Howto: Open Hotmail in Chrome [Working Hack]

Final Edit: No need for hacks or workarounds. The latest dev channel build of 2.0.160 works perfectly with hotmail without any changes. Here is how to subscribe to the dev channel

Edit5: Now hack works in the Official 1.0 Releases.

Note something about the script. There are two dashes at the start of the script, not one large one.

Edit 4: Confirmed that this hack only works with the dev channel build of Chrome v0.4.154.33

Edit 3: At long last. A solution is available. With the developer release of Chrome v0.4.154.33 Chrome Developer Team has notified of a temporary workaround. Here is how it works,

Right Click on your Google Chrome Shortcut on Your Desktop and select properties

Paste this following code in the Target field in addition the text already there (Something like “C:Documents and Settings<Username>…Chrome.exe”). Make sure to keep a space after [Chrome.exe"] and then paste

–user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19″

Note something about the script. There are two dashes at the start of the script, not one large one.

Click OK. Then open this new shortcut to browse Hotmail. This enables Hotmail to recognize Chrome as Safari. Chrome team has said they are trying to sort this out with MS. And those who thought this was a problem with MS not Chrome were absolutely right. This is a issue solvable only by Microsoft. Until that happens (don’t hold your breath), keep using this.

This hack should work with previous versions of Chrome as well. I’ve tested with Chrome v0.4.154.33 and worked fine with me. Just a suggestion, before you start browsing using the new shortcut just clear your browser cache for good measure.

If you want to use the dev releases (Extremely unstable releases) you can learn how to do it here. Please mind that sometimes the dev builds mess up (as they said they would) big time. For instance the current build v0.4.154.33 has serious issues with Flash. However, they usually patch up large glitches within a few hours, I’ve never seen any other software dish out updates so fast.

Happy Chroming!

Edit2: Still no solution. But if you are tired of the BS of MS please help yourself to this handy tutorial for migrating to Gmail.

Edit: Sorry all. I didn’t test out Hotmail properly before writing this. I couldn’t send mail, just like the previous versions. However, reading and other activities like sorting and storing mail seems to work fine. If you are having problems with facebook, please upgrade your chrome with devchannel. Then it works fine

It seems a few people are landing on my blog looking for a way to open Hotmail in chrome.

Here goes,

1. Visit Hotmail.com

2. Login

3. The resulting page says that Hotmail cannot identify your browser (Typical MS style, if you think it’s better than your own, pretend it doesn’t exist! Try ignoring Firefox now!). Near the bottom of this page is a link which says “continue anyway” or something on that mood. Click on that and you are good to go. And use the new 0.4beta of Chrome for better performance.

Take care