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Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

417 points by faebi 4y ago

tanseydavid 4y ago
Visiting this link in Chrome ends up in a redirect loop. One the URLs that passes by during the loop indicates: "unsupported browser" at the end of the string./
voytec 4y ago
Firefox ESR as well.
comfrey 4y ago
Any context, reasoning, or background?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I found this: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-performance-improvements-less-cpu-memory https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-...
inductive_magic 4y ago
I get “hmm, your browser isn’t supported” on safari mobile.
- Xerox9213 4y ago
  The link is https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser I imagine this is what Teams forwards you to when it sees FF Nightly as your browser.
valvar 4y ago
Happens with a lot of websites, unfortunately. Also experienced this with Samsung when trying to manage my account for their SmartThings app.
precommunicator 4y ago
Long time ago my bank used to block it, a simple change of User-Agent fixed that problem.
hellcow 4y ago
Not just nightly. Stable is blocked as well. Seems we're in the next IE-era.
- yokoprime 4y ago
  Then there is an error. Teams supports FF stable, they have even made efforts to improve support https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=Firefox https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...
  - lousken 4y ago
    both nighly and stable ff is broken - my mother couldn't access her meeting in Firefox the other day because Teams said "you only have to use Edge or Chrome"
    - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      This is absolutely true. There are some types of meetings (likely the ones which are MS Stream-based -- but as a plain user this is impossible to detect) where upon joining you will get the dreaded message about incompatible browser.
  - drowsspa 4y ago
    I don't know what is "support" for them, but I've never been able to make calls in it. Only the chat function works.
    - warner25 4y ago
      That's what I was thinking too. I have to keep Chrome installed on my Linux machine exclusively to use Teams for voice and video calls, since calls have never been possible in Firefox and the Linux desktop client is so buggy.
      - vetinari 4y ago
prophesi 4y ago
Is it blocking Firefox entirely? At least on an M2 Mac, it shows "Your browser isn't supported" running Firefox v110.0.1.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- red_trumpet 4y ago
  Works for me on Kubuntu 22.04. Note that the link above directly goes to the error page.
  - prophesi 4y ago
    Yeah, I logged in and it still gave the error page after routing to /#go. Same happens on my Fedora machine.
- asddubs 4y ago
  so is this the ie11 user agent matching thing?
  - yokoprime 4y ago
    No, there is something wrong with their browser detection. Teams supports Firefox, Chrome and Edge https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=Firefox https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...
    - yazzku 4y ago
      What if you fake the user agent?
- squeegeeninja 4y ago
  Firefox has been blocked entirely for at least a year now, in my experience.
yokoprime 4y ago
Why not use stable FF for your business meetings?
- phneutral26 4y ago
  Thats also blocked. But what did you expect from a greedy multi-million $ company, that already forces their browser on your system. Yust recently there was a post on here that pointed out how Microsoft forces Edge on their Windows Users. So yeah, what did you expect...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
biehl 4y ago
Works for me with the Office 365 Teams. Is the one on live.com different?
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  They’re in theory built on the same platform, but the live.com version is “Teams for Home” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/teams-for-home https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/teams-for-ho...
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Yes, OP is misinformed and wrong and so are many comments here. Office 365 Teams works in Firefox. Source: Me, right now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
https://teams.microsoft.com https://teams.microsoft.com Firefox 110.0.1 on Linux, works perfectly What am I missing? The link in the submission points to https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser but https://teams.live.com/ https://teams.live.com/ works without issues
- tredre3 4y ago
  > What am I missing? It's blocked on Nightly. 110.0.1 is the current stable version, not nightly.
  - rejectfinite 4y ago
    Again, cannot believe so many people are wrong about this. teams.LIVE.com is the HOME version of TEAMS. - does NOT work on ANY FF version. teams.MICROSOFT.com is the ENTERPRISE version of Teams. - WORKS on FF But hey feel good when devs are wrong about basic shit. I have some job security then. *again downvoted by mad incels
behnamoh 4y ago
Controversial opinion: I used to like Firefox but at some point you have to accept the reality: No developer likes to have 2 backlogs, one for Chrome and one for FF. IMO It's better to adopt Chromium-based browsers and put pressure on Google to avoid letting it become the sole decision-maker about the web.
- jzombie 4y ago
  What about Safari? From my experience, most WebRTC issues (i.e. Teams) are involved around Safari instead of Firefox or Chrome, provided the SDP negotiation is sequenced correctly.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  How the fuck could that happen if their browser engine is the only one supported in most websites and their browser has close to a monopoly when it comes to market share?
- dijit 4y ago
