No IE Support = No MobileMe at Work

[danny_w]

Really? No one's come up with a hack or work-around? All I want is to get one vcard out of contacts. I'm trying to decide if I want to just take screenshots of it with my phone or bother to go home so I can access it.

The real solution is to get portable firefox running on a thumbdrive, but I got burned when one died as a result of the frequent rewrites, so I need to work out a thumbdrive backup system first.

This is not a solution for all of those people with locked-down work computers, many of which aren't allowed to use a USB device of any kind.

 

[HLdan]

Interesting, you say most iPhone users don't have Macs but then you are annoyed that Apple doesn't support Firefox for Linux? Defend it all you want but there are hardly any Linux users with Linux as their primary OS. You don't even see a Linux PC at Frys, Best Buy or Circuit City. It's an open source alternative that only a few Windows Zealots use. When you go into most people's homes they have a computer with either the Mac OS or Windows.

It doesn't make good business sense to support a platform with very limited users especially since Linux is more a platform to tinker with. Speak to Adobe and ask them why they don't have Photoshop for Linux? Ask Microsoft why they don't make Office for Linux?

 

[danny_w]

Interesting, you say most iPhone users don't have Macs but then you are annoyed that Apple doesn't support Firefox for Linux? Defend it all you want but there are hardly any Linux users with Linux as their primary OS. You don't even see a Linux PC at Frys, Best Buy or Circuit City. It's an open source alternative that only a few Windows Zealots use. When you go into most people's homes they have a computer with either the Mac OS or Windows.

It doesn't make good business sense to support a platform with very limited users especially since Linux is more a platform to tinker with. Speak to Adobe and ask them why they don't have Photoshop for Linux? Ask Microsoft why they don't make Office for Linux?

Excuse me? The Apple boards are flooded with people who use Linux at work and can't view their email. Our company has customers who use Linux almost completely within their companies. I am not talking home users here.

 

[HLdan]

Excuse me? The Apple boards are flooded with people who use Linux at work and can't view their email. Our company has customers who use Linux almost completely within their companies. I am not talking home users here.

Mobileme is a service for the home user that handles their business on the go where Exchange is not an option for them. Companies use Exchange and Mobileme is Exchange for the rest of us. A forum of several users is less than .5% of the market that uses computers and Linux being a fine platform is not very widely used. For the record there a lot of business users that hang at coffee shops doing their work. Take a peek at someone's PC screen the next time and see what system is being used, most likely it's not Linux. I'm not sticking up for Apple for not supporting Firefox for Linux, I'm explaining to you that it's not worth their time and money to support an open source platform that's not part of the majority. Currently only Windows and the Mac OS are the major players.

Linux developers have to step up to the plate to promote the use of Linux more in order to get the major players to support it. The same goes for the lack of games on Mac, Apple is not hardly stepping up to the plate to promote Mac gaming which is why game developers don't deal with the Mac much.

 

[Daveoc64]

Interesting, you say most iPhone users don't have Macs but then you are annoyed that Apple doesn't support Firefox for Linux? Defend it all you want but there are hardly any Linux users with Linux as their primary OS. You don't even see a Linux PC at Frys, Best Buy or Circuit City. It's an open source alternative that only a few Windows Zealots use. When you go into most people's homes they have a computer with either the Mac OS or Windows.

It doesn't make good business sense to support a platform with very limited users especially since Linux is more a platform to tinker with. Speak to Adobe and ask them why they don't have Photoshop for Linux? Ask Microsoft why they don't make Office for Linux?

I'm very confused.

"Windows Zealots" as you put them, are HIGHLY unlikely to have anything to do with Linux.

Besides, the point here is that Apple's code actively seeks out Linux users (and IE6 users) and then blocks access despite the functionality of the service working without any issue if you spoof your browser string.

There's a difference between "unsupported" and "blocked". Under "unsupported", Apple would basically say: "Use whatever browser you want to, but we can't help you if Firefox on Ubuntu doesn't work". With blocked, you don't even get that chance.

The other issue is that MobileMe incorrectly informs users that they can continue anyway when using a Linux browser. Clicking the "Continue" button does nothing.

MobileMe claims that its lack of IE6 support is due to poor web standards compliance, but the reality is that MobileMe isn't as standards compliant as Apple would make out. It uses Flash for a single button!

 

[JR2008]

I can't claim to understand any of the tecchie stuff above, but I've had to cancel my MobileMe account becuase it does not work with IE6. My work PC only uses IE6 and I can't install any other browser. Also when you're traveling and just want to check your email on the internet, you can't do this with MobileMe if the computer uses IE6.

 

[FFW]

I can't claim to understand any of the tecchie stuff above, but I've had to cancel my MobileMe account becuase it does not work with IE6. My work PC only uses IE6 and I can't install any other browser. Also when you're traveling and just want to check your email on the internet, you can't do this with MobileMe if the computer uses IE6.

I echo this completely. The whole idea of MobileMe is to be able to access your email anywhere. Unless its your own hardware you can't control what browser you have access to and so no IE6 support in some form is a mistake by Apple if you ask me. If I can access my MobileMe email from a third party service like mail2web then why the hell can't Apple provide a "basic" interface for it? This is an "upgrade" that I didn't want as a .Mac user, pure and simple.

 

[Daveoc64]

I echo this completely. The whole idea of MobileMe is to be able to access your email anywhere. Unless its your own hardware you can't control what browser you have access to and so no IE6 support in some form is a mistake by Apple if you ask me. If I can access my MobileMe email from a third party service like mail2web then why the hell can't Apple provide a "basic" interface for it? This is an "upgrade" that I didn't want as a .Mac user, pure and simple.

Exactly.

It's ironic that a service designed to let you get a LOT of data on "any" computer actually only works on a small minority of computers.