running firefox with outlook web access

February 6, 2006 12:51 PM

is there a way to make firefox work with outlook web access, in "premium" mode?

my company just switched to the incomparable outlook web access, which looks quite nice in internet explorer but gives you a shitty, feature-poor version in anything else. i want to use firefox, as IE obviously sucks (i had no idea you couldn't even right-click and save the page, for example), and it doesn't seem like there's anything inherently special about IE that would make it run better with outlook premium; just regular M$ stuff. anyone have any suggestions? familiarities with the program?

posted by yonation to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Same boat here. I either just use IE or the IE Tab extension for Firefox. I thought that the Outloook Web Access used ActiveX to do all the cool stuff. Could be mistaken though.
posted by AstroGuy at 1:03 PM on February 6, 2006

I tried and tried. It isn't possible, to the best of my knowledge.

Same thing with any Mac browser.
posted by k8t at 1:03 PM on February 6, 2006

I also use firefox and my company recently upgraded to latest Outlook Web Access. I use firefox extension IEtab specifically for this reason. It has an option to always open certain URLs using IE.
posted by devilshgrin at 1:06 PM on February 6, 2006

Just checked. If I disable ActiveX entirely in IE, the messase list never populates, so I'd say they're using ActiveX for the advanced features.
posted by AstroGuy at 1:06 PM on February 6, 2006

OWA rules.
Firefox rules.

What's a girl to do?

RPC over HTTPS, I suppose.
posted by k8t at 1:08 PM on February 6, 2006

good to see others sharing in the pain. it's unbelievable that microsoft gets away with such proprietary messes... and its because of the oldies; my tech dept loves opensource, etc, but since they didn't want to retrain the 50+ people who took 5 years to learn outlook, they stuck with OWA. inertia is the worst.

anyway, IEtab seems like a nice compromise, thanks for that suggestion, but someone should go a step more and do something! it still sucks not being able to right click in frames and save just the frame, etc... among the zillion other reasons FF is better.
posted by yonation at 1:11 PM on February 6, 2006

Dude!! &%$#@!!

ietab is the coolest Firefox extension that I have ever seen. Thank you very much for pointing that out. :-D
posted by drstein at 1:35 PM on February 6, 2006

Except it doesn't really work fully, eg can't search.
posted by A189Nut at 1:59 PM on February 6, 2006

The authoritative answer is that you can't render OWA Premium with Firefox engine. It won't work no matter what you try to do to it.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 2:39 PM on February 6, 2006 [1 favorite]

I use Thunderbird (Firefox's email sibling) to access an Exchange server via IMAP. Check with your email gang to see if IMAP or POP is offered; if so, get address & port.

Web-accessed email can do many things. However, web email is rarely as good at storing data locally as a dedicated email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook.
posted by gregoreo at 7:07 PM on February 6, 2006

I just set Firefox to always open OWA as an IE tab. I don't know all its limitations, but I can see all my folders, so I'm happy.
posted by lhauser at 10:40 PM on February 6, 2006

I'm not sure what blindcarboncopy's official answer refers to, but an ie tab brings up the option to use the IE version of OWA for me... I just had to be careful to make sure the tab was using the IE rendering engine.

A189Nut: search works for me, although it appears in a separate tab instead of the "officially-sized" pop-up window.
posted by djradon at 7:18 PM on October 13, 2006