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Comment by lousken | Hacker News Reader

Idk about 12 years but I know about last two years - many companies and workers had to switch to WFH. So that means using some sort of chat&video&audio software/website.

What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority. Instead, it took them years to get at least the GPOs right, autoupdate is the same story... so many things in corprote env were or still are PITA to set up in Firefox. So unfortunately no wonder it's Chrom(ium) for every single big company out there.

And don't get me wrong, I try to use exclusively Firefox whenver I can, but this is really frustrating to me as sysadmin.

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> What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams?

I think that's the wrong way around. Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application?

Microsoft chose not to support Firefox, not the other way around. It's still choosing not to support smaller platforms (the Linux application is simply garbage, lacking basic features that have been available on other platforms for months).

When I ran into this problem, Teams didn't work because Firefox didn't allow the application to enumerate the audio devices hooked up to my computer, only exposing a "default" one. I don't even understand why that would be a problem, my browser already asked which input and output to use, why would Teams need to care?

Jitsi and Google Meet worked fine, so the problem was clearly with Microsoft's developers. They managed to fix the problem eventually, so Microsoft should take 100% of the blame here in my opinion.

I don't know about the sysadmin stuff. Honestly, with modern Chrome-clone Edge, I'd expect most business that roll out a browser to now simply stick to the built-in browser.

I would strongly disagree on the sysadmin stuff. Firefox has always had a very powerful settings system. All the stuff you could set in about:config can also be set via a set of configuration files provided by the sysadmin, the user and the distro, each of which can provide defaults, presets or locked non-changeable settings which are hierarchically enforced. Exactly what you need as a sysadmin, cross-platform, could do everything and the kitchen sink, distributable either via your usual config management or LDAP/HTTP/whatever you can script in a few lines of Javascript if you need. GPOs are just a poor windows admin's substitute, they cannot do half of that, even in IE and Edge. Not to mention Chrome, which lags miles behind there.

I am not denying that firefox has options to customize itself, but if you don't wanna take my word for it - here's the comments on /r/sysadmin when they started supporting GPOs https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/82naw1/mozilla_fi... .

Same thing with MS login https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p1ral4/firefox_91...

I'm not aware of the APIs in question and it sounds like this probably to prevent fingerprinting of a device... but why not simply return only the default device when enumerated?

It inherently makes sense that all those apps would try to understand what devices were available and even allow switching between them. It's often required because that entire stack between the browser, os, and device is very unreliable even on something like macOS.

Yea it's on MS to test and fix their stuff, but FF is the one losing market share and honestly part it sounds like they make their apis more prone to misuse. At least in this case.

I don't know why this broke in the first place, all I know is that I had no sound and that the device selection menu was borked where other video calling webapps worked just fine. The enumerateDevices API has been in Firefox for years [1].

To be fair(ish) to Microsoft, I did spoof Chrome's user agent because Microsoft forced a "this website doesn't work with your browser" screen in Firefox. Perhaps the failing API was an unstable Chrome-only API that they assumed works because of the UA. The browser compatibility screen communicates that they definitely tested it, that they definitely knew about the problem, and that they just didn't want to fix it.

I just dropped Teams as an option and sent everyone who wanted to video chat Jitsi links. That worked fine while I needed it. If a company chooses not to support me, then I will choose not to use that company if I can.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=enumerateDevices

>Why would Firefox need to change their browser for a specific web application?

Because Firefox has more to lose by not doing so. The blame game is pointless because in the end it helps Firefox in no way.

When you're a platform trying to gain market share, and a big application doesn't work because of the developer's bug, you don't throw your hands up and say "well it's the developer's fault." You work around that bug in your platform. Reminds me of the stories[1] about early days Microsoft putting all sorts of hacks in their OS to work around 3rd party app bugs, just to keep backward compatibility going. When you're focused on growth, you can't adhere to some sense of purity and demand 3p apps fix themselves to work on your platform. You need to make the platform work with their app.

1: (original Raymond Chen link busted, but quoted here:) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

That's the vicious circle:

1. Google basically controls the web.

2. Whenever a new Web API shows up, browser vendors have to decide between implementing the standard and copying the bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions that are implemented in Chromium.

3. Websites are tested on Chromium, so they start to rely on Chromium's bugs, exotic behaviors and extensions.

4. When a website breaks in Firefox (or Safari), people claim that it's the fault of Firefox devs and switch to Chromium.

The early web got tired of this when it was Microsoft at the wheels, but it feels that few people are particularly interested in fighting the good fight these days. Much easier to blame Mozilla.

On the other hand, how many of these browsers are actually building or inventing any of these new apis to support things like screensharing, video, audio, and etc so they're not hacks except for chrome?

Well, given that WebRTC was mostly invented at Mozilla, at least one.

I can blame whoever I want, but at the end of the day, the problem that I have to deal with is the user saying - Teams doesn't work. What am I supposed to do with it?

Honestly (you may not like the answer) I tell users "try a different browser".

exactly, and that's how firefox loses marketshare

Because IE was an outdated stagnating piece of garbage and Chrome is still pretty good.

> What did Firefox do to fix the compatibility e.g. with Teams? That should've been the highest priority.

Why use a browser for Teams at all?

If you wanna join a meeting from another company and you dont have teams licence, you can only use browser or mobile app (not sure if this was changed later or not, because by winter every company I manage had bought ms 365 business. Though teams licence is still an extra item in MS365 admin so I'd assume it hasn't changed)

The electron version is horrible too and even more wasteful on resources :)

Also this way you can use add-ons with it.

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