  Respectfully, I don't care that you have two backlogs. Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer. I'm already sick of how much I have to kowtow to large companies because they treat developer time as costly, but user time as free.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    > Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer. Respectfully, a lot of developers don't care about losing a small percentage of users. They will get to focus their effort on Chrome users and increase the service quality for them.
    - dijit 4y ago
      That's fine. If they can't manage to make a service work using appropriate web standards then I don't think I trust them with hosting a service, my data, or to create adequate products anyway. -- I mean, what other corners are being cut?
bluedino 4y ago
Whatever software blocker BIGCORP uses has prevented me from running non-release FF for quite a while at work
- scarface74 4y ago
  And you don’t see why a corporation would do that?
tonetheman 4y ago
[dead]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
_joel 4y ago
How's it fingerprinting, can you fake the user-agent or using more modern methods?
dogma1138 4y ago
Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent, w/e string matching they do is too strict they aren’t checking for actual JS/WebASM compatibility or anything like that. Chrome stable with a non standard user agent doesn’t work on via the windows live url but works through the O365 corporate one, same with Safari Mobile without any user agent modification. This to me looks like stupidity more than malice, their link doesn’t even recommend Edge but rather Chrome and Safari…
- screamingninja 4y ago
  > Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent More than a "boo-boo" in my opinion. Same issue with the new Bing Chatbot - it only works on Edge, but then works perfectly in Firefox when you change your user agent string. Not a technical limitation, but just an anti-competitive desire to drive users to their own products.
- Donckele 4y ago
  +1 for stupidity
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Stupidity is only ever acceptable when it agrees with business objectives. Malice is the sensible default assumption when money is on the line.
    - prettyStandard 4y ago
      "Break it but make it look like a mistake" /s
      - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
        I wouldn't even use sarcasm here. It it is literally an actual and important part of the history of Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
29athrowaway 4y ago
Change your user agent, not your browser.
plorg 4y ago
My organization (which uses Teams) forcibly migrated all Firefox users to Edge a couple of weeks ago and uninstalled FF. They were citing incompatibility with some software and I assumed that meant the new ERP system being adopted by one of the larger departments.
- number6 4y ago
  At least Edge is now Chrome...
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    "At least" makes it sound like that's a silver lining, but that makes it worse. It's exacerbating the Blink monoculture problem.
    - number6 4y ago
      You are right; it is more defeatism than optimism really
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Microsoft is very heavily lobbying organizations to use edge as a standard browser right now. They're doing the same to us. It's really annoying. They're hell-bent on increasing marketshare no matter what.
  - fatneckbeard 4y ago
    trying to get rid of a nother IM client at my place. everyone hates it because the one they are replacing is very simple and quick
  - jzombie 4y ago
    It would be interesting if Google tweaked their Chromium licensing so that Edge couldn't use it. Then Microsoft wouldn't have a browser at all.
jzombie 4y ago
When clicking the link in Chrome on macOS, it goes into an infinite URL redirect loop w/ one of the URLs being "unsupported browser." This didn't happen the first time I clicked the link, by the way. It occurred on the second. The first click, I was redirected through a bunch of pages until I landed on the sign-in form. It took a few seconds to arrive there after navigating the redirects. I thought the experience was so janky that I decided to try it again, then discovered the redirect loop.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
It's 2023. Why are we still doing user agent detection? We're supposed to do feature detection. userAgent is deprecated. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/userAgent https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/u...
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  How do you detect whether the user's browser has a slow implementation of an API without actually freezing the browser for 8 seconds?
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    1. Pick the API that's most likely to be the fastest (based on marketshare) as the default to use. 2. Use `setInterval` to start your benchmark routine. 3. Benchmark function runs the API using a simple loop that will return quickly (i.e. within 2ms) using performance.now to evaluate. 4. When you obtain enough samples to indicate an alternate path is faster disable the benchmark function No freezing the browser. Shouldn't take too long to switch to an optimized version. That being said, this is a lot of complexity / hard to implement in a robust and fast way so I'm not saying it's a better answer.
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      Yeah or just test the user agent.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
  Not always that simple. Where I work I need to provide a list of browsers customers can use, list those in the documentation and make sure QA test all of them and block any others. Bugs in the app can lead to big issues and telling the customers to use whatever browser suits them and "if it works it works" is not good enough. There are still large differences between browsers that feature existence is not same as feature conptivinility. Of course customers can tweak user agent and "lie" about their browser but then responsibility of issues is shifted to them.
tmdh 4y ago
This may be unrelated. Is it legal to ship a Firefox fork as a distribution with a Chrome user agent by default?
