October 11, 2003
Escaping from Hotmail

If you use Microsoft's free Hotmail email service, you have no real rights som complain - it's free after all.
That however does not make the "If you use our product we own you" attitude any less annoying. In Hotmail that is expressed by the obnoxious Hotmail topframe that's loaded whenever you click a link in an email you've received on your hotmail account. They use topframes like that in other places as well. Usually the frame contains a helpful "Loose the topframe" link (e.g. About.com's 'Featured Link' pages). On Hotmail, they just carry the ludicrous message You are visiting a site outside of Hotmail. To return to Hotmail, close this browser window.. As if Hotmail was somehow 'the real world' or my 'home' that I would want to return to. It's not just obnoxious, it's anti-web, it's old-school closed networks thinking, it's AOL, it's ridiculous - but like I say, I have no right to complain.
Thankfully a remedy is easy to come by. This link: Escape from Hotmail contains a javascriptlet that turns off the top frame. You can drag it to your links toolbar in MSIE. I don't know if it works from Mozilla.
The words of warning on blindly dragging javascriptlets to your MSIE toolbar I have previously mentioned apply. Even the one about this particular scriptlet being harmless.

Posted by Claus at October 11, 2003 10:09 PM | TrackBack (0)
Comments (post your own)

THANK YOU! I've been wishing for freedom from that darn topframe forever. Like you said, I have no right to complain- and never did- but that does not mean I had to enjoy it. You just made my day!

Posted by: eric on December 9, 2003 7:40 PM

Hmm you seem like your a bit of a retard using small unreadable text, do you have any webdesign skills, even BASIC skills??

mate your a fucken retard, make your site fucken readable you poof.

I am adding a dising review of this website on my rants at ACWORLD on [Edit: WE DON'T ALLOW COMMENT SPAM]

your pathetic.

Posted by: Ac World on January 4, 2004 1:19 PM

How nice. Comment spam in the form of a flame. Cool enough. The answer to your font size question is this: I used bigger fonts for a while, but nobody liked them. If you were us?ng a proper browser you could just resize the text. That's what all my regular readers do.

Have you got any spelling skills by the way. Even BASIC skills?

Posted by: Dee on January 4, 2004 2:30 PM

Ac World is a pathetic moron and a rude one at that. Thanks for the tip. The link you reference appears to be broken. I get a Java script error. I would love to try this solution.

Note: If I select "View" from MSIE 6.0 and try to resize the text, it does not work on your site.

Posted by: ned on February 13, 2004 6:19 PM

Ned, sorry it doesn't work for you. It works fine here - I just want to make sure you're trying the right thing: Proper usage of the link is NOT to click it. Instead, drag it to your links toolbar and use it when you have a window loaded with one of those "You are visiting a site outside of Hotmail" topframes.

Wrt resizing of text: IE6 support for CSS is broken and has been so for years. Resizing of textt works wonderfully in Mozilla Firefox. Try it, you'll like it.
http://mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Posted by: Dee on February 14, 2004 1:59 PM

ohhhh. Great, Thanks.

Posted by: ned on February 15, 2004 2:44 AM

P.S. Happy Valentines Day

Posted by: ned on February 15, 2004 2:45 AM

Thank you--finally I'm freed from this incredible annoyance!! In my search I also found this petition to Microsoft, which might be of interest: http://www.petitiononline.com/hm4g2567/petition.html

Thanks again, I'll be passing this on.

(note to Ac World: What's pathetic is how obviously childish and insecure you are. How are your comments in any way worthwhile or relevant? But I hope you feel like a big shot with your little "dising" review.)

Posted by: C Jepson on June 23, 2004 5:39 PM
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