Just wanted to see if I was the only one left standing who checked my Hotmail in a desktop web browser - I don’t have any version of the Outlook app installed, so I just go to Hotmail.com and log in there, generally using Firefox.
It’s become painfully slow doing absolutely everything, including typing an email. I’m not that fast a typist, but in Hotmail I must use one finger to type each key and wait for the next letter to show up on the screen. It also developed the nasty habit of reliably sending new emails to the Drafts folder as I work on them, clearing my screen and making me go fetch the email in progress from Drafts again and again. It behaves as if there’s something very wrong with my computer, but it’s really fine in every other aspect, and yes I do re-start from time to time.
One of the Microsoft tech forum hosts said use Edge, and lo and behold, that’s fixed the problem. It works just fine in Edge, though I’m not too sure if I want to trust that browser, and there are some inconveniences of viewing email in a separate application than my normal web browser.
I wonder why Microsoft decided to stop playing nice with Firefox…
Separate question, do people use Edge? Is it good, is it safe? Should I just switch my whole business to it, and stop using Firefox?
My mother does. I set her up with a hotmail account back in '96-'97 or so, and that’s the account she still uses.
She still does web based mail, and has used whatever offering the Microsoft installed on her computer at the time, Explorer and now Edge.
Personally I dislike Edge, but I haven’t used it enough to have an opinion on its web browsing. Pretty much just for PDFs on computers that I haven’t installed Adobe Reader on. But it does seem to load slowly, and do everything else slowly as well.
I do. I use it (web based) for my ‘trash/spam/commercial’ email address.
I too have noticed it’s been pretty slow over the past few months, but I had attributed that to FireFox, which is taking f. . . o . . . r. . . e. . . v. . . e. . . r. . . to load on my home desktop anymore. Interesting to hear I’m not alone.
I specifically do not use any Outlook apps on my desktop. Same with Edge. Less crap to load/spy on me on a 2016 Windows 10 ‘Model T’ of a desktop. I’m also wildly against Microsoft forcibly pushing software onto my computer for sales purposes (as opposed to updates to the OS).
Tripler
It’s still a good workhorse of a computer–as evidenced by this post.
Some time ago Microsoft quit supporting its version of Edge that used the Microsoft proprietary rendering engine. The version of Edge currently being distributed uses the Chromium rendering engine (and Microsoft now has a huge number of check ins to the Chromium project.) Browser bench testing tends to show that the variance in performance between the various Chromium browsers is fairly small, which is not surprising–the core rendering engine is where the lion’s share of performance in loading html and javascript content happens.
Edge and Google Chrome both have the same trust issues in that they are promoted by major tech companies for their own ends, not yours. I trust Microsoft a small, almost imperceptible amount more than Google simply because Google monetizes my data more as a core part of its business than Microsoft does, but there is not much sunlight between the two.
I am unaware of Hotmail existing as a web product, and any attempt I make to visit hotmail.com on any browser simply redirects to the outlook.com web application home page. AFAIK if you had a legacy hotmail.com account before it was all combined, you get to keep it, but the actual Hotmail web app, as best I can tell, no longer exists.
I noticed no meaningful performance difference testing the Outlook web app (which I assume is what OP is using) on Edge vs Firefox. Often times browser extensions will have a significant impact on browser performance, so it could be you have one of those running that interacts badly with outlook.com. A common issue these days is if you run any of the various privacy extensions like Ghostery, uBlock et al., it can cause some issues and degraded performance on some websites (and the site creators don’t care since they don’t want you using those tools anyway.)
I still have my 23 years old Hotmail address as my main email account and use it (actually, outlook.com as already mentioned) mainly in Chrome on Windows, without any problems or delays. I also use the Outlook app on my Android phone and am content with it.
My only beef with the outlook.com interface: it doesn’t use the Chrome spellchecker, but its own proprietary spellchecker. I often switch between German and English and to change the language for the Chrome spellchecker is trivially easily done with two clicks, but on outlook.com it’s deeply buried in some submenu and always a hassle to do.
