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Live.com Oops bug

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We released live.com and immediately got dinged for a lot of errors when reading feeds, among others. I am glad to say that at least that one issue has been fixed. We were tracking the feeds that were being added, anonymously of course, so we could do recommendation for top feeds. Unfortunately, under heavy load, this feature decided to be a pain. We have decided to remove the real time updates to this feature for a while. We should be able to figure out what went wrong and fix it soon. Users will still see the top feeds, but they are not real time anymore. At least this way, you will not have problems reading your feeds. For a web site that has feed reading as one of the primary tasks, i guess that is important [;)].

We have two more major bugs that we need to solve. One is obviously Firefox support. I have read lots of reports that suggest we intentionally do not support Firefox. I would like to say that is pure fallacy. I like that word, fallacy, seems more classy than a lot of other things i could say. :). We want to target the web, not just people using Windows and IE. We have been saying our mission is to provide a page that you can completely make yours. I know Yahoo has My Yahoo and even MSN has My MSN, but this page i think is different from all of those. I can say that because i used to work on My MSN as well. I do not know of any other website that allows you to write your own gadget. We also want to have absolutely no content bias. Before we shipped, there was even talk about alphabetizing everything in the categories list. But we did not do it, because it made sense that NFL Football was higher than Horse racing, instead of the other way around.

Anyway, coming back from that tangent, we are working on Firefox support. I dont like the fact that we had to ship without Firefox support, but when you are under extreme time constraints (our ship date was not moving, to say the least), you have to cut some stuff. Firefox was one of those unfortunate cuts. I guess this might give the impression that we do not care about Firefox users. I just hope we can change that perception by shipping software. On the Start.com page we get a lot of traffic from people using Firefox. It makes sense for us to work in Firefox and we will do it.

The other major bug is our search experience. When you search for something, click on a link and navigate away from our page and come back to our page, your search is lost. We are working on fixing this as well. We have had some discussion within the team about how to solve this particular issue. Our current idea is to ship what we think is reasonable behavior and then listen to you guys to fix it even further.

I hope you enjoy using www.live.com.

- Venkat

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2005
    Any chance that www.live.com will work with those of us who prefer to browse with Opera (since you indicate you "want to target the web")?
  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2005
    I agree, don't forget Opera for the people who choose not to use Firefox.
  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2005
    Just support the stanards. We are programmers we write to specs. We expect out C# to be good or a compile will appropriately tell us where to go and the same should be for ALL technologies.

    Of course by doing that you throw out useless "browsers" like Opera which aren't REALLY stanards based, but inappropriate act like they are.
  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2005
    John Coleman,

    Have you ever tried Opera 8.5 or the Technical Preview of Opera 9? Opera is NOT useless. It is the most brilliant piece of Internet software available. It's an excellent brower, mail, newsgroups, newsfeeds, chat suite.
  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2005
    It is actually not a problem with Atlas. Atlas minimizes the work you have to do to get your site to work across IE and Firefox. We had some bugs in our code, mostly the CSS stuff and some problems with drag and drop.