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  as long as you don't include any of the firefox or mozilla branding, because you don't have the rights to those: absolutely.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    There are also Firefox extensions that let you set a custom user agent. It might make you easier to fingerprint (unusual combination of user agent and browser features means very very high uniqueness), but it will allow you to bypass buggy user agent checks if needed.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      Although of course an even better solution is to complain and get MS to fix their shit. This was almost certainly someone not realizing they should feature test instead of checking a UA.
      - kwhitefoot 4y ago
        Yeah, right!
guilhas 4y ago
I was using MSTeams this week in Linux, and it was showing everything OK, webcam and audio, but the person on the other side was not receiving webcam image, in Windows. We tried several things, update browsers, Firefox, Chromium, Flatpak... In the end we just made a Jitsi meeting https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/join-a-meeting https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/join-a-meeti...
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Jitsi is really great yeah. It works in every browser and the video is much smoother than teams' is. I think jitsi favors framerate over quality and teams does the opposite. I really prefer the framerate approach because it makes it feel much more natural, like you're really talking to someone instead of a postage stamp sized picture on the screen.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Microsoft has some of the worst developers in big tech. I worked with two principal engineers from Microsoft and I swore I would never work with anyone from Microsoft again.
- dijit 4y ago
  I dislike microsoft irrationally, but I would find it hard to paint with such a broad brush. Typescript & vscode are products microsoft produced and are beloved. you can also find things in Windows that are just “better” than what we had in Linux land until very recently, namely IOCompletion Ports and the iSCSI stuff.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    Typescript as a language is fine but as an implementation is horribly slow. Same with vs code.
worksonmine 4y ago
This is not just nightly, even Firefox-esr on Debian didn't support screen-sharing at least a few months ago. Had issues during client meetings last year and since then I always propose google meet instead if I see a teams link in the invitation, explaining why. It's not technical it's lazy devs. The button is disabled claiming my browser doesn't support it. Bullshit.
- toastal 4y ago
  Jitsi works for screensharing on X11 + Fx for me. It's a worthy alternative if you want to escape not unjust Microsoft but Google as well.
altairprime 4y ago
Also Safari iOS, so that won’t last very long.
Saris 4y ago
I see they're still doing the usual back-button hijack that every microsoft website seems to do as well.
superkuh 4y ago
Modern web development has made it so that browsers are essentially just a VM for running javascript applications. Each megacorp (and mozilla, the odd institution out) browser is now it's own OS. It's no surprise that each OS is diverging from the others. Especially now that the W3C has been sidelined and the megacorp controlled WHATWG is making the calls (in the best case, in the worst, or more common case, each browser OS just does it's own proprietary thing). You wouldn't be surprised that Windows or Mac OS can't run a linux elf, or vice versas. Same here. This phenomenon is web devs getting what they deserve and dragging everyone down with them.
rozab 4y ago
I have a regular teams call with somebody, and never use it outside of this. A few months ago it was blocking both Firefox and Chromium user agents on Linux. Rather than mucking about with it I just switched to a Windows laptop for this meeting. But last week I tried it on Linux Firefox and it works (well, to the limited extent that teams works at all)
LeonM 4y ago
Nobody here commenting on the fact that Slack blocks Firefox as well for voice/video calls? I'm not a regular Slack user, but when I tried the voice call option earlier this week first I got a notification that they were switching to some new style of video conferencing called "Huddles", and it gave me an option to choose between "huddles" and "classic" video calls, which was confusing to begin with. I choose the latter, but I got a compatibility error with my browser, advising me to use huddles instead (really, they couldn't detect that earlier?). Anyway, when I tried to 'huddle' my customer, it simple said my browser (Firefox on Linux) wasn't compatible, and that I must install Chrome to use the feature. This is where I closed Slack and used my phone to make the call.
- slater 4y ago
  Slack audio & video calls work fine on my Firefox.
- arp242 4y ago
  It doesn't "block Firefox", it just doesn't work because it uses some now-deprecated experimental APIs for it that Firefox never implemented. The whole video stuff was kind of a mess for a time with different browsers implementing different things. This is probably why you shouldn't use experimental APIs, but people want features, so... This was the status last time I used it a few months ago anyway; I believe they were planning on fixing it – they will have to sooner or later, since Chrome will remove these APIs at some point.
calibas 4y ago
