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I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.

nextos 2y ago
"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-teams-meeting-on-an-unsupported-browser-daafdd3c-ac7a-4855-871b-9113bad15907 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...
- berkut 2y ago
  That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
  - cess11 2y ago
    Yes, they broke this somewhat recently. Video &c. doesn't work in Chromium either. So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.
    - cereal_cable 2y ago
      Everyone I work with is constantly badmouthing Teams. It's buggy and flakey and they killed Linux support which my company actually made use of. Either way, it doesn't matter since it's bundled. Literally killed any chance of competition getting a fair shake at our usage. Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.
      - cess11 2y ago
        The customers I'm thinking of are in the public sector and quite non-technical, from us they learn that there are better options and realise that the tooling they have are causing them pain. Together with GDPR cases tightening things up on what software you can use I expect this to make a difference.
      - cogman10 2y ago
        Yup. My company was seriously considering slack, but then teams came in the o365 bundle they were already paying for, so we went with teams. It's better than where we were (Cisco jabber) but also worse than what's out there.
        GFischer 2y ago
        The company I work for used Slack, we were happy, but higher ups were looking to cut costs and they noticed they had Teams for free, so guess what... bye bye Slack. Absolutely a monopoly maneuver.
  - dathinab 2y ago
    > which they're deprecating and didn't really maintain for at least the last 2 years either (it basically ran a often very outdated version of the web app + some AFIK unnecessary and buggy custom audio handling)
- _cenw 2y ago
  there's two kinds of teams calls. the kind attached to a meeting is hosted on an actual server and the one where you call someone directly is some p2p mess that is a lot less reliable (and doesn't work on those browsers).
dathinab 2y ago
I do too and I'm not sure what happens in your case but they do block Firefox _for calls_ arbitrarily (it's not that it doesn't work but that the moment it thinks you are on Firefox it refuses to try to work. Do you maybe only do calls through Chrome? Or maybe you have a user agent spoofing extension (or similar) installed in Firefox?

nextos 2y ago

"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-teams-meeting-on-an-unsupported-browser-daafdd3c-ac7a-4855-871b-9113bad15907 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

berkut 2y ago
That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
- cess11 2y ago
  Yes, they broke this somewhat recently. Video &c. doesn't work in Chromium either. So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.
  - cereal_cable 2y ago
    Everyone I work with is constantly badmouthing Teams. It's buggy and flakey and they killed Linux support which my company actually made use of. Either way, it doesn't matter since it's bundled. Literally killed any chance of competition getting a fair shake at our usage. Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.
    - cess11 2y ago
      The customers I'm thinking of are in the public sector and quite non-technical, from us they learn that there are better options and realise that the tooling they have are causing them pain. Together with GDPR cases tightening things up on what software you can use I expect this to make a difference.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      Yup. My company was seriously considering slack, but then teams came in the o365 bundle they were already paying for, so we went with teams. It's better than where we were (Cisco jabber) but also worse than what's out there.
      - GFischer 2y ago
        The company I work for used Slack, we were happy, but higher ups were looking to cut costs and they noticed they had Teams for free, so guess what... bye bye Slack. Absolutely a monopoly maneuver.
- dathinab 2y ago
  > which they're deprecating and didn't really maintain for at least the last 2 years either (it basically ran a often very outdated version of the web app + some AFIK unnecessary and buggy custom audio handling)
_cenw 2y ago
there's two kinds of teams calls. the kind attached to a meeting is hosted on an actual server and the one where you call someone directly is some p2p mess that is a lot less reliable (and doesn't work on those browsers).

dathinab 2y ago

I do too and I'm not sure what happens in your case but they do block Firefox _for calls_ arbitrarily (it's not that it doesn't work but that the moment it thinks you are on Firefox it refuses to try to work. Do you maybe only do calls through Chrome? Or maybe you have a user agent spoofing extension (or similar) installed in Firefox?