Windows Live Local

Another Update, 2005-12-15: MS has fixed the incompatibility with Gecko-based browsers as of today.

Update: A connection at Microsoft has said that this should at least work on Firefox, and that he’s passed along my report. Hopefully fixes will be forthcoming.

Windows Live Local has potential, but it’s a total strikeout on the Mac.

(Perhaps the “Windows” part of the name should have been a clue. But if it’s really not supposed to work on the Mac, why not do some browser sniffing and send a helpful message – like “Go away”?)

Anyway… in Camino, when you click and drag, you get the outline of a tile but the map doesn’t move – until you release the mouse button, at which point the map follows the pointer around, even though the mouse button is up. A final click toggles things back to the initial state.

Firefox 1.5 behavior is similar, except it never goes into drag mode at all – but it moves a litle bit when you try the initial drag.

Safari (2.0.2) shows no map at all.

I was left with no other option but to try IE 5.2 – but of course that doesn’t work either. Not even Microsoft cares about that browser anymore!

Andrew commented on Fri Dec 9 15:28:47 2005:

This was my experience as well. Firefox works except for dragging. And it’s very slow.

doug r commented on Sat Mar 18 19:36:20 2006:

It works pretty good in Firefox-for about 10 minutes! Then it either freezes up Firefox so bad I have to use Gnome to shut the window or reboot; or it actually crashes Firefox-ordinarily hard to do with 1.5.0.1