I don't buy that this is accidental. When you write software, you test it on every platform you choose to support. If it doesn't work on a supported platform, then you take the time to fix it before release. It's not an "accident" when the software doesn't work on a platform you didn't bother to test on. That platform is being neglected by policy, not because of some "accident" in the code.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  > When you write software, you test it on every platform you choose to support. This depends on your definition of "support". It's very likely that Microsoft do not claim to support (as in, put customer support resources behind) Firefox Nightly, this would be reasonable as it's provided for development utility, not daily use. However, I do somewhat disagree that you test it on every platform. If Teams is built as a website, do we expect them to test every feature of every release on every browser? Probably not, we expect that they do reasonable testing across a representative range of browsers, maybe focused on major features.
  - calibas 4y ago
    > If Teams is built as a website, do we expect them to test every feature of every release on every browser? If they've got good unit tests, they may test every feature of every Teams release and I assume they test on all the browsers/versions that represent the vast majority of the market. They don't bother supporting FF Nightly because it's not important to them, not because of some "accident" in the code.
- kredd 4y ago
  You guys test against non-stable versions of every browser before release?
  - calibas 4y ago
    Nope, and that's a matter of policy. I certainly wouldn't argue it's an "accident" that a site I create doesn't work properly in FF Nightly.
m00dy 4y ago
If any MS Teams developer here, here is my bug report. I can't use same sso account on android and on macos at the same time. The token gets invalidated for some reason.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
I'm one of those people who choose to use FF Nightly. It works with Teams unless you want to make a call or share screen - you need to change the User Agent then. I'm too lazy to do it so I'm using a phone app for calls and complaining to everyone that Teams is crap. And I mean, it is crap by itself. It is badly thought out, it has its bad moments even on its native platform, its system of teams etc. is confusing and far inferior to the ones used by its competitors. Frankly, if it wasn't MS and their dominant market position/integration with AD, very few people would make the decision to use it for daily work. /rant
lars_francke 4y ago
Piggybacking here: Does anyone understand the identity management of Microsoft? Is there any way for me to see all my "accounts" associated with various email addresses and the organizations they belong to? I haven't been able to access most of the Microsoft ecosystem due to various errors on MS side and I'd really like to get it fixed. Some customers are inviting me to their teams and I always have to say "sorry, doesn't work"
pentagrama 4y ago
I wonder if this has something to do that Microsoft is going to launch a big update for Teams soon [1]. I thought that the update was most about the desktop version who is switching from Electron to Edge Webview2 technology, but maybe it affects also the web version. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-performance-improvements-less-cpu-memory https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-...
nubinetwork 4y ago
Uh, teams never worked on Firefox on Linux.
l0b0 4y ago
We need a third option in the malice/incompetence spectrum: active neglect. It's the safest way for big organisations to push users off of platforms they don't like. A combination of one or more of the following is going to ensure that the platform support is always wonky: - Under-fund the testing. This can backfire if whistle-blowers point out the change. - Assign bad apples to the platform. This can't really backfire, because of the woke "everyone's equally good at everything" thing. - Keep moving the target, similar to the "extend" part of embrace-extend-extinguish. "Of course we can't support legacy platforms like Firefox, because they don't support this incredibly niche 3D tile caching optimisation flag, which only Teams and two other products on the globe use."
tag2103 4y ago
We are a smaller company, only 10 users. We are in the process of fully ditching Microsoft for a full linux stack using Samba for AD (for the leprosy known as Quickbooks alone). I've blocked MS at the pihole and was expecting people to bring torches and pitchforks. The general consensus was we should have done this years ago and how did you make my computer so much faster. To hell with Microsoft and their tripe.
- c7DJTLrn 4y ago
  Nice. I've also blocked Microsoft Teams in the sense that I won't work for a company that uses it, or any of the Office suite for that matter. Always willing to "unblock" it should Microsoft have an epiphany some day and decide to invest in building good products.
- toastal 4y ago
  PiHoling Microsoft GitHub too?
  - oblio 4y ago
    *crickets*
    - toastal 4y ago
      Hopefully the OP already migrated repositories elsewhere and only allows Microsoft GitHub to open merge requests to projects that have yet to institute a mirror or mailing list.
cronix 4y ago
I'm not using a FF nightly build, but I initially get a screen along the lines that my browser isn't supported and a split second later it goes away and a login form pops up. There's more text but it flashes so quickly I can't really make out the rest.
rejectfinite 4y ago
I have seen this error before :) A lot here. live.com is the "personal" Teams, the one pinned in Windows 11. teams.microsoft.com is the enterprise "real" Teams, the first one they released. They are different, why there is 2 downloads here. But HN loves to hate on Teams so... carry on :) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app
cpeterso 4y ago
How many companies test their websites in pre-release versions of Chrome or Firefox? Some brave volunteers on the team (even non-developers) could dogfood test Chrome or Firefox Beta (or even Chrome Dev or Firefox Nightly) as their regular browser for day-to-day work. It’s not full test coverage of your website, but they would identify major breaking issues before your end users do. They might find be new browser bugs that Google or Mozilla should fix or breaking web API changes that your website needs to adapt to.

