I've been checking out the various Windows Live Services. There seem to be more and more everyday. There's a lot of coolness going on with this stuff. However, one thing I've noticed is that most of them do not play nicely with Firefox. If you browse them with Firefox, you're often alerted that you need IE6 or higher to use the service.

For example, I have been beta testing the next version of Hotmail named Windows Live Mail (WLM for short) which sports a new AJAXy interface. When I browse the site in Firefox, you get a pretty poor experience and a notification that although it doesn't work very well in Firefox, they are working on supporting it. Then tonight, I read this post on the Windows Live Mail (WLM) blog which indicates a new release of WLM. If you don't want to read that, here's the part of that post that I'm concerned with...

Hotmail Classic View
OK, I know it's a contradiction to name anything with the name “classic” as NEW.  But it is.  We know our customers roam….and that they don't always log in to Windows Live Mail on computers with IE (and many times they aren’t even logging in from a computer at all).  We want to help make sure you guys can get your mail any time you need.  Now for people not using Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher, we have a new view of WL Mail, what we're calling the Hotmail Classic View.

I'm hoping this doesn't mean that if you use Firefox, you'll get the Hotmail Classic View. That would be a big mistake in my opinion. Since, I haven't seen the new version I'll withold judgment. That being said, I see some resistance with the Windows Live stuff supporting Firefox. I'm not sure what's going on, but part of me suspects that there may be some internal debate as to whether supporting Firefox is the right move.

Let me add my 2 cents. Please support Firefox. This isn't 1997. The browser war cannot be won the way it was back then. The users are the ones with the loudest voice in this argument and there are too many choices now for web services out there. You'll be missing out on a huge opportunity. Plus, as I've written time-and-time again, this is so Web 1.0.