Technofriends

The latest Google Chrome release 1.0.154.46 has been able to fix the Hotmail issue ( Hotmail never used to work with Google Chrome) by spoofing the forward going user agent as Safari. So from now on, anyone surfing Google Chrome with latest version, will be able to access Hotmail. 

So what exactly has Google Chrome done to fix the issue? 

Whenever you access a website, the browser sends a specific header with the details which informs the server about the client. These details are contained in the HTTP Header called User-Agent. Google Chrome, by default sends the User-Agent as  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.43 Safari/525.19 , with the latest build the User-Agent for website URLs ending with mail.live.com, the user agent will be sent as Safari. This makes Hotmail’s webserver assume that its a Safari browser trying to get the content. 

As per Google, 

This release fixes issues with two popular webmail providers:

• Sending mail from Yahoo! Mail works again.
• Windows Live Hotmail now works. While the Hotmail team works on a proper fix, we’re deploying a workaround that changes the user agent string that Google Chrome sends when requesting URLs that end with mail.live.com.If you’ve been using the –user-agent switch to use Hotmail, you can remove the switch from your shortcuts with this release.

1.) Work around for “Adobe Reader Plugin Open Parameters Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability

2.) Javascript Same-Origin Bypass.

I am certainly impressed with the work Google Chrome team has done in fixing this issue. Not sure if Microsoft was deliberately trying to delay the release of fix for Hotmail support for Chrome. I am sure, the change at Microsoft wouldn’t be too much for this simple user-agent issue. 

Read Step by Step instructions for updating Google Chrome and migrate to the latest release.

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