417 points by faebi 4y ago

Visiting this link in Chrome ends up in a redirect loop. One the URLs that passes by during the loop indicates: "unsupported browser" at the end of the string./

voytec 4y ago

Firefox ESR as well.

comfrey 4y ago

Any context, reasoning, or background?

smoldesu 4y ago
I found this: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-performance-improvements-less-cpu-memory https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-...

inductive_magic 4y ago

I get “hmm, your browser isn’t supported” on safari mobile.

Xerox9213 4y ago
The link is https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser I imagine this is what Teams forwards you to when it sees FF Nightly as your browser.

valvar 4y ago

Happens with a lot of websites, unfortunately. Also experienced this with Samsung when trying to manage my account for their SmartThings app.

precommunicator 4y ago

Long time ago my bank used to block it, a simple change of User-Agent fixed that problem.

hellcow 4y ago

Not just nightly. Stable is blocked as well. Seems we're in the next IE-era.

yokoprime 4y ago
Then there is an error. Teams supports FF stable, they have even made efforts to improve support https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=Firefox https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...
- lousken 4y ago
  both nighly and stable ff is broken - my mother couldn't access her meeting in Firefox the other day because Teams said "you only have to use Edge or Chrome"
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    This is absolutely true. There are some types of meetings (likely the ones which are MS Stream-based -- but as a plain user this is impossible to detect) where upon joining you will get the dreaded message about incompatible browser.
- drowsspa 4y ago
  I don't know what is "support" for them, but I've never been able to make calls in it. Only the chat function works.
  - warner25 4y ago
    That's what I was thinking too. I have to keep Chrome installed on my Linux machine exclusively to use Teams for voice and video calls, since calls have never been possible in Firefox and the Linux desktop client is so buggy.
    - vetinari 4y ago

prophesi 4y ago

Is it blocking Firefox entirely? At least on an M2 Mac, it shows "Your browser isn't supported" running Firefox v110.0.1.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
red_trumpet 4y ago
Works for me on Kubuntu 22.04. Note that the link above directly goes to the error page.
- prophesi 4y ago
  Yeah, I logged in and it still gave the error page after routing to /#go. Same happens on my Fedora machine.
asddubs 4y ago
so is this the ie11 user agent matching thing?
- yokoprime 4y ago
  No, there is something wrong with their browser detection. Teams supports Firefox, Chrome and Edge https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=Firefox https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...
  - yazzku 4y ago
    What if you fake the user agent?
squeegeeninja 4y ago
Firefox has been blocked entirely for at least a year now, in my experience.

yokoprime 4y ago

Why not use stable FF for your business meetings?

phneutral26 4y ago
Thats also blocked. But what did you expect from a greedy multi-million $ company, that already forces their browser on your system. Yust recently there was a post on here that pointed out how Microsoft forces Edge on their Windows Users. So yeah, what did you expect...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

biehl 4y ago

Works for me with the Office 365 Teams. Is the one on live.com different?

mynameisvlad 4y ago
They’re in theory built on the same platform, but the live.com version is “Teams for Home” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/teams-for-home https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/teams-for-ho...
rejectfinite 4y ago
Yes, OP is misinformed and wrong and so are many comments here. Office 365 Teams works in Firefox. Source: Me, right now.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

https://teams.microsoft.com https://teams.microsoft.com Firefox 110.0.1 on Linux, works perfectly What am I missing? The link in the submission points to https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser but https://teams.live.com/ https://teams.live.com/ works without issues

tredre3 4y ago
> What am I missing? It's blocked on Nightly. 110.0.1 is the current stable version, not nightly.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Again, cannot believe so many people are wrong about this. teams.LIVE.com is the HOME version of TEAMS. - does NOT work on ANY FF version. teams.MICROSOFT.com is the ENTERPRISE version of Teams. - WORKS on FF But hey feel good when devs are wrong about basic shit. I have some job security then. *again downvoted by mad incels

behnamoh 4y ago

Controversial opinion: I used to like Firefox but at some point you have to accept the reality: No developer likes to have 2 backlogs, one for Chrome and one for FF. IMO It's better to adopt Chromium-based browsers and put pressure on Google to avoid letting it become the sole decision-maker about the web.

jzombie 4y ago
What about Safari? From my experience, most WebRTC issues (i.e. Teams) are involved around Safari instead of Firefox or Chrome, provided the SDP negotiation is sequenced correctly.
doodlesdev 4y ago
How the fuck could that happen if their browser engine is the only one supported in most websites and their browser has close to a monopoly when it comes to market share?
dijit 4y ago
Respectfully, I don't care that you have two backlogs. Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer. I'm already sick of how much I have to kowtow to large companies because they treat developer time as costly, but user time as free.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  > Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer. Respectfully, a lot of developers don't care about losing a small percentage of users. They will get to focus their effort on Chrome users and increase the service quality for them.
  - dijit 4y ago
    That's fine. If they can't manage to make a service work using appropriate web standards then I don't think I trust them with hosting a service, my data, or to create adequate products anyway. -- I mean, what other corners are being cut?

