6 ms·

What's even more ridiculous is that for Firefox, if you change the "User Agent" it works perfectly fine[0][1]. Since Opera is now a re-skinned Chromium, it's hi

What's even more ridiculous is that for Firefox, if you change the "User Agent" it works perfectly fine[0][1]. Since Opera is now a re-skinned Chromium, it's highly likely that from a technical point of view it should also work, if you change the UA. (No idea about Safari.) It's either extreme laziness or deliberate monopolistic behaviour... [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/apu2u6/the_bad_old_days_are_back_according_to_skype_web/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/apu2u6/the_bad_old... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aw1umv/skype_web_is_now_blocked_in_firefox/ehjhfbq/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aw1umv/skype_web_i...

whizzkid 8y ago
Basic functionality works fine on Safari as well. Just change the UA.
atrainedmonkey 8y ago
In Microsoft's defence, just because its functional, doesn't mean they're ready to spend time supporting it on other clients from day 1. They may be planning a more gradual roll out to other clients once they have confidence with Chrome.
- tcd 8y ago
  This is why we have alpha's or beta's, such that you can "opt in" but be warned it may break. Simply not supporting a browser at launch is not a good look for your product.
  - johnnyfaehell 8y ago
    Especially when it's a major product and you literally have thousands of engineers.
- josteink 8y ago
  > In Microsoft's defence, just because its functional, doesn't mean they're ready to spend time supporting it on other clients from day 1. It’s on the public web. It should work in all major browsers. EOT
  - IMTDb 8y ago
    It does work for the majority (> 50%) of users. Is it enough ? No. Is it sufficient to be published ? Yes.
- ethbro 8y ago
  This smacks of the bad old days of the web, where UA checking was de rigour (usually to lock sites to IE). And then, as now, the page usually functioned fine under alternatives with a masked UA. "Warning: You browser is unsupported. You may experience issues. Continue?" is the only defensible roadblock.
- mcny 8y ago
  » We recommend that web developers avoid UA sniffing as much as possible; modern web platform features are nearly all detectable in easy ways. Over the past year, we’ve seen some UA-sniffing sites that have been updated to detect Microsoft Edge… only to provide it with a legacy IE11 code path. This is not the best approach, as Microsoft Edge matches ‘WebKit’ behaviors, not IE11 behaviors (any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing). In our experience Microsoft Edge runs best on the ‘WebKit’ code paths in these sites. Also, with the internet becoming available on a wider variety of devices, please assume unknown browsers are good – please don’t limit your site to working only on a small set of current known browsers. If you do this, your site will almost certainly break in the future. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-more-interoperable-web-with-microsoft-edge/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...
  - gtirloni 8y ago
    Being a large company, I wouldn't expect every team there to have read that. Looks like the Skype Web didn't.
    - RandallBrown 8y ago
      More likely someone said "We don't want to put effort into testing Firefox right now."
      - mcny 8y ago
        > More likely someone said "We don't want to put effort into testing Firefox right now." The product teams should NOT have to test on Mozilla Firefox. We (disclaimer: I am not an Mozilla employee. Just someone who loves the web.) have a very robust Web Compat program https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/27435 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/27435 and Web Compat is very interested in helping product teams. I think what the Edge team was trying to say above was detect feature support, not browser vendor. In fact, I would say there are many professionals at Microsoft willing to help the Skype team use feature detection properly. or there is always the Mozilla Developer Documentation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_testing/Cross_browser_testing/Feature_detection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...
- Derek_MK 8y ago
  They can easily just display a warning that the site is not officially supported on X browser, and the user may run into unexpected errors. This is an active thing that Microsoft is doing, not something they're forced to do.
onion2k 8y ago
What's even more ridiculous is that for Firefox, if you change the "User Agent" it works perfectly fine. On your hardware, using your OS version, on the single internet connection you tried, in your language, with your set of installed plugins, using your particular browser settings, and trying the limited set of features that you used to test it. That's practically the definition of "it works on my machine." I imagine the Skype team have a somewhat more rigorous testing methodology.
- aiven 8y ago
  I don't understand why so many people downvote this. He didn't say nothing wrong. "I opened in my browser" is not a proper testing, there are a lot might going on. In recent year MS have showed itself in many good ways and I don't think that they will do such shady move without proper reason.
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    I would guess it's because it comes off as a bit snarky, and the same point could have been conveyed in a less patronizing way, but that's all completely subjective, so who really knows (besides, of course, The Shadow).
    - onion2k 8y ago
      I've got to try harder if it was only a bit snarky. :)
ktjfi 8y ago
Not supporting Safari is weird, but not supporting Firefox is perfectly normal, given that it's at a whopping 4.46% of market share in the US.
- worble 8y ago
  "Not supporting" and "Deliberately blocking user agents" are two completely different things though.
  - ktjfi 8y ago
    They simply don't want to read any bug reports from Firefox users because they don't want to support that browser.
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      That is the most likely explanation. "It killed our precioussss IE, we hates it, we hates it!"
- jamienicol 8y ago
  Firefox's market share is presumably comparable to safari on desktop, and edge which is supported.
- birger 8y ago
  For desktop, where one would use this, it is 8%
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  I can’t find any source saying Firefox market share is below 8% in the US on desktop. Can you cite your stat.
  - SyneRyder 8y ago
    StatCounter has Firefox at 7.63% in North America on Desktop. That puts it just behind Edge in usage too. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/north-america#monthly-201802-201902 http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/north...
_Schizotypy 8y ago
This seems rather bizarre, as Microsoft apparently want people to move away from edge since they are working on a new chromium based browser.
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  I thought it is still going to be named Edge. Is that wrong?
  - skoskie 8y ago
    Not wrong.
chupasaurus 8y ago
Same thing with AutoCAD Web and probably many more "Web apps". Enterprised devs have a duck syndrome, nothing new.
dgudkov 8y ago
It's not ridiculous. It just means that they are not ready to provide regular long-term technical support for Firefox users yet, even if it technically works in the current version of Firefox. The reason can be anything - lack of resources, ongoing work on edge cases, licensing issues, etc.
- winter_blue 8y ago
  Back in Nov 2018, Dropbox went down this same lazy and inexcusable path, by programming their Linux client to shut down on any file system that was not Ext4.[1] I was using F2FS. Their excuse was that extended attributes support was critical to Dropbox, which is not a valid excuse since F2FS, XFS, ZFS, etc, all support extended attributes.[2] It would have been just a few lines of code to check if the user was running a filesystem that had extended attributes support. So presumably, they probably just didn't want to QA on multiple systems, so laziness won. I had to back up all my files, reformat my F2FS partition to Ext4, and restore my files, to get Dropbox working again. I've been a paying customer for 4+ years (at the $9.99/month level), and this is what I have to deal with. Moreover, the Dropbox mobile apps and web UI still do not support editing plain text files (.txt / .md) -- even though they've added support for editing MS Doc (.doc / .docx) files. Compared to supporting editing MS Doc files, supporting plain text file editing would be so trivial for them to add, yet they haven't. I keep all my notes and thoughts in plain text files. When I don't have my Linux laptop, I'm forced to use Google Docs on my phone, even though I'd prefer to have all my notes/thoughts in my neatly organized collection text files. Unfortunately, I don't know of any solid alternatives to Dropbox, that have reliable non-flaky support on Linux, and good iOS and Android apps. [1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-client-warns-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-in-Nov-why/td-p/306368 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux
  - url00 8y ago
    Actually, Dropbox's Android app does let you edit text files. It was one of the main reasons I went with Dropbox.
  - 8y ago

