If “Office Live” is an indication, Microsoft seems to prefer a fragile web. A web not only restricted to a couple of web browsers, but also to specific operating systems.
Cameron Field twittered1 “Anyone know how to install WordPress on a Microsoft Office Live hosted site/domain?”
Intrigued by what “Microsoft Office Live” is, I google it and go to smallbusiness.officelive.com, but instead of finding out what it is, I was rudely redirected to http://home.officelive.com/Misc/CompatibleShell.aspx?linkId=UnsupportedBrowser and greeted with
To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7, running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista. You can download Internet Explorer from the Windows Internet Explorer page.
* Firefox 2.0, running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox 2.0 from the Firefox download page.
So, not only is the site checking what browser I’m running, but what operating system I’m running the browser on. Maybe there is a legitimate technical reason why this site doesn’t work for Firefox running on Ubuntu, but that would surprise me as I can’t imagine why integration with Mac OS X could work without any easy solution also for Linux.
Assuming there is a technical reason, the saddest part is the missed opportunity of at least giving me information about the site.
I’m filing this one Optimized Under.
- As an experiment I’ve been Twitter tracking “WordPress”. [↩]
6 Comments
Hm, the site rejected both of my Ubuntu installs (Xubuntu and Ubuntu) on the other machines, and the interesting thing is, it rejected FF3 on this machine. Strange Microsoft
I seriously doubt it’s a technical issue.
Whilst in a way restricting software can make good business sense on the desktop I honestly cannot see why Microsoft would not allow Firefox. As far as I am aware Microsoft earn absolutely nothing from Internet Explorer, yet with Firefox and Opera around the corner looking to get on the top of the browser perch I don’t see why Microsoft don’t just pour their resources into Firefox or just lax their online competitive edge a bit. I could go into a rant as to why Microsoft feel the need for an online presence in the first place, but the comment box simply isn’t big enough.
officelive is a joke any way you slice it. There’s not FTP access, so AFAIK, there’s no way to install anything on it. They only allowed the use of CSS after people complained. it’s more similar to googlepages than anything else I can think of. (it came free with my dell. all it’s really worth is branded live email (e.g. @archgfx.com addresses))
My guess would be it uses an ActiveX / COM control, which would lock it to windows only.
Michael, why would Mac be supported then?
Forgive my cynicism, but when I saw the title of the thread I expected all non-Internet Explorer browsers to be ‘unsupported’ not just ones running on certain operating systems.
Still, as others have pointed out, you’re not really missing out by not having OfficeLive.