Sunday, September 25, 2005

Macintosh and Yahoo (mac owners get the shaft)

Yahoo and Google are all that's left of the portal wars of the late 90's. I use Yahoo all the time because of its breadth of service. There is almost nothing online that Yahoo doesn't provide. It galls me that they don't pay any attention to Mac owners. How do they hate us? Let me count the ways:

  • Yahoo Messenger hasn't been updated in years. While AOL and MSN upgrade their product often for the Mac, Yahoo has abandoned the Mac version. None of the new features available on the Windows version are available on the Mac version: stealth settings, animated emoticons, launch player, environments, etc. None of these are available for Mac users. Hint: use the excellent IM client Adium as a replacement; it replaces MSN Messenger, AOL, Jabber, and others.
  • Launchcast, Yahoo's music station only supports no Mac browsers. If Yahoo would provide support to mozilla browsers like Firefox it would cover up a lot of problems, but most of their products run only in Windows IE.
  • With Stattracker for fantasy football, the new version only runs on Windows IE. All other users pay the same amount of money and get the "classic" version. (If you're not clear, classic means that Yahoo is too cheap to provide service to anyone else than windows owners).
You would think that Yahoo would go a long way to provide cross-platform support since it chips away at an advantage that Microsoft has. I'm not asking that Yahoo do as much for mac users as they do for windows owners, but they have a long way to go to be considered mac-friendly. By simply providing support to Firefox for all of their features, mac owners would be able to access more features.

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