whizzkid 8y ago

Basic functionality works fine on Safari as well. Just change the UA.

atrainedmonkey 8y ago

In Microsoft's defence, just because its functional, doesn't mean they're ready to spend time supporting it on other clients from day 1. They may be planning a more gradual roll out to other clients once they have confidence with Chrome.

tcd 8y ago
This is why we have alpha's or beta's, such that you can "opt in" but be warned it may break. Simply not supporting a browser at launch is not a good look for your product.
- johnnyfaehell 8y ago
  Especially when it's a major product and you literally have thousands of engineers.
josteink 8y ago
> In Microsoft's defence, just because its functional, doesn't mean they're ready to spend time supporting it on other clients from day 1. It’s on the public web. It should work in all major browsers. EOT
- IMTDb 8y ago
  It does work for the majority (> 50%) of users. Is it enough ? No. Is it sufficient to be published ? Yes.
ethbro 8y ago
This smacks of the bad old days of the web, where UA checking was de rigour (usually to lock sites to IE). And then, as now, the page usually functioned fine under alternatives with a masked UA. "Warning: You browser is unsupported. You may experience issues. Continue?" is the only defensible roadblock.
mcny 8y ago
» We recommend that web developers avoid UA sniffing as much as possible; modern web platform features are nearly all detectable in easy ways. Over the past year, we’ve seen some UA-sniffing sites that have been updated to detect Microsoft Edge… only to provide it with a legacy IE11 code path. This is not the best approach, as Microsoft Edge matches ‘WebKit’ behaviors, not IE11 behaviors (any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing). In our experience Microsoft Edge runs best on the ‘WebKit’ code paths in these sites. Also, with the internet becoming available on a wider variety of devices, please assume unknown browsers are good – please don’t limit your site to working only on a small set of current known browsers. If you do this, your site will almost certainly break in the future. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-more-interoperable-web-with-microsoft-edge/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...
- gtirloni 8y ago
  Being a large company, I wouldn't expect every team there to have read that. Looks like the Skype Web didn't.
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    More likely someone said "We don't want to put effort into testing Firefox right now."
    - mcny 8y ago
      > More likely someone said "We don't want to put effort into testing Firefox right now." The product teams should NOT have to test on Mozilla Firefox. We (disclaimer: I am not an Mozilla employee. Just someone who loves the web.) have a very robust Web Compat program https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/27435 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/27435 and Web Compat is very interested in helping product teams. I think what the Edge team was trying to say above was detect feature support, not browser vendor. In fact, I would say there are many professionals at Microsoft willing to help the Skype team use feature detection properly. or there is always the Mozilla Developer Documentation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_testing/Cross_browser_testing/Feature_detection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...
Derek_MK 8y ago
They can easily just display a warning that the site is not officially supported on X browser, and the user may run into unexpected errors. This is an active thing that Microsoft is doing, not something they're forced to do.

