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> Obviously it's more fun for people to assume it's been done on purpose & bash MS I mean, it definitely is, but you also have to admit that it's very in-chara

> Obviously it's more fun for people to assume it's been done on purpose & bash MS I mean, it definitely is, but you also have to admit that it's very in-character for Microsoft to intentionally break stuff, just to push their own software. MS Teams, for example, will pretend that Video calls aren't possible to do on Firefox. Until you use a tool like User-Agent-Switcher to set the user-agent to MS Edge and you find out that video calls and screen sharing work flawlessly. Chrome works as well. With their browser essentially being a reskinned version of it, I guess even they considered it to be too unbelievable if they claimed that video calls couldn't be done in it.

tomduncalf 4y ago
It wouldn’t surprise me if they just don’t want the testing and support overhead of supporting Firefox, and so it’s easier to block it than let people use it but it might be broken (and they then file a support ticket regardless of if it says “unsupported” etc). A shame for sure but probably makes good business sense given Firefox’s declining user base.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Considering you can do a lot of automated testing with many browsers at the same time, this excuse doesn't fly.
  - mccorrinall 4y ago
    Aren’t they the authors of playwright anyway? THE library to test with all major browsers.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      I'm not a web dev, but oh, you're right [0]. [0]: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/
    - tomduncalf 4y ago
      I imagine the tricky bit is testing the audio/video parts – "does the video work reliably with multiple participants" or whatever is probably quite hard to entirely judge in an automated fashion. It wouldn't surprise me if a reasonable amount of tests for something like Teams were still manual, though I'd love to be proven wrong!
      - mccorrinall 4y ago
        > I imagine the tricky bit is testing the audio/video parts – "does the video work reliably with multiple participants" or whatever is probably quite hard to entirely judge in an automated fashion. I actually forgot that Teams has audio and video. You are right about testing those two, I don't have a good idea for that either. I would probably look into using a virtual cam, like OBS implemented one, and then just check the footage on the other end? But honestly, Firefox usually just works.
    - falsenapkin 4y ago
      I imagine at the 180k people strong corporation there may be some gaps between those who work on Teams and those who work on Playwright
      - brynjolf 4y ago
        I agree. Honestly most likely they don't have the resources, the management, the money, the development experience, the culture, the transportation, the air to breathe, the water to drink ro the food tør at to solve this immense problem. Most likely they never even heard of Firefox, Chromium, Puppeteer, Browserstack, Playwright, Selenium or the internet.
        falsenapkin 4y ago
        > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    It's not the testing/finding problems it's the effort to fix them
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      If it already works 99.9% of the time, why not run a series of tests, at least?
      - themitigating 4y ago
        If you aren't going to fix the problems why?
        bayindirh 4y ago
        If you're a company with good intentions, solving trivial problems won't cost you any significant time, then. So, if things are working mostly, and you're intentionally not fixing the trivial problems, then you have bad intentions either directly or indirectly.
- krageon 4y ago
  There's no need to be apologist to a megacorp that does stupid things. They're going to continue even if you don't make excuses for them.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Lol the parent ruined the outrage party, but he’s likely correct. I’ve worked at companies that did the same thing and they weren’t “stupid megacorps”.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - josefx 4y ago
      > I’ve worked at companies that did the same thing The companies you worked for published their own browsers?
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        I'm not sure where exactly you're going with this. I can imagine several possible arguments that someone might make based on this observation, but all of them are pretty obviously poor so I won't impute them upon you.
        mikestew 4y ago
        That was some damned fine word smithing to diplomatically state what savages like myself would have just mangled into less flattering prose. <golf clap>
