Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

teams.live.com

417 pointsfaebi302 comments

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…

+1 for stupidity

Stupidity is only ever acceptable when it agrees with business objectives. Malice is the sensible default assumption when money is on the line.

"Break it but make it look like a mistake" /s

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

Money isn't on the line w.r.t. to Firefox Nightly. I don't even think real money is on the line w.r.t. to Firefox entirely.

We may love it, but Firefox is a big fat nobody in the browser space of 2023.

Well, everyone is a nobody compared to Chrome at this point. Google has been extremely effective at taking over this space (enormous engineering team implementing new standards far faster than others can keep up, marketing (including on google landing page), poor/selective support for other browsers on the major platforms of the web that they wrote, install by default on 90% of the world's phones, pay for install by adobe and other products long ago).

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... 7% firefox, 10% safari, 11% edge.

By the measure of desktop browsers, Safari and Edge are nobodies too, and that is even with Microsoft's browser being a chrome skin and preinstalled on Windows.

> 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.

Microsoft has repeatedly engaged in malicious anticompetitive behavior. Without any additional information, I therefore think it's rational to place a high prior probability on this being malicious anticompetitive behavior. The data itself might be consistent with either an accident or malicious anticompetitive behavior. In that case, the prior dictates the posterior.

Then why is it FF nightly only?

It is a matter of configuration in their black box. I am using Librewolf and cannot login to Teams with that either. I have similar problem dropping links in Teams to URL's on my own server. MS blocks them, and I always have to tell people to copy the URL and paste it into a different browser such as Firefox.

On Android, with FF installed and using a Work profile for all the Microsoft bullshit, both Outlook and Teams won't let me click on links because "there's no compatible browser installed" :D

Fururologist here, Librewolf and firefox nigthly is probably 0.01 porcentaje of users, is probably lore we don't test this we say it doesn't work use something we test it, yes they should say is your browser but the avrege client is old man who doesn't understand what they download and don't wat to use opera from 2000 more than this, is better say use some of this

Or it’s just a bug.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

A very useful policy for malicious people.

In my experience, malicious people with high competency cover their ass with giant fig leaves. They don’t let it hang in the breeze.

Plenty of malicious people are incompetent!

Plenty of non-malicious people are incompetent, and there's a lot more of them

There might be a lot more non-malicious people in the population as a whole but I would not be surprised if there are more malicious than non-malicious people in positions of power, including those positions where you can make anti-competitive decisions for a giant megacorporation.

But even if that is not the case and malicious people are not the norm even there, using Hanlon's razor to try and shut down any discussion of possible malicious actions still ends up empowering the malicious actors that do exist. It's a decent rule for first interactions with human people that you don't know better but is absolutely not the right tool for corporate entities who can much more easily brush off any consequences for being caught acting maliciously. It is outright stupid to apply it to corporations that have a history of maliciousness.

Well, I guess you do have a point there about regular people vs corporate entities that start with M and end with icrosoft

The entire point of my post is that Hanlon's razor is not a useful prior when the malice would be in service of greed.

Or as Upton Sinclair put it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

>Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

People this smart don't get to claim this level of stupidity. As others have said already, their reputation precedes them. Never underestimate the value of a good (or bad) name.

This represents a basic misunderstanding of how public companies work.

Microsoft has been subjected to multiple lawsuits and judgements and fines and consent agreements regarding its practices in this area. Microsoft has been burned by this kind of thing in the past; we probably don’t even know half of the legal rulings that Microsoft is subject to that this potentially violates.

My high prior probability would be that there are actually a bunch of lawyers in Microsoft whose job it is to ensure that they have training and processes in place precisely to prevent this sort of thing happening, not that Microsoft has a secret team trying to find ways to sneakily block other browsers.

Microsoft had blocked Skype web from being accessed by Firefox for years. I doubt anyone over there cared about it, it did make larger waves a few times.

They no longer do though, or maybe Firefox has stopped identifying itself on the features they are testing.

Agreed. All the big players in fact have a vested interest in encumbering Firefox releases as this browser still provides the ability to use poweful adblocking, which directly affects ad revenue.

Sounds like Hanlon's razor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Imagine being a malicious actor in this world of ours, where as long as you could make it look like a potential mistake, you can get away with whatever, and people on the internet will simply say "Sounds like Hanlon's Razor" and you're basically in the clear :shrug:

Imagine being someone who made a simple mistake, and people on some weird internet forum with no identity verification said "Oh, that guy must be malicious!" and you lose your job. How would you feel? It's justified, if I understand the point you're trying to make, right?

Which is worse?

