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Comment by djbusby | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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-...

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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(it basically ran a often very outdated version of the web app + some AFIK unnecessary and buggy custom audio handling)

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).

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?

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