  - ReactiveJelly 4y ago
    There's a difference between apologetics and explaining
    - fartcannon 4y ago
- wombat-man 4y ago
  Probably. I know it was a different time but they supported old versions of IE even when the market share dwindled below 10%. I guess they probably figure supporting Firefox isn't going to win them enough business to offset the cost.
- bogwog 4y ago
  I doubt that the costs of supporting firefox outweigh the benefits of forcing users to use Edge, especially since it already works on firefox.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  I find the thought that Microsoft doesn't have the budget to support one more browser extremely amusing. But it's likely just statistics as you said. Somebody made the genius move to say "we don't want to spend time testing a browser with 5-10% market share". Which of course it makes sense to MBAs but they are missing so much other nuance.
  - ziml77 4y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if it usage of Firefox is under 1% in the environments Teams is used in. I would expect most companies to just have everyone use Chrome or Edge to lower their own support overhead.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > It wouldn’t surprise me if they just don’t want the testing and support overhead of supporting Firefox, and so it’s easier to block it than let people use it but it might be broken (and they then file a support ticket regardless of if it says “unsupported” etc) So many companies mistake "support" for "support". You can have software that supports platform X without providing technical support for it when run on platform X. Commercial software companies tend to confuse these two very different meanings of support.
nicce 4y ago
> MS Teams, for example, will pretend that Video calls aren't possible to do on Firefox. Until you use a tool like User-Agent-Switcher to set the user-agent to MS Edge and you find out that video calls and screen sharing work flawlessly. Yes, video and screenshare works but audio does not. I have never succeed on that in Linux. Some component is missing.
- carpenecopinum 4y ago
  I would love to give you a "just do X" solution for it, but when I tried it roughly 5 minutes before writing my original comment, it worked without any issues (on a somewhat up-to-date Arch Linux). Everybody in the call could hear me, see my webcam and look at my screen share. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you to get it working, though.
  - nicce 4y ago
    I haven’t tried it for half year, maybe something has changed. I have Arch Linux as well. It could not find audio devices on Firefox when using Teams. This happened with two different devices. As side note, I only use Firefox Developer edition, but I doubt they have significant differences on this matter.
- spockz 4y ago
  How did you get screen sharing to work? I never managed to get it to work on fedora in either chromium or Firefox. Something to do with wayland or not. Jitsi however worked the first time I tried it.
  - nicce 4y ago
    Wayland requires some additional work. You need to install correct xdg-portal. Chromium also requires specific flag before WebRTC works. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#xdg-desktop-portal...
- weberer 4y ago
  Have you looked at your microphone's volume in your OS's settings?
pjmlp 4y ago
So just like Google Hangouts...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
weberer 4y ago
MS Teams is the worst. Their Linux client has been in "Preview" for the past two years. It's still missing many features like background blurring or the ability to show more than 4 people on screen at the same time. After a certain point, you have to stop making excuses for them and accept they're abusing their monopoly position to intentionally harm competition.
- ziml77 4y ago
  They're not specifically screwing over Linux users. Teams just outright sucks. The Windows client is buggy and slow. I think they don't care to actually put development effort into Teams at all because it's not a product that sells people on their ecosystem other than satisfying their desire to not pay even more to another company just to get a chat application.
Miraste 4y ago
Conversely, I use Edge for Google sites (and nothing else) because Google goes out of their way to make them unusably slow on Firefox. They look for polyfilled, unimplemented, or bugged features that see low usage, implement them in Chrome, and then make Gmail, YouTube, etc. depend on them so Firefox takes 20s to load.
- f1refly 4y ago
  I don't know your use case, but I can recommend one of the invidious instances to access youtube. There's a handy list on the formerly main instance https://invidio.us https://invidio.us from which one can pick.