Edit: Not that I expect much from here, but since there are a number of child(ish) replies, I might as well clarify this for the replies that I'm not going to individually address:

I'm not saying it's not cool to say "Microsoft sucks" or anything like that. If that's how you feel, then feel free to just say that. It's the internet. What's NOT cool is making up an imaginary situation where someone's simple error is part of this conspiracy that Microsoft is this terrible evil corporation, when there's thousands of decent, community-loving people that work there, one of whom made this error, more than likely by simple carelessness. It's not that big of a deal, it's not a showstopper by any means, and will be a simple fix in due time, almost undoubtedly.

There are people behind software, but a lot of commenters seem to think it's professionally appropriate to just shit on things because they're from Microsoft or because they're from Apple, or wherever. Just say you don't like Microsoft, or that you don't like Apple. It's so antisocial to take the stance I keep seeing.

I think the young people call this "parasocial" these days. Back in my day, we called it "fanatics", where there's this unhealthy obsession and seemingly anthromorphized view of corporations and institutions where hundreds or thousands of different, varied, diverse groups of people are all cohesively accomplishing or building things. It dismisses nuance, it rejects common sense understanding of how teams of people work, and is reductive and hostile to actually intelligent conversations about products and ideas.

I don't think anyone is assigning blame to a specific individual here, but to the corporation as a whole. A corporation that has time and time again been proven and acknowledged themselves to engage in anti-competitive behavior.

I think it's deliberately obtuse to claim to represent such an opinion. The people on "git blame" for this will end up being reprimanded in some way, in serious cases.

If we're chalking it up to "Microsoft sucks" then that's fine, but it'd be better imo to just say THAT, rather than sneak up to the point via this auxiliary issue of this user agent string. Someone has to answer for these individual fuck-ups, it's intentionally shitty behavior to be insinuating that someone did this maliciously under the guise of end users assuming innocence, thereby obscuring the responsibility for it.

> The people on "git blame" for this will end up being reprimanded in some way, in serious cases.

Ok, sucks to work at Microsoft then, it is not the fault at people outside Microsoft that they have terrible management, if that's how things go there.

> Someone has to answer for these individual fuck-ups, it's intentionally shitty behavior to be insinuating that someone did this maliciously under the guise of end users assuming innocence, thereby obscuring the responsibility for it.

Yes, management who are the decision makers should obviously answer for this, and if the culture is to blame some random engineer who happened to program it, the engineer is probably better off getting fired from such a toxic environment where they have to be some scapegoat for managements fuckups.

Most organizations, Microsoft included, employ a blameless policy.

It’s almost never an individual person’s fault, but rather that the process failed in stopping a regression from going through. If anything should be blamed, it’s that the process didn’t catch this; at the PR, testing, or release phases.

If individuals were reprimanded nearly as much as it’s implied, there wouldn’t be a lot of people employed at Microsoft or any other big company.

You don't have to invent imaginary scenarios when the one before us does quite well on its own. We are not talking about an individual, we are talking about a faceless megacorp with a storied history of bad faith.

Just being a faceless megacorp is reasonable grounds for losing the benefit of the doubt, but one with their history? Ascribing anything other than malice first is plain and simple naïveté.

I'm struggling to see the world from your point of view. Do you honestly believe there's a room full of cigar smoking robber barons somewhere in Redmond who got together and told the devops guy who runs that site to break compatibility with some niche browser's interim builds, because that's the best way to maximize profits? (And somehow these same guys were the ones pulling the strings in 1995?)

Align all the incentives, and you don’t need to have an explicit command. If your product demo is only tested on the company’s browser, no order is necessary to break compatibility, as it will drift away by default. If a team is chastised for having misrendered prototypes, but not for browser compatibility, then it makes sense for an individual to throw in a User Agent check.

It isn’t likely that any one individual is pushing for incompatibility, but that nobody cares about incompatibility. That lack of care about any standards, with “it works” and “it works on our browser/OS/hardware/etc” treated as synonymous, can be part of a company culture.

> and you lose your job.

You're making up stuff to make your case stronger. Also, it's totally legitimate to fire people for making mistakes, it's not an injustice.

edit: Instead, imagine being fired for making a mistake when you were actually told to ignore something by a supervisor.

You do realize the "someone" in question is a mega corporation worth almost 2 TRILLION dollars with around 200K employees? One with a long history of anti-competitive behaviour and "mistakes"?

I've worked on contracts alongside MS employees and researchers in the past, and I've been pleasantly surprised.

Three decades of experience in the field, and unfortunately, I don't have quite the brooding disdain for Microsoft. Their stock has lined my pockets, their employees have treated my respectfully when we've worked together, their products do what they're advertised to do.

