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Comment by CurtHagenlocher | Hacker News Reader

Sure, they do now; it's a pretty sensible business decision given Chrome's market share. But there was some period of time after it came out -- I can't recall how long -- when Chrome was officially not supported by OWA (Outlook Web Access).

I work at Microsoft (but not on any product related to these) and I'm quite certain that this was the case.

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The reason chrome was not supported earlier is probably because OWA possibly used some arcane and non-standard IE features that were lacking in chrome. Also AFAIK it never blocked the OWA outright (by redirecting to some other url instead)

My specific recollection is this:

On Ubuntu at home, I used Chrome for most things. But I specifically installed Firefox to be able to use the "better" version of OWA. OWA would still work on Chrome, but it would automatically downgrade to the less-capable version.

Presumably, Chrome and Firefox were similar enough that the same code should have worked with both.

Additionally, for years and years (until maybe two years ago) they did the same in Firefox, where you always got the less capable version that had no means to delete multiple emails at one. Man, that was annoying.

That being said, screw you Google, this is not OK. Maybe its business, but its not right. Time to start destroying my Google profile with Ghostery et al.

OWA specifically redirects Chrome for Linux to an older, static-html version. You have to spoof Firefox for Linux or spoof Chrome for Windows in order to get the rich client UI.

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