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. -_-
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.
No it seriously means the feature isn’t available yet in the browser. Like there is a part of Firefox missing that they need to use the website. Basically all websites are coded in HTML, css, and js or a form of that. The browser controls them and the code operates out of it. If a feature is on chrome and chromium but not Firefox, the site won’t work on Firefox. Not sure exactly what is missing but it is mozillas fault not Microsoft.
MS purposefully not respecting the standards for its softwares to only work on their own browsers is a feature since they made Internet Explorer. It’s an industrial strategy to trap the users into their own tools. It’s to the point they don’t respect even their own standards in the case of docx for example so that there is no easy interoperability with libreoffice.
I agree with you that the real reason for it is EEE but their justification for it is that for enterprise and corporate customers, the only ones they care about, they can’t control Firefox in the same was as they can Edge or Chrome with the Microsoft Account add in which allows the MDM agents like InTune to apply DRM. Their primary concern (so they claim) is the enterprise administrators ability to control the computer, provide settings, configure defender xdr security and all the other bs products they sell.
That remark, while truthful a long time ago, didn’t really apply during the later periods of IE, or the early periods of Edge before it became a webkit clone. When it needed to win back users, there was a lot of focus on standardization, meaning that when I worked on sites, I tested them through MDN Docs, and in Firefox and IE first, made sure my solutions were not using any -webkit- nonsense, and then they would be fine on other browsers. Anytime I did find IE bugs late in its life, it was usually because some other browser coder was not correctly following standards.
But that could open a security exploit, for example letting other users take your IP and use it within the call to perform a ddos or other kind of attack on your system. They could have been trying to fix that.
Not what I mean. I mean Microsoft may know about an exploit with Firefox users joining calls like that and they blocked the user agent because that was the simplest way to keep most people safe.
Last time this came up, just spoofing the Firefox user agent to Chrome made it work perfectly. Maybe they block it because they haven’t tested it on Firefox yet, but it works as well as it does in Chrome.
And if they haven’t had the time to validate it in Firefox yet, that is a conscious choice by MS to not dedicate time specifically to validating in Firefox and treating it as a second-class web browser.
Firefox implements everything the various web standards require. There are a few non standard features that Chromium implements that certain websites take advantage of, but the fact that their code isn’t portable is not Firefox’s fault. As for Teams… Microsoft’s just being a dick: if you change the user agent it works just fine.
And maybe Microsoft requires it. Also the could be more under the surface we don’t know about with the user agent, where it might have some kind of security exploit or something.
If there was a known security exploit, it would have been patched. Everything works, so nothing essential is missing. The way I see it, it’s yet another attempt to manipulate users into switching away from open standards.
Also, it’s a multi billion dollar company, can they really not afford to put a couple of devs to work on changing a few lines of code to fix whatever small incompatibility there may be?
You really don’t want to lose this argument do you? As a software engineer myself, I can assure you that that’s complete bullshit.
Teams is nothing special, it doesn’t intrinsically require any functionality only available in Chromium. It isn’t some weird magical piece of software that can’t be made work strictly using standard web protocols and features, something that, apparently, it already does because it does work if you trick it. It’s not even cutting edge, chat and video conferencing web apps have been around for ages at this point, many were implemented years back with only a fraction of what’s available today. They worked everywhere and still do. Microsoft is perfectly capable of making it work, because it can.
And If there was a known security exploit, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PATCHED. It doesn’t matter if it’s on Microsoft’s end or Firefox’s end.
The only reason they don’t make it work on Firefox by default is because they don’t want you to use it on Firefox, that’s it.
You seem to not want to lose either. I’m a software developer myself who specializes in websites. If Microsoft knows a severe exploit, they probably wouldn’t go around telling everybody exactly how to exploit it, would they? And we don’t know that it works perfectly, just that it works enough to use it.
They’d disclose it to Mozilla and the Firefox team if they knew. It would make no sense for them not to. Why are you so obstinate when it comes to this exploit theory, it’s the least likely reason you could pick for them not to support it.
How do we know they didn’t and are just waiting for mozilla to fix it? All of this is speculation, including the shit about it being Microsoft wanting you to use their browser. This isn’t that unlikely either.
Look, this is going nowhere, I give up. If you aren’t going to be reasonable, I’m not gonna waste my time discussing this. If you don’t want to listen, fine. Stick to your uninformed and unreasonable opinions and be happy.
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?
I used to freelance for a big corp who used MS teams and provided me with separate credentials, while also having my private MS account, that I occasionally use for other corps I worked for.
It was a hell using it that way. I had to run each one in a private Brave window to be able to work on two different accounts.
I know they only use MS teams, bc their infra is all based on MS, and it probably works fine for them internally. But man, this shit needs to be fixed in some way to account for external people, especially the ones who chose their own stack and work simultaneously with others.
It does, but it basically reloads the app when switching. Which, if I recall correctly, means no notifications from the other account and really slow swapping between accounts. When I had to use multiple accounts I would use the app for one and a browser for the other.
Luckily, I’ve been able to get away with only using Teams for meetings, so my exposure is limited, but last time I messed around in the top right corner there was an area that indicated it would show notifications from other accounts.
I have had no need or desire to test this, though.
I had to look it up, here’s what I found (please correct me if I got it wrong):
To change the user agent in Firefox, you can use the built-in Developer Tools. Here’s how you can do it:
Open Firefox.
Press Ctrl + Shift + I on Windows or Cmd + Option + I on macOS to open the Developer Tools.
Click on the “Network” tab.
Look for a small icon that looks like a mobile phone and a tablet together, usually located at the top-right of the Network tab. This is the “Responsive Design Mode” button. Click on it.
Once in Responsive Design Mode, you’ll see a dropdown menu at the top of the screen where you can select different user agents (like various mobile devices, different browsers, etc.).
Remember, changing the user agent can sometimes lead to unexpected behavior on websites, as it tells the website that you’re using a different browser or device than you actually are. This is usually used for testing and development purposes.
Add comment