Google Chrome fixes Hotmail by being Safari

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Google is continuing its rapid development of its Chrome browser with the dev-channel release of Chrome version 0.4.154.33. Again this is mostly a bug fix, though two of the bugs are really interesting.

Bug #6482 fixes an issue with composing mail and switching folders in Hotmail. The really interesting part is that Google admits that Hotmail does not yet properly recognize the Chrome browser so users need to trick Hotmail into thinking that Chrome is actually Apple Safari (which is supported by Hotmail).

Here’s the workaround from Google to make Chrome appear to be Safari for Hotmail use:

Add the following to the shortcut you use to launch Google Chrome:
–user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19″

Right-click the Google Chrome shortcut, click Properties, and paste the line above to the end of the Target field.

Another interesting bug is #6418 which lets Google Desktop call Google Chrome as a default browser. Seems straight forward enough – though it sure does seem odd that Google Desktop wouldn’t have fully supported Chrome from day one.