This is indeed the case. I use firefox daily, including for teams. I have to fake my user agent to do it, but it works. Its purely teams just saying fuck you to firefox…
Comment on Teams apparently can't call when using Firefox
dan@upvote.au 5 months ago
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 instead 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.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 5 months ago
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Could you share your user agent string please? I am still on the Teams desktop app for Linux, but that’s been discontinued in 2022 already, so I am anticipating the day it will stop working altogether. And I haven’t even managed to log in to teams web with Chromium yet (and no, I don’t want to install f*cking Chrome itself) - I get a permanent login loop on successful username / password :/
Natanael@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
You should update the spoofed agent occasionally or else you may get an update warning from some sites and get blocked. Just check what a current version of an allowed browser reports and copy it.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, probably a good idea. Nevertheless, I am pissed (but not surprised) to see that Firefox is getting locked out on purpose. A sincere “Fuck you” @Microsoft.
kibiz0r@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They might be doing feature detection on one of the more obscure APIs, too. I know there’s some audio manipulation APIs that aren’t available.
Someone complained about Discord deliberately blocking Firefox users because of that, but it turned out that spoofing the user agent would actually break the feature.
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Teams used to have more features on Firefox. Microsoft has intentionally started stripping off shot to move people to edgium
dan@upvote.au 5 months ago
Oh… I didn’t know this. Maybe it is intentionally malicious then. Hmm.
drathvedro@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.
Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
dan@upvote.au 5 months ago
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.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
However, Chrome is a browser collecting user data for a company whose business model it is to sell user data. Edge is a shitty bloatware collecting user data for a company that has (for now) a business model selling software licenses.
I wouldn’t say it’s “better” to use Edge, but I wouldn’t install Chrome either(!) on any device whose data I care about.
Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
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.
drathvedro@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I couldn’t say that it is. Chrome team’s usual approach is to make and release stuff first, write specifications later. By the time the other browsers come along, there’s already both market adoption and bunch of dumb decisions set in stone as a standard. Most notable examples of this would be QUIC and WebUSB
dan@upvote.au 5 months ago
Sometimes it’s doable if you can call the API and check that the result is what you’d expect. For example, a long time ago some browsers incorrectly handled particular Unicode characters in JSON.parse. Sites could check for the incorrect behaviour and shim JSON.parse with a version that fixes the output.
I’ve never worked with WebRTC but I imagine it might be difficult to do that with some of its APIs given they require camera or microphone access (meaning you can’t check for the bug until the user actually tries to use it).
drathvedro@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Yeah, you can even test visual and network stuff at a cost of latency, but it’s hard and lots of developers are too lazy to do this, I’ve often seen sites that don’t even check if function exists before calling it, crashing the entire site because adblock cut out google tags or they call API that isn’t even implemented in firefox.
I did. It’s a complete mess. First and foremost exactly because it’s a soup of completely unrelated tech - P2P, webcams, audio in&out, stream processing and compression, SIP(!?). There’s no good debug tooling available and lots of stuff is buried inside browser’s implementation. And, on top of that, any useful info on the topic is usually buried under lots of “make a skype killer in 5 minutes” kind of libraries with hardcoded TURN servers - the developer’s overpriced TURN servers, that is.