Computer support and website design in the French Alps

Gmail says Firefox is not a fully supported browser

January 14, 2008 at 10:35 am | email, google apps
- Posted by Phillip Ingle | Add Your Comments

I started having problems looking at my Gmail and my Google Apps for your domain mail in firefox recently,Google kept saying “We’re sorry. It seems there is a problem. Please try using Gmail with a supported browser.”

fter a bit of research I have determined that it is due to to the User-Agent header in firefox having changed and Google not having updated their code to take account of this. I have two solutions that you can use.

  1. disable the browser checking by appending ?nobrowsercheck to the url, so for gmail type in
    http://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser
    and for google apps for your domain type in
    http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/?nocheckbrowser
    obviously replacing the domain with your own.
  2. edit the browser agent string in firefox to something older, so in the address box type in
    about:config
    and then scroll down to general.useragent.extra.firefox
    and double click on it and change it to Mozilla Gecko Firefox/1.5.0.4

I prefer the first solution, but either work.

Google Apps now supports IMAP

November 5, 2007 at 6:02 pm | email, google apps
- Posted by Phillip Ingle | Add Your Comments

This is some of the best news that has happened in ages.
is a great system for managing your email, but up until now it has not been possible to use IMAP.

The introduction of IMAP means that the same mailbox can be accessed by different users on different computers and changes are kept in sync. For small office setups and small businesses run from home this is ideal.


 gives you a fully functioning mail system with fantastic anti spam and antivirus control. You can also keep documents, spreadsheets and presentations online and accessible from anywhere. You also have on online calendaring application which sends reminders to your mobile phone via sms as well as to your email. And all of it is written so that it works on most modern mobile phones with internet browsing capabilities.

I have been using it with the POP version of collecting my email for some time now, and have set this up for some of my clients, I have been hesitant to push it though because of the lack of IMAP support, but now that this is part of the package then it is on my highly recommended list.

If you want more advice on the advantages then don’t hesitate to get in touch. If you want help setting it up then please do get in touch. I was going to put some instructions here but there are already good ones at LifeHacker and at HowToGeek