Something tells me you're under 40.

> Three decades of experience in the field, and unfortunately, I don't have quite the brooding disdain for Microsoft. Their stock has lined my pockets, their employees have treated my respectfully when we've worked together, their products do what they're advertised to do.

"They've lined my pockets and treated me nice so anything they do is all right by me."

> Something tells me you're under 40.

No. But during my three decades of experience, I actually grew up.

Bummer, I guess. I got rich and paid for three kids to go to Ivy League schools, bought a house a mile and a half from the White House, and before too long will leave them a seven figure nest egg after my wife and I are dead.

But hey, revel in your internet wit, mighty commenter! Your immense mental stature frightens me! ;-)

self-defined winners claim the system works, news at 11

Of course someone who is gaining financially from MS is going to take this position.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

My salary doesn’t depend on it, it’s just in my portfolio. I’m just not an idiot…

I do consulting and bill upwards of 300/hr worked in the DC area, with several decades of experience and a network built up along the way.

I took this position thirty years ago too, my mind hasn’t changed except that young people feel like they’re clever or somehow intellectually valid for copy pasting a quote into a web forum.

Your continued series of replies seem to do nothing to bolster your argument about Microsoft.

But at the same you elaborate in great (and unnecessary) detail about the level of success you have attained.

BTW: I am hardly young. I am nearly ancient.

I'm not making an argument about Microsoft, but rather about the low regard I have for people who make inflammatory comments about companies online when there's human beings there doing all the work, affected by the negativity. It's just childish, and reeks of chronically online personalities.

Making a personal remark about me is plenty of reason for me to mention my success, since they implied that my perspective is somehow fueled entirely by some stock that I own. I have actual experience working alongside some MS people, and I have held that stock since 2013. So what? My opinion just goes out the window? That doesn't make much sense to me, I don't know about you...

The reason I associate that with youth is that young people often don't have a healthy portfolio or indeed any financial hygiene to speak of and seem to think that business is a zero sum game. We all benefit from the business world pushing things forward if we're holding stock in the most powerful companies. I'm hardly a supporter of the capitalist system, but I'll be damned if it's not going to work in my favor, since I understand how things are. My responsibility is to my family first. Had there been a revolution when I was younger, I'd have been among the first in line to change things, but it didn't happen.

I think I'm wasting my time in this thread, though.

Imagine Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown for the 99th time then some randos show up to defend Lucy saying some really obtuse and ignorant shit like it was "a simple mistake".

There should be consultants who specialize in Hanlon's Razor, coming up with ways to make future plans look like stupid mistakes. Or maybe more usefully, they could discover profitable mistakes based on current conditions and events e.g. "Those two labels could be confused with each other; is there any way to make money from claiming that we confused them?"

We’ve been doing that at least since World War II in military intelligence, and they probably stole the idea from organized crime.

Those consultants are called lawyers and the idea is called plausible deniability.

I'll never understand Hanlon's razor. I've never seen any malice which cannot be explained by stupidity.

Never attribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to laziness.

Only ince or twice maybe.

BTW how can we trust Hanlon? Maybe he tried to cover up is own malice.

When it comes to megacorporations with a history of anticompetitive behavior, I much prefer "Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by greed."

Devil's advocate: I don't think blocking bleeding-edge browsers is necessarily "stupidity." If you're smart enough to understand all the caveats of running a bleeding edge software program, you're smart enough to change your user agent string.

If you're not, you have no business running nightly, and you're probably going to generate a lot of "yOuR sITE is BRokEN!" support emails / forum posts / bug reports for other projects, and conspiratorial posts screeching on social media.

I see this all the time - people who run dev branches/nightlies/alphas and have the QA skills of a turnip who have no business doing so...and of course they're noisy as hell and waste a lot of people's times.

If you don't know the most basic points of QA and how to file a bug report that doesn't waste people's time, stop running anything beyond "stable" or betas marked specifically for public consumption. You're not "cooler" or more 133t running nightly releases.

People can run whatever software they want. They don't need your permission, or to know how to file a bug report, or whatever other bullshit you've dreamed up. They're also allowed to complain when a site is broken in their browser.

If you don't want to see unsophisticated complaints and bug reports, then you need to stop looking at them. Perhaps find a different profession/hobby where your user-hostile attitude actually benefits someone.

It’s also simply not true that more user-facing bugs happen on nightlies. I run nightlies at times and have never found them to be less stable in any tangible way that would affect site usability and show up in a bug report. On the contrary, nightlies are the first to get important bug fixes. It’s overwhelmingly likely that GP is just a lazy audacious dickwad ignoring valid bug reports.