bluedino 4y ago

Whatever software blocker BIGCORP uses has prevented me from running non-release FF for quite a while at work

scarface74 4y ago
And you don’t see why a corporation would do that?

tonetheman 4y ago

[dead]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

_joel 4y ago

How's it fingerprinting, can you fake the user-agent or using more modern methods?

dogma1138 4y ago

Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent, w/e string matching they do is too strict they aren’t checking for actual JS/WebASM compatibility or anything like that. Chrome stable with a non standard user agent doesn’t work on via the windows live url but works through the O365 corporate one, same with Safari Mobile without any user agent modification. This to me looks like stupidity more than malice, their link doesn’t even recommend Edge but rather Chrome and Safari…

screamingninja 4y ago
> Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent More than a "boo-boo" in my opinion. Same issue with the new Bing Chatbot - it only works on Edge, but then works perfectly in Firefox when you change your user agent string. Not a technical limitation, but just an anti-competitive desire to drive users to their own products.
Donckele 4y ago
+1 for stupidity
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Stupidity is only ever acceptable when it agrees with business objectives. Malice is the sensible default assumption when money is on the line.
  - prettyStandard 4y ago
    "Break it but make it look like a mistake" /s
    - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
      I wouldn't even use sarcasm here. It it is literally an actual and important part of the history of Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

29athrowaway 4y ago

Change your user agent, not your browser.

plorg 4y ago

My organization (which uses Teams) forcibly migrated all Firefox users to Edge a couple of weeks ago and uninstalled FF. They were citing incompatibility with some software and I assumed that meant the new ERP system being adopted by one of the larger departments.

number6 4y ago
At least Edge is now Chrome...
- josephcsible 4y ago
  "At least" makes it sound like that's a silver lining, but that makes it worse. It's exacerbating the Blink monoculture problem.
  - number6 4y ago
    You are right; it is more defeatism than optimism really
wkat4242 4y ago
Microsoft is very heavily lobbying organizations to use edge as a standard browser right now. They're doing the same to us. It's really annoying. They're hell-bent on increasing marketshare no matter what.
- fatneckbeard 4y ago
  trying to get rid of a nother IM client at my place. everyone hates it because the one they are replacing is very simple and quick
- jzombie 4y ago
  It would be interesting if Google tweaked their Chromium licensing so that Edge couldn't use it. Then Microsoft wouldn't have a browser at all.

jzombie 4y ago

When clicking the link in Chrome on macOS, it goes into an infinite URL redirect loop w/ one of the URLs being "unsupported browser." This didn't happen the first time I clicked the link, by the way. It occurred on the second. The first click, I was redirected through a bunch of pages until I landed on the sign-in form. It took a few seconds to arrive there after navigating the redirects. I thought the experience was so janky that I decided to try it again, then discovered the redirect loop.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

It's 2023. Why are we still doing user agent detection? We're supposed to do feature detection. userAgent is deprecated. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/userAgent https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/u...

madeofpalk 4y ago
How do you detect whether the user's browser has a slow implementation of an API without actually freezing the browser for 8 seconds?
- vlovich123 4y ago
  1. Pick the API that's most likely to be the fastest (based on marketshare) as the default to use. 2. Use `setInterval` to start your benchmark routine. 3. Benchmark function runs the API using a simple loop that will return quickly (i.e. within 2ms) using performance.now to evaluate. 4. When you obtain enough samples to indicate an alternate path is faster disable the benchmark function No freezing the browser. Shouldn't take too long to switch to an optimized version. That being said, this is a lot of complexity / hard to implement in a robust and fast way so I'm not saying it's a better answer.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Yeah or just test the user agent.
tuwtuwtuwtuw 4y ago
Not always that simple. Where I work I need to provide a list of browsers customers can use, list those in the documentation and make sure QA test all of them and block any others. Bugs in the app can lead to big issues and telling the customers to use whatever browser suits them and "if it works it works" is not good enough. There are still large differences between browsers that feature existence is not same as feature conptivinility. Of course customers can tweak user agent and "lie" about their browser but then responsibility of issues is shifted to them.

tmdh 4y ago

This may be unrelated. Is it legal to ship a Firefox fork as a distribution with a Chrome user agent by default?

