Hotmail Live beta works in Firefox

If you've been participating in the Hotmail Live beta and using both IE and Firefox, you'd be aware that what works so nicely in IE barely works at all in Firefox. Niceties like context menus and drag and drop were totally broken and the best that you could do was default to the original Hotmail interface with a few token UI upgrades (mostly nicer graphics). However in the past couple days that seems to have all changed.

I'm looking at a Hotmail Live beta session in Firefox as we speak and it has all the features that are normally only available in IE. It seems like Microsoft finally got their heads straight about browser compatibility and are on the AJAX bandwagon with other webmail clients like Google Mail.

The only drawback is that Hotmail is slow with a capital SLOW. Whatever AJAX processing they're doing, it's really overkill or something because what takes a moment to display in Gmail takes several seconds in the Live.com interface. Let's hope they get that worked out and we can finally have a real competitor to Gmail in the webmail biz.