Apple OS 9.x browser won't allow yahoo mail access??

Apple recently upgraded to a new OS and a friend of mine who hasn’t upgraded her OS (because her computer is old and it requires money to upgrade) suddenly can’t retrieve her web based yahoo email. This happened after Apple came out with their new 10.x OS.

She told me she called Apple and they told her it was because her browser is old (she uses firefox) and she can’t upgrade her browser unless she pays them for a new OS 10.x (she has OS 9.x)

I told her that most webmail is not OS or usually even browser dependent. She says other websites work, but Yahoo mail does not. Has Yahoo secretly colluded with Apple to make their email service incompatible with the older Firefox browser?

I suggested going to Firefox to see if they have a browser upgrade and they only have an upgrade that runs on the Apple 10.x OS!??

She uses SBC/Yahoo dsl to connect to the internet.

I have not seen her hardware in person (she has an old ibook), and I’m not an Apple user, but this situation sounds unfair. (fork over your money or else our system won’t work for you anymore!) She has not changed a thing on her system while all this was going on. She doesn’t want to pay $150 to upgrade because she’s getting conflicting opinions about whether OS 10 is going to work on her old ibook.

Any ideas what is going on here? Isn’t this the sort of scenario that everyone accuses Microsoft of carrying out?

Have her try the iCab browser from www.icab.de. It’s the only browser still in development for OS 9.

by the way, there is at least one webmail system I know of (Time-Warner cable’s “RoadRunner”) that IS browser dependent. It requires IE just to successfully click the “send” button.

I can see three things you might be complaining about, here:

1: Firefox and the other browsers not supporting OS9. This is a very reasonable business decision on Mozilla’s part: It takes time and effort to develop and support an operating system, and very few people use OS9 any more. So it’s probably not worth the effort.

2: Apple charging for the upgrade to OSX. Again, this is reasonable: They invested time and money into developing OSX; why shouldn’t they charge for it?

3: Yahoo not supporting old browsers. This complaint actually has merit to it, but it has nothing to do with the other two points. The Web is designed to be both backwards and forwards-compatible, and all webpages should be browser-independent (that is to say, they should function fully on any browser; it’s reasonable that a page might look better in some browsers than in others). Unfortunately, a great many pages don’t follow this paradigm, instead opting to go exclusively with glitzy, new-and-improved features that are supported by only a few browsers.

Mozilla and Apple are not at all at fault, here, so if you want to complain to someone, complain to Yahoo.

When did it break? Very recently?

Yahoo recently released a beta version of their new webmail interface. It has a lot of new features and would easily require support only provided in newer browsers. They’re pushing it pretty heavily, she might have accidentally turned it on. If she can log into another computer with a more recent browser she might be able to click the “Switch Back” link at the top of the screen to get back into the old mail system.

That is, if the old system still works with such an old browser.

If that’s the case I’d try iCab as Drewbert pointed out.

OS X came out in 2001. Not exactly recent.

This is not some evil conspiracy on Apple’s part.

First off, the upgrade to OS X is hardly recent. Mac OS 9 is seven years old - OS X has been around for over five years already. The developers of Firefox have made the very reasonable decision not to continue supporting a seven-year-old OS in their latest releases, and the developers of Yahoo’s mail service have made the decision to stop supporting the older versions of Firefox that still run on OS 9.

If you want to blame someone, blame Yahoo or Firefox. Apple has nothing to do with this.

But really, no one is at fault. Your friend’s computer is seven years old, and reaching the end of it’s useful life. Time for an upgrade.

It’s not strictly an OS 9 problem, as Yahoo only makes it’s pages compatible with a very limited number of applications on OS X as well. When I try to use Internet Explorer to read my Yahoo mail, it tells me it’s unsupported and that I should get a different browser. It’ll sort of let me sign in anyway, but frequently crashes. I also use Mozilla – probably an old version of it, but not all that old comparatively – and it still complains, and in fact won’t even let me see the Yahoo home page. I think it wants me to use Safari, which is all fine and good but my copy of Safari was so horribly corrupted about a year back that it doesn’t work at all, and trying to load it back in doesn’t work, and even reloading the OS didn’t help (I realize there’s probably a way to fix it for good, but I don’t care enough about it to spend the time).

Yahoo is definitely to blame here. I can’t figure out why they are coding things so peculiarly that only a small range of browser will work. Some companies don’t get the whole concept of what the Internet is supposed to be about.

Dan, your problem sound like a corrupt preferences file, and that would probably not be fixed by reinstalling Safari or the OS. Just delete the Safari preference file and see if that helps.

Cheers,
KF

Oh, she told me this OS10 thing just happened, I don’t keep up with things in the Apple world and thus had no idea the upgrade was 5 years old already!

The most likely explanation then, is that she somehow started using the new features on Yahoo and that’s why it’s not working. I’ll let her know about the “switch back” feature and the other browser suggested. Thanks.

Oh, and in reply to the comment about Apple not being at fault, why do the Apple people tell my friend it’s because she has an old OS? Even I, a non-Apple person, knew it should have nothing to do with Apple and the OS, unless there was something I didn’t know about the way Apple does business.

Except it does have something to do with the OS. If she had a new OS, she could install a new browser, which would be compatible with the new features Yahoo is using. Yes, there are other steps in this process, but the one which is relevant to Apple is the OS, so that’s what they tell her. If she had asked Netscape about it, they’d say that she needs a new browser.

It does have something to do with the OS. She can’t access Yahoo because no one still makes a modern browser for her out-of-date OS.

The new Yahoo is AJAX-heavy. AJAX is, from what I understand, a bunch of technologies that were only really brought together a year or so ago. An older browser is probably not compatible and may never be brought up to compliance with some of this new tech coming out.

Depending on your friend’s computer, it might not cost all that much to upgrade the hardware and software to handle new stuff. You can get older versions of OS X for less than the newest version (Tiger, aka v. 10.4.8). Other World Computing or Low End Mac offer hardware and software for older Macs.

Upgrading to OS X is very highly recommended, if the system can handle it acceptably well (memory, lots of it, is your friend here). I haven’t booted into OS 9, even on my 7 year old PowerBook, for almost a year, and that was just to play an older game that didn’t like Classic emulation. I played around with the old system for a while just to see what it was like and found that I definitely missed some features that just weren’t available in OS 9.