across my e-mail messages. To get rid of them I have to use my mouse to highly the text. It is annoying because I always have to do this to make the text readable.

I have researched the problem using Google and it seems as if I am not the only one experiencing the problem. The only way I can fix it at the moment is to use Internet Explorer instead. I have both IE and Firefox installed on the my computer.

Bill Gates may be a great humanitarian, but to me Microsoft comes across as highly dishonorable. The first e-mail address I ever got was one from Microsoft's Hotmail. It was good but when Google introduced Gmail, I switched over to Gmail because it had much better features, such as archives. However, I couldn't stop using Hotmail because I had already told so many people that I used my Hotmail account and because Hotmail didn't allow me to automatically forward my e-mail to Gmail. This inability to auto-forward is clearly an attempt by Microsoft to lock customers into their products so they can milk more advertising revenue from us. I am turning into a conspiracy theorists here, but the annoying white horizontal lines may be attempt by Microsoft to keep users using Internet Explorer.

While such behavior may make business sense from a short-term profit-maximizing perspective, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Gmail allows anyone to auto-forward their e-mail, and this I think may be a signal of confidence within Google that they believe that their product is so good that customers will not leave even if they have the option to.

7 comments:

Chris Gummer said...

You can use the IETab plugin for Firefox to run an internet explorer tab in firefox. Saves you having to opening an IE window.

Anonymous said...

I think it is Microsoft doing it on purpose; in Safari for the mac Hotmail won't even load!

Anonymous said...

It's a rendering bug in Firefox, because if you scroll the text off the top of the screen and then back down, the lines are gone. It must be caused by a rendering issue when the text scrolls onto the bottom of the visible pane.

Regarding microsoft tying you in to hotmail, I think you should be grateful for the fact that you've had a free to use and fairly consistent email service for so many years, rather than conjuring up conspiracies.

I'm no great fan of microsoft, and am an avid firefox user, but I don't think they're the source of all evil as seems to be the opinion of many bloggers these days.

asnorey said...

Firefox-induced or Hotmail-induced?
That's the question which now remains to be answered regarding this strange "white lines bug", which notoriously *only* shows when a Hotmail account is accesed in Firefox.

...and to "Anonymous":

Regarding the relationship between Hotmail and its users, it is Hotmail who has to be grateful to all the people who were (and that includes me) lazy enough to support this business model for so many years.
It is relatively easy for an IT company to offer a free Email service... compared to the task of millions of people choosing to keep being loyal to it!
And in the end, it is the users who, by means of their *free* choice, can make the difference between a company earning or not earning gazillions of dollars revenue from a free Email service.

But "Evil" or "conspiracies" are things that play no major role here; these cathwords just distract the attention from the facts being discussed.

Anonymous said...

Look here for a fix. after u install, click on the bottom right corner of FF..

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3166728#3166728

firefox could encode the style to fit hotmail, or hotmail could encode their pages to suite firefox n others..

it's like "he said, she said.."

we get what we paid for.. (hotmail and firefox..)

Anonymous said...

There's a relatively simple and painless way to stop it altogether - switch back to the classic version of Hotmail. Firefox only acts up with the newer, "faster" version.

Granted, the classic version of Hotmail slows things down a bit... but it makes reading emails a bit easier.

Nu Order Webs said...

Simple way of solving this is to add style="display:block;" to all images on your HTML email.