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Microsoft's redesigned site to not support alternative browsers?

By Justin Mann

On July 25, 2006, 11:28 AM

It's becoming more and more apparent that Microsoft isn't pleased with how well alternative browsers are doing, primarily Mozilla's FireFox. It was still a shock, however, to learn that Microsoft may simply deny services on their site to FireFox users. If you happen to have both FireFox and Internet Explorer on your machine, you can try it for yourself. Visiting Microsoft's preview page for their redesigned site in IE presents you with their new tools and the new site. Visit it with FireFox, Opera or a number of other browsers and you get “page cannot be found”.

Interestingly enough, even telling Opera to identify itself as IE 6.0 still results in the page not loading. Cracking open IE, however, has it working just fine. While Microsoft is fully within their own rights to design their web pages how they wish, it does have a hint of them trying to lock in a userbase. No word from Microsoft yet.

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9 comments

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  1. July 25, 2006 12:24 PM
    slake said:
    So i guess the government is going to tell them they can't do that either! LOL! Good for MS.
    Reply
  2. July 25, 2006 2:05 PM
    zephead said:
    i just went to microsoft.com in firefox and it worked fine. mabye they should just accept that IE is total crap...
    Reply
  3. July 25, 2006 2:21 PM
    dragonpac said:
    Avant Browser FTW!
    Reply
  4. July 25, 2006 3:05 PM
    DragonMaster said:
    [quote] i just went to microsoft.com in firefox and it worked fine. mabye they should just accept that IE is total crap...[/quote]No! :headbang: Their next website (preview) :[url]http://preview.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx[/url]
    Reply
  5. July 25, 2006 3:21 PM
    Amigosdefox said:
    I also had no problem visiting the page with firefox.
    Reply
  6. July 25, 2006 3:35 PM
    spike said:
    I did. It opens in MSIE, but redirects to MSs current site in FF.
    Reply
  7. July 25, 2006 3:45 PM
    asphix said:
    Same.. it redirected to the official site in FF for me as well.
    Reply
  8. July 25, 2006 4:31 PM
    chessonly said:
    Have you ppl been sleeping forever?? haven't you heard of Opera bork( or borg edition) ?? Microsoft pulicaly blocked opera way back in 2002 since Opera didn't support internet explorers 'standards' . besides M$ sites have always bloacked opera, atleast a thousand times. There is a whole forum dedicated to this kind of crp at my.opera.com
    Reply
  9. July 25, 2006 5:23 PM
    DragonMaster said:
    When I posted my first comment, it was displaying the "Page not found" message. Now, they probably read the news and made it redirect to the main MS page.
    Reply

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