Safari and the new Yahoo! Mail interface (#4)

Over the past few days we have been covering issues with Yahoo's new mail interface. It now appears that many of the issues reported with Safari under Mac OS X 10.3.x were caused by technical difficulties on Yahoo's end (read CNET's story about an Akamai server outage), rather than compatibility issues with Apple's browser.

Several readers note that Windows XP boxes are displaying similar issues. Larry Riddle writes "I use Yahoo free mail. I have not had any problems with the new interface using Safari. However, I did have the problem that has been described with respect to non-working buttons while using Internet Explorer 6 on my Windows XP machine. Yahoo mail worked fine Wednesday, but on Thursday (both afternoon and evening) nothing would happen when I clicked on the reply, delete, or mark buttons. But now this morning (Friday) everything is working fine again. I did delete all the cache files Thursday when the problem was occurring, but still had the problem after restarting both the computer and IE, so I do not believe emptying the cache had any effect. Waiting until the next day, however, did appear to resolve the issue (for now)."

Still, some issues other than the initial interface difficulties are beginning to appear.

Mike Jasinski reports that HTML-formatted e-mails sent through Yahoo! Mail and opened in Entourage can cause the application to crash. He writes:

"I use entourage v.X for my yahoo account and ever since they upgraded the account, I have been having trouble with email coming from that server crashing the program. I have to use the web interface to delete them. All other email accounts work fine."

While problems with Safari under Mac OS X may have been due to lags in Yahoo's network, problems with Mac OS 9 browsers appear to be consistent and end-user system based.

Jim McClure writes "As you know the new Yahoo Email, Address book, and Calendar was rolled out this week. It is almost completely nonfunctional and broken with IE 5.1.7 on Mac OS 9.2.2 Yahoo won't fix the problems, saying you must upgrade to Safari or Netscape 7.1, both of which require OS X

"The Calender cannot even be opened - you get a busy cursor forever and a blank window. The Address book is almost completely a blank window as well and cannot be used. EMail barely works, but layout of the entire window and popups are completely screwed up.

"For those of us with machines that cannot be upgraded to OSX, we are stuck with Mac OS 9.2.2, and thus IE 5.1.7, with no upgrades planned by Microsoft ever. We cannot get into our calendars, at all, and have limited email capability. We can't edit our Address books either."

If you are having success using Yahoo's new mail interface under Mac OS 9, please drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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