To be honest, they don't need to find a different profession / hobby, as long as their user hostile attitude makes them money.

To some extent that is correct, ironically this was likely an attempt to reduce user complaints and bug reports. The problem is that they didn’t went about the the correct way there is a better way to implement feature detection than to check the user agent: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

“The site isn't working on FF nightly or Chrome Canary” is a perfectly valid bug report. It’s up to the dev if they want to investigate and fix or if they want to wait for more data/reports to come it.

You think I’m going to source dive your tens of thousands of lines of shitty hacked up react just because I’m a nightly user? Fuck no. Do your job clown.

Yup. A Fx Nightly user might be reporting a new, valid bug about a spec change or new policy around the anti-fingerprinting tech which would give the site/app owner time to react before this change makes its way to stable. Will there be some legit browser bugs, probably? Will folks running unstable versions be more likely to diagnose who is at fault and do a bug report, also probably.

Same argument goes for games on Linux. There was an interview a couple years back where a team noticed more reports from Linux users, and when they looked into it, the reports had logs, steps to reproduce, system info and it help squash bugs on all platforms.

do people do not remember Dr Dos ?

if a coyote eats your cat, its probably not an accident.

its more likely because it's a coyote and that's what coyotes do. it's in their nature.

As a counter point there is Hanlon's razor

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

If the smart guy mainly is dumb when it suits him, then it's malice.

Key word: “adequately”. A company making an honest mistake a few times is adequately explained by stupidity. A company making the exact same “mistake” year after year, decade after decade, is not.

Microsoft isn't known to be stupid so that mostly leaves malice in their case.

thats not a counter point, thats just gaslighting. we have almost 50 years of microsoft behavior upon which we can base our judgements.

DR DOS was 40 years ago and most people here don't remember Win Me because they were in kindergarten when it was released.

Forums skew young, tech forums even more so.

Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does.

“We are the smartest developers in the world” I’m told used to be something you heard on campus, presumably during the recruiting process, and in the board room. But if the Justice department comes knocking, they turn into Steve Urkel.

You can’t have it both ways, and they “accidentally” break too many things that earn them millions of dollars. It’s not stupidity, it might not be malice, but if not malice then thoughtlessness or arrogance.

> Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does.

Not to say that they don't play dirty, but this isn't actually a contradiction. When you hire 100k workers, you're going to have the smartest developers in the world AND the Urkels.

And odds are the smart developers aren't being put to work on the login page.

Peer pressure, oversight and processes are supposed to prevent a group of people from becoming more than the sum of their worst parts. Microsoft has always found a way to become the sum of the worst instead of the average or the intersection. They only stopped outwardly projecting that behavior for a while after the EU dropped sanctions on their asses. But that was four rounds of promotions ago so that’s all forgotten now.

First of all, Urkel is actually a genius, so it doesn't fit.

Second, if you know you have better and worse programmers you either control the work of the latter or you don't ket them work at your entry.

Nobody sees the work of your smart programmers if nobody could login.

So either MS is a lot dumber than I thought or they just don't care because they no most people can't or don't want replace MS software.

> And odds are the smart developers aren't being put to work on the login page.

This would be a standard testing procedure, not really about developer being smart. Large organizations cannot depend upon individual heroics.

Someone created a story “for the new release of teams a minimum browser compatibility test is required”

The dev who picked it up got a list of supported user agents and decided that they’ll simply do a string match and didn’t think it through as it’s easier than implementing feature detection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

it's even worse than stupidity. it's all done in the name of UX. Apple style. please use the "supported" browser.

they did the same with web Skype.

>This to me looks like stupidity more than malice

Any sufficiently stupid technology is indistinguishable from malice.

Well-played! <golf-clap>

> 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.

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/u...

Does using `window.navigator.userAgent` still work? Does it still return the actual user-agent?

Yes, and because it does, people will use it. You (or standards) bodies can scream from the top of the mountains that it's deprecated, but it won't matter, because if it's there, it will be used.

but Microsoft should understand why this is an issue, they had to rename their windows from 9 to 10 because applications did check based on os name string and just exit after detecting it contains "windows 9" as it suppose to match windows 95 and windows 98

Microsoft is a huge corporation with multiple different identities inside of it, like every international super-conglomerate. The people who work on the OS are very different people who work on the web stuff.

Where can I read more about this?

I don't think that there was any well written article about as it was very plausible rumor. but you can see eg: https://searchcode.com/?q=osname.startswith%28%22windows+9%2... to see this issue present in a lot of publicly available source code.

Quick look and most of those results are checking for macosx version or really old code where the only windows is 95 and not even xp.