TheRealPomax 4y ago
as long as you don't include any of the firefox or mozilla branding, because you don't have the rights to those: absolutely.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  There are also Firefox extensions that let you set a custom user agent. It might make you easier to fingerprint (unusual combination of user agent and browser features means very very high uniqueness), but it will allow you to bypass buggy user agent checks if needed.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    Although of course an even better solution is to complain and get MS to fix their shit. This was almost certainly someone not realizing they should feature test instead of checking a UA.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Yeah, right!

guilhas 4y ago

I was using MSTeams this week in Linux, and it was showing everything OK, webcam and audio, but the person on the other side was not receiving webcam image, in Windows. We tried several things, update browsers, Firefox, Chromium, Flatpak... In the end we just made a Jitsi meeting https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/join-a-meeting https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/join-a-meeti...

wkat4242 4y ago
Jitsi is really great yeah. It works in every browser and the video is much smoother than teams' is. I think jitsi favors framerate over quality and teams does the opposite. I really prefer the framerate approach because it makes it feel much more natural, like you're really talking to someone instead of a postage stamp sized picture on the screen.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

Microsoft has some of the worst developers in big tech. I worked with two principal engineers from Microsoft and I swore I would never work with anyone from Microsoft again.

dijit 4y ago
I dislike microsoft irrationally, but I would find it hard to paint with such a broad brush. Typescript & vscode are products microsoft produced and are beloved. you can also find things in Windows that are just “better” than what we had in Linux land until very recently, namely IOCompletion Ports and the iSCSI stuff.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Typescript as a language is fine but as an implementation is horribly slow. Same with vs code.

worksonmine 4y ago

This is not just nightly, even Firefox-esr on Debian didn't support screen-sharing at least a few months ago. Had issues during client meetings last year and since then I always propose google meet instead if I see a teams link in the invitation, explaining why. It's not technical it's lazy devs. The button is disabled claiming my browser doesn't support it. Bullshit.

toastal 4y ago
Jitsi works for screensharing on X11 + Fx for me. It's a worthy alternative if you want to escape not unjust Microsoft but Google as well.

altairprime 4y ago

Also Safari iOS, so that won’t last very long.

Saris 4y ago

I see they're still doing the usual back-button hijack that every microsoft website seems to do as well.

superkuh 4y ago

Modern web development has made it so that browsers are essentially just a VM for running javascript applications. Each megacorp (and mozilla, the odd institution out) browser is now it's own OS. It's no surprise that each OS is diverging from the others. Especially now that the W3C has been sidelined and the megacorp controlled WHATWG is making the calls (in the best case, in the worst, or more common case, each browser OS just does it's own proprietary thing). You wouldn't be surprised that Windows or Mac OS can't run a linux elf, or vice versas. Same here. This phenomenon is web devs getting what they deserve and dragging everyone down with them.

rozab 4y ago

I have a regular teams call with somebody, and never use it outside of this. A few months ago it was blocking both Firefox and Chromium user agents on Linux. Rather than mucking about with it I just switched to a Windows laptop for this meeting. But last week I tried it on Linux Firefox and it works (well, to the limited extent that teams works at all)

LeonM 4y ago

Nobody here commenting on the fact that Slack blocks Firefox as well for voice/video calls? I'm not a regular Slack user, but when I tried the voice call option earlier this week first I got a notification that they were switching to some new style of video conferencing called "Huddles", and it gave me an option to choose between "huddles" and "classic" video calls, which was confusing to begin with. I choose the latter, but I got a compatibility error with my browser, advising me to use huddles instead (really, they couldn't detect that earlier?). Anyway, when I tried to 'huddle' my customer, it simple said my browser (Firefox on Linux) wasn't compatible, and that I must install Chrome to use the feature. This is where I closed Slack and used my phone to make the call.

slater 4y ago
Slack audio & video calls work fine on my Firefox.
arp242 4y ago
It doesn't "block Firefox", it just doesn't work because it uses some now-deprecated experimental APIs for it that Firefox never implemented. The whole video stuff was kind of a mess for a time with different browsers implementing different things. This is probably why you shouldn't use experimental APIs, but people want features, so... This was the status last time I used it a few months ago anyway; I believe they were planning on fixing it – they will have to sooner or later, since Chrome will remove these APIs at some point.

calibas 4y ago

I don't buy that this is accidental. When you write software, you test it on every platform you choose to support. If it doesn't work on a supported platform, then you take the time to fix it before release. It's not an "accident" when the software doesn't work on a platform you didn't bother to test on. That platform is being neglected by policy, not because of some "accident" in the code.

