The advantage of online email service (webmail) providers like Windows Live Hotmail is that you can check your emails and login to your account from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a computer and an internet connection. Another big advantage of Hotmail is that you can sign in to your account from pretty much any web browser you are likely to find installed on the computer you are using, whether it is running any version of Windows, the Mac operating system, or Linux (among many others).
Tip: Note that this page gives you a listing of the most popular web browsers supported by Hotmail: there are too many browser variants to list (and it is a constantly evolving list), but it ultimately boils down to the "rendering engine", which displays web pages on screen, and processes scripting information (Apple's Safari browser, for example, uses the same rendering engine as Google Chrome or Flock, so all three browsers are supported by Windows Live services and Hotmail since they share their "WebKit" rendering engine!)
Here is a table of the most popular browsers Hotmail supports:
| Internet Explorer 8, IE 7, and IE 6 for Windows 7 / Vista / XP | |
|---|---|
| The latest versions of Internet Explorer on Windows are supported by Windows Live Hotmail; note that Internet Explorer 6 is a very old browser, and you may find that some functionality is limited. | |
| Mozilla Firefox version 3 and later (Windows, Mac, and Linux) | |
| The latest versions of Firefox are fully supported by Hotmail; this also includes other web browsers that use the same rendering engine, including among others Netscape, SeaMonkey, Flock (for now, the next versions will use WebKit instead), Camino (Mac), and Galeon (Linux). | |
| Google Chrome | |
| Google Chrome fully supports by Windows Live Hotmail. | |
| Apple Safari | |
| Version 4 and later of the Windows and Mac versions of Safari are fully supported by Windows Live Hotmail (Safari uses the same rendering engine as Google Chrome and future versions of the Flock web browser). | |
| Opera Browser | |
| While the Opera browser is not officially supported by the Windows Live team or Hotmail itself, we have found no problems whatsoever in using the new Hotmail in the latest version of Opera (10.6, at the time of this writing). | |
| Other web browsers for Windows, Mac, or Linux / UNIX | |
| There are many more browsers available, many of them using the rendering engine of one of the browsers above. Browsers like Avant or Maxthon, for example, using Trident behind the scenes (Internet Explorer's rendering engine), and are therefore fully supported by Hotmail, even if they are not listed in the official Windows Live supported browsers list. | |
Tip: if the Hotmail sign in screen detects that you are using a browser that is either not supported, or not fully supported, Windows Live will display an appropriate error message telling you to use another browser for Hotmail, or that you may have a limited amount of functional features while inside that browser.
In addition to the web browsers mentioned above, the login form of the Hotmail sign in screen, as well as most of the rest of Hotmail and Windows Live, work with two additional system requirements: "cookies enabled", and "JavaScript enabled".
To automatically sign in to your Hotmail account, for example, your browser needs to have cookies turned on (they are by default) in order for Windows Live to be able to create a cookie containing your login information (email address and/or password).
Many websites and web applications work by going from one page to the next, depending on what you want to see or read. As you've noticed in the new Hotmail, however, much of the reading emails, composing new messages, deleting or emptying folders, etc. - all this happens without reloading the page thanks to "JavaScript" scripting and "Ajax" behind the scenes - in other words, regardless of the supported web browser you choose to use, it needs to have JavaScript enabled (it is by default).