Similarly, Mozilla recently had to freeze part of Firefox’s User-Agent string because some websites mistook Firefox 110 as IE 11 and blocked access because they no longer supported IE 11. The websites misinterpreted “rv:110” in Firefox’s Use-Agent string as “rv:11”.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1805967

The alternative is breaking backwards compatibility, which means breaking the Web. (I'm not necessarily against that)

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.

> block any others.

I get all the rest but not this part. A banner should work plenty?

I think it depends. Let's say I sell my finance application to an organization with 10k employees. They then use it to handle transactions on around 100mil per month.

If there are bugs, it may result in money being transfered to the wrong company, or money being transfered without proper approval. Maybe unlikely bugs but could happen.

I can show a banner telling each of the 10k users about browser requirements. I guess that around 99% of the users will ignore that banner and happily proceed with unsupported browsers.

If I don't know if it will work with the browser they are using, why should I let them perform transactions using it? Sure, if it goes wrong maybe I can tell the CFO that their employee ignored the banner, but that won't make him happy.

For me selling the service there are zero benefits with allowing arbitrary browsers.

I use the same userAgents in all of my web-scraper code, I just copy and paste my user-agent string after all these years.

It is still an old FireFox user agent I got somewhere. I should test my code and see if it still works after all these years. At the time, it was the only userAgent string which didn't lead to being limited. It was almost like an invisibility cloak for my bots.

My guess is that they aren't using user agent detection, for reasons you mentioned.

It's unlikely they QA unstable browsers, but some in this thread are reporting the same on FF stable.

How do you detect whether the user's browser has a slow implementation of an API without actually freezing the browser for 8 seconds?

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.

Yeah or just test the user agent.

Just look at all the big companies doing it

https://faisalman.github.io/ua-parser-js/

That tool says that I'm on Windows 10 but I'm on 11, so not 100% accurate.

I get the best practice and why relying on the User Agent is helplessly flawed, but I've never come across a better way to get a sneak peek into the (first) Initial Page Request of a customer to your web app. E.g. if you'd wanted to improve the page performance and weight of your app, you'll want to keep unused js/css to near zero. If you'd rely on feature detection, your critical path for "showing the initial screen of the app" is bound to "download feature detect, parse it, execute it, fetch correct variants of your js/css packages, parse them, execute them, show screen". That's not cool, imho.

Changing the UA only changes the behavior of the web server, so unless that's some block of untouchable code owned by some other team made to 'optimize' page loads for different clients, you're not doing yourself any favors by changing it in your browser; you should be loading up the client itself since you can't simulate the actual engine loading your web app differently.

> If you'd rely on feature detection, your critical path for "showing the initial screen of the app" is bound to "download feature detect, parse it, execute it, fetch correct variants of your js/css packages, parse them, execute them, show screen". That's not cool, imho.

Even for barebones web apps, your initial html response should have either empty data (but otherwise a visible UI) or a SSR'd version of the page shown while the JS downloads and executes.

1) If clients spoof their UA, they just get what they asked for. Couldn't care less.

2) With SSR you're actually making a case for sniffing the UA for the client's device class. Web apps might need to ship vastly different but overlapping code across different device classes. I'm not even talking about things that can be lazily loaded subsequently, I'm talking about the initial screen for given URL.

3) I'm _not_ going to show the customer any loading spinner or just show a white page for 2s. We had that with Java Applets, remember?

All in all, I'm not saying we should getting back into optimizing web apps for certain os/browsers/versions. What I'm saying is there might be good reasons where the mess of classifying the device on the (first) Initial Page Request is acceptable, given the alternatives.

> 1) If clients spoof their UA, they just get what they asked for. Couldn't care less.

I thought you were specifically talking about testing the behavior of your website on different client by changing your browser's UA. The only legitimate use would be if you have a mobile-only stylesheet like older wordpress themes (because you said "I've never come across a better way to get a sneak peek into the (first) Initial Page Request of a customer to your web app")

> 2) With SSR you're actually making a case for sniffing the UA for the client's device class. Web apps might need to ship vastly different but overlapping code across different device classes. I'm not even talking about things that can be lazily loaded subsequently, I'm talking about the initial screen for given URL.

I'm not sure why this would be the case. For Teams, they can just load a purple top bar with the words "Microsoft Teams: Loading", right? That's a single responsive stylesheet.

> 3) I'm _not_ going to show the customer any loading spinner or just show a white page for 2s. We had that with Java Applets, remember?

What else are you going to show while the page loads? A fake UI with fake data? As soon as the JS starts executing and loading data, that data can start to populate the screen.

How do you deal with guaranteeing this approach doesn't break users with non-default settings and preferences?

He probably doesn't, but do you have specific settings in mind?