danpalmer 4y ago
> When you write software, you test it on every platform you choose to support. This depends on your definition of "support". It's very likely that Microsoft do not claim to support (as in, put customer support resources behind) Firefox Nightly, this would be reasonable as it's provided for development utility, not daily use. However, I do somewhat disagree that you test it on every platform. If Teams is built as a website, do we expect them to test every feature of every release on every browser? Probably not, we expect that they do reasonable testing across a representative range of browsers, maybe focused on major features.
- calibas 4y ago
  > If Teams is built as a website, do we expect them to test every feature of every release on every browser? If they've got good unit tests, they may test every feature of every Teams release and I assume they test on all the browsers/versions that represent the vast majority of the market. They don't bother supporting FF Nightly because it's not important to them, not because of some "accident" in the code.
kredd 4y ago
You guys test against non-stable versions of every browser before release?
- calibas 4y ago
  Nope, and that's a matter of policy. I certainly wouldn't argue it's an "accident" that a site I create doesn't work properly in FF Nightly.

m00dy 4y ago

If any MS Teams developer here, here is my bug report. I can't use same sso account on android and on macos at the same time. The token gets invalidated for some reason.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

I'm one of those people who choose to use FF Nightly. It works with Teams unless you want to make a call or share screen - you need to change the User Agent then. I'm too lazy to do it so I'm using a phone app for calls and complaining to everyone that Teams is crap. And I mean, it is crap by itself. It is badly thought out, it has its bad moments even on its native platform, its system of teams etc. is confusing and far inferior to the ones used by its competitors. Frankly, if it wasn't MS and their dominant market position/integration with AD, very few people would make the decision to use it for daily work. /rant

lars_francke 4y ago

Piggybacking here: Does anyone understand the identity management of Microsoft? Is there any way for me to see all my "accounts" associated with various email addresses and the organizations they belong to? I haven't been able to access most of the Microsoft ecosystem due to various errors on MS side and I'd really like to get it fixed. Some customers are inviting me to their teams and I always have to say "sorry, doesn't work"

pentagrama 4y ago

I wonder if this has something to do that Microsoft is going to launch a big update for Teams soon [1]. I thought that the update was most about the desktop version who is switching from Electron to Edge Webview2 technology, but maybe it affects also the web version. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-performance-improvements-less-cpu-memory https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-...

nubinetwork 4y ago

Uh, teams never worked on Firefox on Linux.

l0b0 4y ago

We need a third option in the malice/incompetence spectrum: active neglect. It's the safest way for big organisations to push users off of platforms they don't like. A combination of one or more of the following is going to ensure that the platform support is always wonky: - Under-fund the testing. This can backfire if whistle-blowers point out the change. - Assign bad apples to the platform. This can't really backfire, because of the woke "everyone's equally good at everything" thing. - Keep moving the target, similar to the "extend" part of embrace-extend-extinguish. "Of course we can't support legacy platforms like Firefox, because they don't support this incredibly niche 3D tile caching optimisation flag, which only Teams and two other products on the globe use."

tag2103 4y ago

We are a smaller company, only 10 users. We are in the process of fully ditching Microsoft for a full linux stack using Samba for AD (for the leprosy known as Quickbooks alone). I've blocked MS at the pihole and was expecting people to bring torches and pitchforks. The general consensus was we should have done this years ago and how did you make my computer so much faster. To hell with Microsoft and their tripe.

c7DJTLrn 4y ago
Nice. I've also blocked Microsoft Teams in the sense that I won't work for a company that uses it, or any of the Office suite for that matter. Always willing to "unblock" it should Microsoft have an epiphany some day and decide to invest in building good products.
toastal 4y ago
PiHoling Microsoft GitHub too?
- oblio 4y ago
  *crickets*
  - toastal 4y ago
    Hopefully the OP already migrated repositories elsewhere and only allows Microsoft GitHub to open merge requests to projects that have yet to institute a mirror or mailing list.

cronix 4y ago

I'm not using a FF nightly build, but I initially get a screen along the lines that my browser isn't supported and a split second later it goes away and a login form pops up. There's more text but it flashes so quickly I can't really make out the rest.

rejectfinite 4y ago

I have seen this error before :) A lot here. live.com is the "personal" Teams, the one pinned in Windows 11. teams.microsoft.com is the enterprise "real" Teams, the first one they released. They are different, why there is 2 downloads here. But HN loves to hate on Teams so... carry on :) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app

cpeterso 4y ago

How many companies test their websites in pre-release versions of Chrome or Firefox? Some brave volunteers on the team (even non-developers) could dogfood test Chrome or Firefox Beta (or even Chrome Dev or Firefox Nightly) as their regular browser for day-to-day work. It’s not full test coverage of your website, but they would identify major breaking issues before your end users do. They might find be new browser bugs that Google or Mozilla should fix or breaking web API changes that your website needs to adapt to.