Ok so we’re a little addicted to Twitter Search, but we’ve seen a bunch of tweets on not being able to check Hotmail on Safari.  There’s a fairly easy way to workaround the problem, so if you’re trying out Safari 4 but miss being able to get to your Hotmail here’s how to do it.

Like a lot of other issues with Hotmail and non-IE browsers, you just need to change the User Agent string to fool Hotmail into thinking it is dealing with a browser it knows about.  In Safari, this is pretty easy to do.  As far as we can tell, however, Safari doesn’t remember the User Agent settings from session to session, so you would need to reset the User Agent for each new session that you want to check your Hotmail account.

First, open up Safari, and click on the “settings” icon (looks like a gear), and turn on the menu bar:

Then, from the same menu, click on Preferences, then Advanced:

…and check “Show Develop menu” at the bottom of the dialog box.  This places a “Develop” menu item in the menu bar (you only need to set up the Develop menu once).  From there, go down the list and choose “Opera 9.63 for Windows” (or Mac (??)):

Setting the User Agent string to Opera will allow you to use Hotmail normally in Safari 4, that is until you close the session.  A lot of trouble? Maybe, but if you just want to check out Safari (it’s pretty dang fast) but need to get at your Hotmail, this little trick might be worth your while.

As to why you have to go to this extra trouble, we have no idea.