There are genuine differences in browsers that need to be handled correctly and aren't easily observable or runtime-detectable. Multimedia (needed for camera/mic handling) and WebRTC still remain a giant landmine that requires UA testing 10 years later.

Web advocates can scream from the rooftops as much as they want that nobody should do UA testing, and then have basically no response when we encounter genuine browser bugs that can't be worked around.

Because you’ll be surprised how many developers aren’t familiar with these things and how many of them think that they are more clever than the herd and do not validate their assumptions.

It wouldn’t surprise me if some junior dev picked it up and then went to ask a senior dev how can they detect the browser version and they got a half assed reply hmm check the user agent and went on with that.

95% of the major bugs and security issues I see on a daily basis are due to this.

I'm genuinely interested: How does UA sniffing for, e.g. a device class, introduce security issues that wouldn't exist w/o it?

UA isn’t the cause of security issues the same thought process or lack there off that led to UA being used as a proxy for compatibility in this cause is.

But in a more general view reliance on an unreliable and user controlled data for decision making is a pretty common pitfall in the security world.

Sometimes it is not possible due to bugs in browsers.

For example, how do you know if calling a API will crash the browser?

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=118336...

In that case you use that API whenever you can so that browser gets fixed ASAP.

Yeah, and that browser update is controlled by IT and they manage the CEOs laptop and you'll be fired if the site doesn't work on their laptop.

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.

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.

PiHoling Microsoft GitHub too?

*crickets*

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.

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.

At least Edge is now Chrome...

"At least" makes it sound like that's a silver lining, but that makes it worse. It's exacerbating the Blink monoculture problem.

You are right; it is more defeatism than optimism really

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.

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

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.

Or “we like open source software and ‘freedom’ as long as it is used by the right people in a way that I agree with”

Microsoft could just keep an independent fork—just match features at a slower pace. Google can't change the license of Blink, their renderer, since it's a fork of KDE's LGPL renderer.

gnu license is working as intended - helping… microsoft? I guess

edit: but honestly, Google could go Apple open source way, making code changes in huge dumps that are impossible to integrate back. But I an not sure it’s worth the trouble.

That's the weird thing about Microsoft expanding marketshare.

If they'd actually succeed in capturing the majority of the market, there's a big chance Google would throw in the towel and then what??

Then they stop all development. It already happened with IE6. Took a decade to decrown it even though for all intents and purposes it was a dead browser.

And they wouldn't even need to stoop so low as to make it non-FOSS. Just making it GPLv3+ would probably do it.

In the last months I have heard everything from MS including "Firefox is the #1 source of security bugs in enterprise" and the like.

Since that's verifiably false, why hasn't Mozilla filed a defamation lawsuit over it?

Lobbying? Please describe

Constantly hanging out with the senior management praising Edge. As they say "Microsoft is better at talking to your boss than you do".

Also their consultants are trained to be shills. Every time we have a call with them they will remark about it if we use another browser, even though their area of expertise has nothing to do with it.

This sounds remarkably familiar. A certain ERP I've been dealing with sent out dire warnings about installing and updating Edge, else something nebulously defined would break. This understandably caused a lot of confusion and frustration with users (the ERP spammed so many with this warning...) and pissed off IT teams. It turns out that the Edge they were talking about was the ERP's own software named Edge (amusingly named and released long after Edge the browser showed up), which they leave for the end user to optionally install, and actively refused to clearly document why, where, and how to install it.

The fun part is all of this was to update an expired certificate.

> forcibly migrated all Firefox users to Edge

Man, I can understand doing that for regular users who don't care, but as a developer?

Just a few weeks ago an integrator for an ERP system our customer had bought was trying to show some details in a Teams call when his PC suddenly rebooted. He came back and apologized, turns out it was a company policy forced reboot. In the middle of the day because what are timezones?

If my company tried anything like forcing which browser is installed or when my machine reboots, I'd hand in my resignation promptly.

From a security perspective, I feel like my employer can do what they need to. I wouldn’t accept 24/7 active monitoring, but ensuring programs are up-to-date and trusted seems like basic steps in preventing a security incident.

The two programs I’ve used that auto-update your machine give you plenty of a heads-up that you should do it yourself.

> From a security perspective, I feel like my employer can do what they need to

I've always felt that this kind of attitude from IT departments is counter productive. It gives people a false sense of security at best, and baby mentality at worst (where they assume no responsibility because it's apparently someone else's).

Which organization? At least they can get derided publicly for doing this...

I work for a small manufacturing company. I'm not going to blow up my company or my job over a decision I have next to no insight into that affects my job in such a small way.

