I’ve read about the Hotmail/Outlook switch on a bunch of sites including
yours, but I’ve not found an answer for a problem I’m having. My mother has been
using Hotmail on an older iMac, pre-Intel with Safari for several years. The
other week, she opened Hotmail and got a message something about Outlook and to
login and she did. Since then, her email has been a problem. Whether she goes to
Hotmail.com or Outlook.com, the page is all jumbled. She can come back a little
later and see the inbox and mail and might be able to reply to one, but then
after a click, it’s jumbled again – one long vertical line of all the saved
folders on the left side. The same thing happens when I try it with her account
on my Mac. There have been couple of times when it opens fine, window looks
good, inbox and all the mail are there, but it’s frozen and I can’t click to
open anything and I can’t click the name to log out. I just have to close the
window.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #75, I look at a case where Safari is scrambling the page so thoroughly
that email on Hotmail cannot be read.
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Safari displays Hotmail pages wrong
So, my belief is that this is probably an issue with Safari. I would hope that Microsoft will end up fixing Outlook.com and/or Hotmail to work properly under Safari.
So, what I would recommend you do (I honestly don’t know if this is an option for the older iMac, which is pre-Intel iMac), but what I would do is try running a different browser.
On your own Mac, try running something like Firefox or Chrome and see if the site behaves properly for you. My guess is that it will and that this will pretty quickly identify this is as a Safari specific problem.
Clear browser cache
Like I said, I really don’t know if there’s a good solution for an older iMac like this. I will admit it’s not my strength.
The other thing that I might consider doing (actually in both of your cases with Safari) is to clear the cache. I don’t use Safari myself, so I don’t have the instructions handy, but it should be a fairly simple thing to do. In most browsers, it is.
Simply go out into its options somewhere and make sure that the cache of information that the browser keeps (that Safari keeps for you on the hard disk) is completely cleared. Then, try logging into Hotmail again and see if that happens to make the problem go away.
If it does, fantastic. We’re done. If it doesn’t, I would look at another browser. At least until Microsoft, hopefully, resolves the issue with Safari.
Next from Answercast 75 – Can I transfer software from one machine to another using an external drive?