onion2k 8y ago

What's even more ridiculous is that for Firefox, if you change the "User Agent" it works perfectly fine. On your hardware, using your OS version, on the single internet connection you tried, in your language, with your set of installed plugins, using your particular browser settings, and trying the limited set of features that you used to test it. That's practically the definition of "it works on my machine." I imagine the Skype team have a somewhat more rigorous testing methodology.

aiven 8y ago
I don't understand why so many people downvote this. He didn't say nothing wrong. "I opened in my browser" is not a proper testing, there are a lot might going on. In recent year MS have showed itself in many good ways and I don't think that they will do such shady move without proper reason.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  I would guess it's because it comes off as a bit snarky, and the same point could have been conveyed in a less patronizing way, but that's all completely subjective, so who really knows (besides, of course, The Shadow).
  - onion2k 8y ago
    I've got to try harder if it was only a bit snarky. :)

ktjfi 8y ago

Not supporting Safari is weird, but not supporting Firefox is perfectly normal, given that it's at a whopping 4.46% of market share in the US.

worble 8y ago
"Not supporting" and "Deliberately blocking user agents" are two completely different things though.
- ktjfi 8y ago
  They simply don't want to read any bug reports from Firefox users because they don't want to support that browser.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    That is the most likely explanation. "It killed our precioussss IE, we hates it, we hates it!"
jamienicol 8y ago
Firefox's market share is presumably comparable to safari on desktop, and edge which is supported.
birger 8y ago
For desktop, where one would use this, it is 8%
skinnymuch 8y ago
I can’t find any source saying Firefox market share is below 8% in the US on desktop. Can you cite your stat.
- SyneRyder 8y ago
  StatCounter has Firefox at 7.63% in North America on Desktop. That puts it just behind Edge in usage too. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/north-america#monthly-201802-201902 http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/north...

_Schizotypy 8y ago

This seems rather bizarre, as Microsoft apparently want people to move away from edge since they are working on a new chromium based browser.

skinnymuch 8y ago
I thought it is still going to be named Edge. Is that wrong?
- skoskie 8y ago
  Not wrong.

chupasaurus 8y ago

Same thing with AutoCAD Web and probably many more "Web apps". Enterprised devs have a duck syndrome, nothing new.

dgudkov 8y ago

It's not ridiculous. It just means that they are not ready to provide regular long-term technical support for Firefox users yet, even if it technically works in the current version of Firefox. The reason can be anything - lack of resources, ongoing work on edge cases, licensing issues, etc.

winter_blue 8y ago
Back in Nov 2018, Dropbox went down this same lazy and inexcusable path, by programming their Linux client to shut down on any file system that was not Ext4.[1] I was using F2FS. Their excuse was that extended attributes support was critical to Dropbox, which is not a valid excuse since F2FS, XFS, ZFS, etc, all support extended attributes.[2] It would have been just a few lines of code to check if the user was running a filesystem that had extended attributes support. So presumably, they probably just didn't want to QA on multiple systems, so laziness won. I had to back up all my files, reformat my F2FS partition to Ext4, and restore my files, to get Dropbox working again. I've been a paying customer for 4+ years (at the $9.99/month level), and this is what I have to deal with. Moreover, the Dropbox mobile apps and web UI still do not support editing plain text files (.txt / .md) -- even though they've added support for editing MS Doc (.doc / .docx) files. Compared to supporting editing MS Doc files, supporting plain text file editing would be so trivial for them to add, yet they haven't. I keep all my notes and thoughts in plain text files. When I don't have my Linux laptop, I'm forced to use Google Docs on my phone, even though I'd prefer to have all my notes/thoughts in my neatly organized collection text files. Unfortunately, I don't know of any solid alternatives to Dropbox, that have reliable non-flaky support on Linux, and good iOS and Android apps. [1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-client-warns-me-that-it-ll-stop-syncing-in-Nov-why/td-p/306368 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux
- url00 8y ago
  Actually, Dropbox's Android app does let you edit text files. It was one of the main reasons I went with Dropbox.
- 8y ago