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Microsoft patches botched Hotmail update
Thu, 12th Aug 2010
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Last week Microsoft completed its rollout of the Hotmail overhaul to over 350 million people in more than 220 countries. “Now, everyone can take advantage of a faster Hotmail experience with great new features like one-click filters, Sweep, Active Views and more,” said the company’s blog.

Following the update many users complained that some of the cloud-based email service’s functionality didn’t work.

“We appreciate everyone taking the time to report issues and for providing us with the information that our moderators have requested,” said Microsoft. “The Hotmail Product group is using this information to create hotfixes to resolve these issues which are currently being released to the site.”

The first hotfix should be complete by end of this week and solve the problems users are seeing with high contrast display mode.

“The workaround is to turn it off,” says Microsoft’s customer services. “Also this hotfix should resolve the Hotmail performance degradation that we saw when customers are running Messenger on the web (the workaround is to sign out of web messenger).”

Microsoft has since posted a list of supported web browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 6.0+ on Windows
  • Internet Explorer 6.x
  • Internet Explorer 7.x
  • Internet Explorer 8.x (Standards mode)
  • Firefox 3.0+ on Windows and Macintosh
  • Safari 4.0+ on Windows and Macintosh
  • Chrome on Windows – latest major version
You can find an updated FAQ about the issues here.