I wonder why they don't just allow both

This is 100% down to the poor manageability of Firefox on corporate networks. Edge has all the same ADMX templates plus more than Chrome. Corporate management of software is important.

The above link is for home Teams.

Your company should be using teams.microsoft.com ! :)

So your comment makes no sense.

We as IT admins may just want to keep track of Edge updates and extensions and not want someone running months old Firefox all sneaky like.

I'm sure there's a distinction, but this is an anecdote, and the above link is specifically another person's anecdote. My comment makes fine sense, if you want to say they are completely separate products, it's probably unrelated just do that, don't be an ass.

Our IT department doesn't treat us like idiots, FF was an officially supported browser until a month ago, we were on the most recent version. I believe them if they say it's about webapp compatibility, even if this does help them manage the browser under group policy or whatever. They could make this decision for whatever reason they want and wouldn't have a problem getting people to go along with it.

Because teams.microsoft.com works in Firefox

teams.live.com does not

So they are different and it is relevant.

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."

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.

> 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.

> 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.

You guys test against non-stable versions of every browser before release?

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.

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.

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.

Not just nightly. Stable is blocked as well.

Seems we're in the next IE-era.

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?filter...

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.

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.

Linux desktop client seems to be dead; as of last week, trying to download the deb or rpm package results into 404.

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"

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.

The posted link is to the error page. https://teams.microsoft.com works in FF stable.

Nope - "We're sorry—we've run into an issue."

Oh wow, I clicked on that link on mobile and was unable to go back. Pressing the back button just redirected to the same page over and over again. Usually you only see that on malicious ad sites.

If you don't know already, long press on the back button solves the problem.

Microsoft's largely useless support site does the same thing. There's something weird afoot in that organization.

Microsoft's tech forum pages have been highjacking the back button for years now. It's really despicable...

Doesn't work on stable 110.0.1 (64-bit).

Nope, it doesn't. FF stable on MacOS.

Teams is, was, and will be the absolut worst. They only won, because it's bundled into MSO.

Microsoft has always lived in the same era.

> Seems we're in the next IE-era

Too bad there is no Register or Inquirer equivalent this time around.

The register is still there but they're really pro-big business this time around. Recently there was an piece about how happy we should be with all the corporate Linuxes. Bow to our benefactors :)

I can use Teams on the stable version without any issues. You might have cross-origin cookies disabled, which will stop Teams from working. PS. FF:v110.0.1 (64-bit), macOS: 13.2.1.

Oops, sorry. I was using the Office 365 Teams (teams.microsoft.com), which runs ok on FF. I can confirm the Teams for the personal account (https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser) is not supported in FF.

Those cookies are disabled by default in Firefox. Are you saying that to successfully use Teams one has to alter their browser configuration to make it _less secure_?

I believe it's website specific. Office 365 Teams (teams.microsoft.com) will request users to grant certain permissions when it's visited.

> the next IE-era

the WebKit Wide Web

Doesn’t work in Safari on default settings either, it complains about disabling tracking prevention. No thanks. Also, Safari’s tracking prevention is almost 6 years old by now, support it already. So more like Chromium Wide Web.

Even this remark assumes familiarity with “ITP”, as if it’s some web standard.

https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

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

so is this the ie11 user agent matching thing?

No, there is something wrong with their browser detection. Teams supports Firefox, Chrome and Edge https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...

What if you fake the user agent?

Firefox has been blocked entirely for at least a year now, in my experience.

Works for me on Kubuntu 22.04. Note that the link above directly goes to the error page.

Yeah, I logged in and it still gave the error page after routing to /#go. Same happens on my Fedora machine.

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.

Slack audio & video calls work fine on my Firefox.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Typescript as a language is fine but as an implementation is horribly slow. Same with vs code.

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

but https://teams.live.com/ works without issues

> What am I missing?

It's blocked on Nightly. 110.0.1 is the current stable version, not nightly.

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

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

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)

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

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-...

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

as long as you don't include any of the firefox or mozilla branding, because you don't have the rights to those: absolutely.

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.

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.

Yeah, right!

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

And you don’t see why a corporation would do that?

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.

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

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-ho...

Yes, OP is misinformed and wrong and so are many comments here.

Office 365 Teams works in Firefox.

Source: Me, right now.

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://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/join-a-meeti...

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.

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.

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

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"

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

The link is https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser

I imagine this is what Teams forwards you to when it sees FF Nightly as your browser.

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

Change your user agent, not your browser.

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.

Any context, reasoning, or background?

I found this: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/20/23607037/microsoft-teams-...

Firefox ESR as well.

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

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

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./

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.

Uh, teams never worked on Firefox on Linux.

