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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 bu
by 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 agoConsidering you can do a lot of automated testing with many browsers at the same time, this excuse doesn't fly.
- mccorrinall 4y agoAren’t they the authors of playwright anyway? THE library to test with all major browsers.
- bayindirh 4y agoI'm not a web dev, but oh, you're right [0]. [0]: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/
- tomduncalf 4y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoIt's not the testing/finding problems it's the effort to fix them
- bayindirh 4y agoIf it already works 99.9% of the time, why not run a series of tests, at least?
- themitigating 4y agoIf you aren't going to fix the problems why?
- bayindirh 4y agoIf 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 agoThere'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 agoLol 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 agoI'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 agoThat 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 agoThere's a difference between apologetics and explaining
- fartcannon 4y ago
- wombat-man 4y agoProbably. 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.