Yes, visiting hotmail.com now redirects to https://outlook.live.com/owa/. This redirect started several years ago, and at the same time it started making me enter my full email address including @hotmail.com whereas before, you could leave that part off. I’ve never been clear on the differences between Hotmail (web-based) and Outlook (web-based), if any. I didn’t notice any other change at the time of the transition from Hotmail to Outlook, besides the login requirement to use @hotmail.com.
I do indeed use ad-blocker extensions all over the place in Firefox. Perhaps outlook.com is fed up with that, and is breaking the interface on purpose to force me to unblock ads in Firefox.
Speaking of which – the adblocking doesn’t actually fully work, even in Firefox. There are still ads in the right panel. This is much, much worse when I use Chrome for Hotmail/Outlook, which I must do on the work computer. The ads there are almost always animated.
Opera, huh? How is it for general web browsing? I’ve used Firefox forever and love it well enough, but if it’s unusable for Hotmail/Outlook I might as well switch to another browser full-time. I do want to be able to use the same browser for email and everything else, and my main priorities are security and taming the ads, especially animated ones.
“What is the best web browser” is a self-hijack, though. I’ll check the other threads.
So hotmail used to be a web mail service that was its own thing, Microsoft bought it a long time ago, and it used to be the regular web mail service just continued to work, over the years Microsoft steadily integrated it with their “Live” email service. I.e. emailaddress@live.com, that service was rebanded “Outlook.com”, and now I think the “default” @ domain if you sign up for a Microsoft email account is @outlook.com, but the old accounts that had different email domains like hotmail, live et al. still exist as logins to the system since Microsoft doesn’t want to make it someone’s long used email address quits working.
Basically Microsoft still maintains the old domains and offers email services through them (live.com, hotmail.com, I think msn.com may be another), but the “web application” that lets you access them through web mail is “Outlook.com.”
A common tactic I see on many websites is they will have “waits” and “retries” if ad content is not loading (which it may not be loading because of an ad blocker), so this will make the site perform slower because it is continually retrying until it entirely gives up. Some sites go further and actually make it so if they don’t detect the ad content in the rendered page, they break/obscure the “content” of the site. For just about every site I can find ways to bypass all of this since at the end of the day you do control the browser as it runs locally on your machine, but some websites are annoying enough I just concede and disable ad blocking on them.
My non-personal email address is a @hotmail.com address. I normally have all of it forwarded to my Gmail account. But if an expected message doesn’t arrive, I do occasionally check my account on hotmail.com (which does indeed redirect me to live.outlook.com).
I do not have any problems with it, even though I used an adblocker. My question to the OP: Which adblocker do you use?
I always recommend uBlock Origin to everyone. It’s lightweight, and focused removing ads without breaking things. It is actively developed and sites that find workaround get fixed pretty quickly. Plus it has a discussion on reddit.com/r/ublockorigin where people will give you workarounds until the fix comes in.
I’ve got AdBlocker Ultimate (Firefox extension). I will happily take your recommendation of uBlock Origin, thank you. Any conflict with Ghostery, which I also have as a Firefox extension, or should I remove Ghostery as well as removing AdBlocker Ultimate before installing uBlock?
By the way, I’ve been using Edge all day just for Hotmail, and it is working like an absolute dream. I’m actually catching up with email after weeks of frustration. But whether I want to use Edge as my primary browser is a different question.
I am unaware of any complications with keeping Ghostery running. However, uBlock’s Privacy and EasyPrivacy filters (which you may need to enable in the settings) do largely make it redundant to use both . I’d suggest just disabling Ghostery and seeing if uBlock Origin covers everything for you.
I do, Hotmail is my email for all commerce and nothing else. If a website demands an email address, I use my hotmail and only check it for tracking packages, it is choked with spam.
I like it just fine. I’ve been using Opera as my primary browser for decades. However, it’s not the only browser I use. At home, I also run a Chrome session for Google stuff. And I use Firefox at work since our ERP system seems to work better, at least it did when we launched it years ago. I still use Opera for other browser stuff at work and it’s nice to alt-tab between ‘general browser’ & ‘ERP’ with ease.