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

Why not use stable FF for your business meetings?

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...

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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?

It's quite probable that they are not cutting the corners that make them money and they're cutting (or might cut) everything else. After all, Firefox Nightly's share is a rounding error for Teams (and its users probably not Team's target anyway)

Yes. but things like backups or security will not make them money either. So I can’t assume that they're protecting my data.

Seems like a strange business decision to give up a a percentage of the market to the competition like that.

The percentage of the market that holds a strong opinion about a nondefault web browser with already minuscule (and consistently declining) market share, and will actively avoid you for not supporting it, almost definitely costs more to cater to then to ignore. (Testing time, engine specific bugs and code, etc.)

That small percentage will be extremely loyal to whichever services will cater to them though. A small percentage of users all choosing to use your service can still be quite a lot of users if there is no real competition in the segment.

I think FF users need these sites more than the sites need them. There's little motivation to support a browser with relatively few users, and a big motivation to get users to switch to their platform.

I think you're right, but not supporting firefox leads more people to use chrome and suddenly we're living the exact definition of a vicious cycle.

FWIW I'm not a firefox user myself, but I am not a fan of Google hegemony in browser tech.

I guess many people are in your situation. If they used Firefox, maybe it would help the "Google hegemony in browser tech" problem?

I use Safari so for now I don't consider myself part of the problem.

Though I do launch Chrome to use Teams (because Teams is mandated by my org and I am too shrill and opinionated to install the desktop client).

> I use Safari so for now I don't consider myself part of the problem.

Got it, I misunderstood your sentence above!

> Though I do launch Chrome to use Teams (because Teams is mandated by my org and I am too shrill and opinionated to install the desktop client).

Yes, it doesn't help that companies don't give a damn, either :)

I think you're looking for "kowtow", however much I enjoy "cow-toe"

That works in reverse though: they can do that to people that they're happy to lose as a customer. In case of ff nightly, number of users are a rounding error. It's entirely possible that cutting them off is worth having a smaller backlog.

It's not a controversial opinion as much as it is incongruent.

> 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.

But by using chromium/blink-based browsers, you have already taken the pressure off Google. You have already given them what they want, so you've forfeited your hand.

For anyone out there who values the swiftly fading open-ness of the Internet, Firefox or other smaller FLOSS browsers are the right tools of choice.

> For anyone out there who values the swiftly fading open-ness of the Internet, Firefox or other smaller FLOSS browsers are the right tools of choice.

Mozilla had their chance at this decades ago and Firefox was the dominant browser against IE, 16 years ago, until they did a deal with Google, fell asleep at the wheel and allowed them to overtake and get sabotaged via Chrome's dominance. The same Mozilla CEO at the time believed they could live without Google's money [0] and now 16 years later, they are still heavily reliant on Google and at this point are on life-support.

Mozilla already gave Google what they wanted and forfeited their so-called 'privacy-focused browser mission' over giving the CEO a decades streak of multi-million dollar pay days, whilst the 'Mozillians' only got layoffs and all left with little to nothing.

Mozilla is now a joke to the 'open-ness of the web'. They have nothing to fight with and lost as soon as the took Google's money.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

The problem IMO is that Mozilla became a corporation for Firefox. Their goals are now aligned with the parties they're supposed to fight against. Obviously that doesn't work.

Chrome became popular by being bundled as shovelware with Flash and being marketed on google.com. There is literally no way for an open source browser to compete against that.

Mozilla has a lot of mismanagement but that's more of a symptom of Firefox being out-marketed in a way that was impossible to fight against.

how exactly do you plan to put pressure on Google

That's why everybody should support Firefox, and only Firefox. Hey, you wanted controversy.

I Wonder what features are used here which Firefox doesn’t support. It is certainly not the serial Interface.

> 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.

Google doesn't care about us raging on HN, normal people are not going to 'put pressure on it' so all you're really doing is letting Google to become the sole decision-maker about the web, even more so than it already is.

A good way to put pressure on Google is actually to use Firefox.

Yes, because using Firefox doesn’t put money in Google’s coffers.

Oh wait…

The way I use Firefox it definitely does not.

By using alternatives to Chromium, you put pressure on the developers to support those alternatives (if 50% of the users were pissed to see a "only works on Chromium" banner, it would matter for the websites).

Hopefully the developers then use features that are compatible between those different browsers, and now those browsers have a word to say against Google if they disagree with a specific feature.

Obviously the goal is not to not put money in Google's coffers... how would you do that? They make money by selling data they took without your consent. It's not like non tech-savvy users can do anything to protect their data. Already tech-savvy users mostly can't be arsed to make that kind of effort.

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.

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