Teams also doesn’t support multiple “work” accounts, so I had to boot up a laptop to accept the call. 🤷
This is not mildly infuriating this is the free internet being eroded through Google’s control of Chrome
I think this is more a push towards tightly couplings with Edge.
I just had to switch to New Teams last week because Classic teams just continued to have more and more call drops and connection problems. The New Teams doesn’t even have an option to change the notification sound, and now I can’t move the banner that appears in the top center of the screen when screen sharing that covers up tabs in browsers and the main preferences/search dialog in VS Code…also a Microsoft product. Apparently no one at Microsoft noticed that one of their most used products used in the most normal way blocks out important functionality from another one of them.
The new presentation blurb is really annoying bad at hiding itself.
That said, new teams finally supports multiple accounts, so I don’t have to keep using a web app for the second one on my work laptop.
Im sure if you swap user agent to chrome they wouldn’t give a fuck
It crashes right after a call starts.
Everything else works fine though.
It’ll complain later that the browser is blocking its spyware and adware.
This team block is so agressive to firefox users that it’s literaly hardcoded as if web browser firefox then deny.
You cam override that by changing a parameter in firefox to advertise itself as another we browser. I don’t remeber how i did it but, once i had to use firefox and i just changed that stting in order to advertise me to the host as a edge browser. With that changed i could use teams as normal.
Epic drm.
When I’d search “(location) weather” on Google (e: in Chrome) and I’d get a really nice at a glance forecast right on top. Do the same thing in Firefox and I’d get a whole bunch of weather websites I could go to. The former obviously being a better, more direct experience. I found an extension that fools Google into thinking it’s Chrome and all works fine with that.
I’m amazed if this doesn’t violate some antitrust regulation
It really can’t. If you spoof the user agent it’ll crash immediately after a call starts.
I suspect they use something extra on top of normal WebRTC.
can’t, or won’t?
Apparently it can when changing the user agent so it seems like it’s more won’t than can’t.
I’m not surprised. I guess they follow on Google’s footsteps of anti-competitively neutering search results for things like weather and stocks from Firefox for Android vs. Chrome, which work fine if your change the user-agent. -_-
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Sure, but the point is that you shouldn’t have to. There should be cross-compatibility.
This is likely legacy code. Firefox used to have a lot of issues with WebRTC, so practically all video conferencing systems blocked it. Teams probably has some “block Firefox because it doesn’t work properly” check that was written 5+ years ago and none of the current developers are even aware of its existence.
Well-coded ones did feature detection instead of checking the user-agent, meaning they automatically started allowing Firefox as soon as it implemented all the required features.
Feature detection is usually the way to go. If your website / webapp depends on a particular feature, check if that specific feature exists, rather than checking for particular browsers. Browser checks are still needed in some cases, for example Safari sometimes reports that it supports particular features but it really doesn’t (or they’re so buggy to the point where they’re unusable), but that’s relatively rare.
Feature detection is usually the way to go. If your website / webapp depends on a particular feature, check if that specific feature exists, rather than checking for particular browsers. Browser checks are still needed in some cases, for example Safari sometimes reports that it supports particular features but it really doesn’t (or they’re so buggy to the point where they’re unusable), but that’s relatively rare.
This is tough to implement when the feature is present, but implemented wrong. Or, even worse, when it’s implemented right, but the most popular browser implements it wrong and almost everyone else follow suit for compatibility reasons, except for one that takes the stance of following standards. I know safari is notorious for this, think pale moon had those issues, too, and there are still echoes from the past from pre-chrome internet explorer, thank god it’s finally dead.
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
At least Chrome is mostly standards-compliant and doesn’t do anything too weirdly. I’d say Safari is the new IE - lots of weird bugs that no other browser has, and sometimes you need hacks specific to Safari.
That’s fair. I meant that more in terms of using market dominance to shape the browser market, and not in entirely good ways.
I’ll rue the day that every website insists it only works with Chrome because of some user-privacy degrading feature that Google insists is a core web technology.
Try changing your user agent to a Chrome one (e.g.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
). Works a treat!Feels like we’re back to 2007 again when spoofing firefox user agent to IE would fix websites not working properly, only now we spoof it to chrome instead.
Sidenote:
HTTP user agents have become absolutely bonkers over the years.
Not really. The example listed above is perfectly readable.
Knowing the versions of webkit, browser version, etc. is important due to inconsistencies, new features, mossing features, and deprecated features. Sure it can be faked, but that is on the end user.
Chrome doesn’t use Webkit, and the referenced Webkit version is probably 10 years old at this point. The user agent is full of stuff for backwards compatibility. That’s why it’s being deprecated in favour of a better API (client hints)
Well they are just lying, it works fine with Firefox and has worked fine for years. I live in the EU though. Sucks to be american these days, I guess?
These days? It’s sucked to be an American for decades.
Better than being in a third world country ig. But it’s frustrating, because our issues are generally fueled by greed and were entirely preventable
As I saw somebody once say, “The US is a 3rd world country in a Prada belt.” If we didn’t have that big chunk of post-WW2 money keeping our economy chugging along all these years, we probably wouldn’t look all that different from them.
I have the same issue, but I am also in the EU. however, I just used an extension to spoof my user agent and now it works fine. there is some weird behavior sometimes, like when I call someone it doesn’t actually ring the other person etc.
Microsoft made their minecraft website complete in functional for Firefox. You can’t even download the launcher without chrome… And I don’t understand why. What in the world do they need chrome features that Firefox hasn’t?
Jitsi is better
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I works for me without a user agent change if I enter through the Microsoft 365 teams workspace and not a teams share link.
Have you tried changing your user agent string to Chrome? I know it can sometimes sidestep these types of “errors”. It can be changed manually through about:config under general.useragent.override, or there exists plenty of addons to switch it more easily.