Recent versions of MS Exchange finally support the full version of Outlook Web App ("OWA") for non-MS browsers and operating systems. You can now use, e.g., Chrome on Windows or Firefox on Linux.
Now as a Linux+Chrome user, I was surprised to find that OWA still only worked in "lite" mode for me. Turns out, OWA bases this decision on your user agent string; if you happen to be running Chrome on Linux, you get dumped to the non-AJAX UI.
This seemed arbitrary to me, so I decided to try switching the user agent to that of the Windows version of Chrome - and bam, it just worked.
I'd like to find a chrome extension to handle user agent switching well, but I haven't seen one yet. For now, I just run chrome as the following:
/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.481.0 Safari/534.4"
Optionally, you can append a flag to use Chrome's spiffy "app" mode as well (or just create an "app shortcut" in chrome and add the user-agent string):
--app="https://mail.mydomain.com/owa/"
Comments
Alan @ Thu Apr 07 09:18:43 -0400 2011
Interesting, I have the same problem but even when running Chrome in Windows 7. Your trick worked a treat though - thanks for that!