tomduncalf 4y ago

It wouldn’t surprise me if they just don’t want the testing and support overhead of supporting Firefox, and so it’s easier to block it than let people use it but it might be broken (and they then file a support ticket regardless of if it says “unsupported” etc). A shame for sure but probably makes good business sense given Firefox’s declining user base.

bayindirh 4y ago
Considering you can do a lot of automated testing with many browsers at the same time, this excuse doesn't fly.
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  Aren’t they the authors of playwright anyway? THE library to test with all major browsers.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    I'm not a web dev, but oh, you're right [0]. [0]: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/
  - tomduncalf 4y ago
    I imagine the tricky bit is testing the audio/video parts – "does the video work reliably with multiple participants" or whatever is probably quite hard to entirely judge in an automated fashion. It wouldn't surprise me if a reasonable amount of tests for something like Teams were still manual, though I'd love to be proven wrong!
    - mccorrinall 4y ago
      > I imagine the tricky bit is testing the audio/video parts – "does the video work reliably with multiple participants" or whatever is probably quite hard to entirely judge in an automated fashion. I actually forgot that Teams has audio and video. You are right about testing those two, I don't have a good idea for that either. I would probably look into using a virtual cam, like OBS implemented one, and then just check the footage on the other end? But honestly, Firefox usually just works.
  - falsenapkin 4y ago
    I imagine at the 180k people strong corporation there may be some gaps between those who work on Teams and those who work on Playwright
    - brynjolf 4y ago
      I agree. Honestly most likely they don't have the resources, the management, the money, the development experience, the culture, the transportation, the air to breathe, the water to drink ro the food tør at to solve this immense problem. Most likely they never even heard of Firefox, Chromium, Puppeteer, Browserstack, Playwright, Selenium or the internet.
      - falsenapkin 4y ago
        > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
- themitigating 4y ago
  It's not the testing/finding problems it's the effort to fix them
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    If it already works 99.9% of the time, why not run a series of tests, at least?
    - themitigating 4y ago
      If you aren't going to fix the problems why?
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        If you're a company with good intentions, solving trivial problems won't cost you any significant time, then. So, if things are working mostly, and you're intentionally not fixing the trivial problems, then you have bad intentions either directly or indirectly.
krageon 4y ago
There's no need to be apologist to a megacorp that does stupid things. They're going to continue even if you don't make excuses for them.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Lol the parent ruined the outrage party, but he’s likely correct. I’ve worked at companies that did the same thing and they weren’t “stupid megacorps”.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - josefx 4y ago
    > I’ve worked at companies that did the same thing The companies you worked for published their own browsers?
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      I'm not sure where exactly you're going with this. I can imagine several possible arguments that someone might make based on this observation, but all of them are pretty obviously poor so I won't impute them upon you.
      - mikestew 4y ago
        That was some damned fine word smithing to diplomatically state what savages like myself would have just mangled into less flattering prose. <golf clap>
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  There's a difference between apologetics and explaining
  - fartcannon 4y ago
wombat-man 4y ago
Probably. I know it was a different time but they supported old versions of IE even when the market share dwindled below 10%. I guess they probably figure supporting Firefox isn't going to win them enough business to offset the cost.
bogwog 4y ago
I doubt that the costs of supporting firefox outweigh the benefits of forcing users to use Edge, especially since it already works on firefox.
pdimitar 4y ago
I find the thought that Microsoft doesn't have the budget to support one more browser extremely amusing. But it's likely just statistics as you said. Somebody made the genius move to say "we don't want to spend time testing a browser with 5-10% market share". Which of course it makes sense to MBAs but they are missing so much other nuance.
- ziml77 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if it usage of Firefox is under 1% in the environments Teams is used in. I would expect most companies to just have everyone use Chrome or Edge to lower their own support overhead.
ryandrake 4y ago
> It wouldn’t surprise me if they just don’t want the testing and support overhead of supporting Firefox, and so it’s easier to block it than let people use it but it might be broken (and they then file a support ticket regardless of if it says “unsupported” etc) So many companies mistake "support" for "support". You can have software that supports platform X without providing technical support for it when run on platform X. Commercial software companies tend to confuse these two very different meanings of support.

nicce 4y ago

> MS Teams, for example, will pretend that Video calls aren't possible to do on Firefox. Until you use a tool like User-Agent-Switcher to set the user-agent to MS Edge and you find out that video calls and screen sharing work flawlessly. Yes, video and screenshare works but audio does not. I have never succeed on that in Linux. Some component is missing.

carpenecopinum 4y ago
I would love to give you a "just do X" solution for it, but when I tried it roughly 5 minutes before writing my original comment, it worked without any issues (on a somewhat up-to-date Arch Linux). Everybody in the call could hear me, see my webcam and look at my screen share. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you to get it working, though.
- nicce 4y ago
  I haven’t tried it for half year, maybe something has changed. I have Arch Linux as well. It could not find audio devices on Firefox when using Teams. This happened with two different devices. As side note, I only use Firefox Developer edition, but I doubt they have significant differences on this matter.
spockz 4y ago
How did you get screen sharing to work? I never managed to get it to work on fedora in either chromium or Firefox. Something to do with wayland or not. Jitsi however worked the first time I tried it.
- nicce 4y ago
  Wayland requires some additional work. You need to install correct xdg-portal. Chromium also requires specific flag before WebRTC works. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#xdg-desktop-portal...
weberer 4y ago
Have you looked at your microphone's volume in your OS's settings?

pjmlp 4y ago

So just like Google Hangouts...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

weberer 4y ago

MS Teams is the worst. Their Linux client has been in "Preview" for the past two years. It's still missing many features like background blurring or the ability to show more than 4 people on screen at the same time. After a certain point, you have to stop making excuses for them and accept they're abusing their monopoly position to intentionally harm competition.

ziml77 4y ago
They're not specifically screwing over Linux users. Teams just outright sucks. The Windows client is buggy and slow. I think they don't care to actually put development effort into Teams at all because it's not a product that sells people on their ecosystem other than satisfying their desire to not pay even more to another company just to get a chat application.

Miraste 4y ago

Conversely, I use Edge for Google sites (and nothing else) because Google goes out of their way to make them unusably slow on Firefox. They look for polyfilled, unimplemented, or bugged features that see low usage, implement them in Chrome, and then make Gmail, YouTube, etc. depend on them so Firefox takes 20s to load.

f1refly 4y ago
I don't know your use case, but I can recommend one of the invidious instances to access youtube. There's a handy list on the formerly main instance https://invidio.us https://invidio.us from which one can pick.