Teams apparently can't call when using Firefox

Carighan , 5 months ago

Just one more upside to Firefox, less interruptions during work~

hellfire103 , 5 months ago

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!

redcalcium , 5 months ago

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.

waigl , 5 months ago

Sidenote:

HTTP user agents have become absolutely bonkers over the years.

eek2121 , 5 months ago

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.

waigl , 5 months ago

There is more information in there that isn't actually true and only supposed to trick some old web servers into treating it a certain way than there is actually correct information,

It mentions three different browsers, only one of which is actually true, and three different rendering engines, none of which is actually what's used.

dan , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

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)

lawrence , 5 months ago

I like how this guy explains the history of browser user agents and why they have this strange configuration today:

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

MonkderZweite , 5 months ago

And that's why you shouldn't parse them and use feature detection instead.

dan , 5 months ago

There's an API called "client hits" that's replacing user-agent. Some of the hints will require the user to provide permission for the site to use them, since they could be used for fingerprinting.

Major browsers (Chrome and I thibk Firefox) are freezing the user-agent. The only thing that'll be changing in user agents is the major browser version. Other parts including platform will be static. Chrome on Windows will always report itself as Windows 10 for example. https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

jaybone , 5 months ago

Oh so like how other browsers reported Windows NT for decades… cool.

MonkderZweite , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Useragent parsing is still a thing?

It is similiar in nature to greping html.

raspberriesareyummy , 5 months ago

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

thank you, this worked for me! :)

maniel , 5 months ago

Yeah, as far as I know it's not some browser chauvinism, but Firefox not supporting some multimedia protocols, that doesn't mean it's Firefox fault though, I'd install some chrome fork just for this kind of interactions

MeatsOfRage , 5 months ago

All you have to do is change your user agent. This is just a way for Microsoft to wash their hands of browser support outside of WebKit

maniel , 5 months ago

you sure you'll get video calling that way?

Evkob , 5 months ago

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.

qaz OP , 5 months ago

I've avoided changing my user agent because Firefox's apperant market share is already so low. I've installed the extension and will it try it with my work container though.

Kallioapina , 5 months ago

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?

TedKaczynski , 5 months ago

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

Kallioapina , 5 months ago

This isnt Hexbear man, wrong instance.

BossDj , 5 months ago

But we're good with Eat the Rich, right?

franklin , 5 months ago

Yes, that's still fine.

Grabthar , 5 months ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d320f612-f21d-42fb-9f09-dfedf24aae86.webm

deweydecibel , 5 months ago

These days? It's sucked to be an American for decades.

A_Very_Big_Fan , 5 months ago

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

EldritchFeminity , 5 months ago

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.

RememberTheApollo , 5 months ago

When you have to compare yourself to a “third world country” to feel not so bad it’s not a compliment.

NeatNit , 5 months ago

What the hell does it have to do with being American?

imkali , 5 months ago

Certain restrictions related to Microsoft Edge are applied less in the EU

meekah , 5 months ago

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.

spongeborgcubepants , 5 months ago

EU resident here, doesn't work for me as well

seliaste , 5 months ago

Same for me, tried it today and it worked perfectly

EnderMB , 5 months ago

Used it today using Firefox on OSX, no issues whatsoever.

NoisyFlake , 5 months ago

You can use private mode or a different browser to login with multiple Teams accounts.

akilou , 5 months ago

yet

Pfft!

Sanctus , 5 months ago

Its cool how all these companies are allowed to just lie to you about their products functionality.

drolex , 5 months ago

If you use Firefox, you are a communist; and if you are a communist why would you need the glorious tools of corporate communication? Just make do with rotten turnips as Lenin intended

NoLifeGaming , 5 months ago

Using Firefox makes you a communist?? Maybe you just enjoying have your data harvested by Google.

xigoi , 5 months ago

Looks like your sarcasm detector is broken. Just like Teams.

NoLifeGaming , 5 months ago

You got me, not gonna lie

Klear , 5 months ago

To be fair sarcasm is impossible to express via firefox.

SatyrSack , 5 months ago

Firefox supports the standard just fine

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Sarcasm/Attributes

Yearly1845 , 5 months ago

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

SatyrSack , 5 months ago

https://lemmy.one/pictrs/image/fa6b285e-44af-4a25-986b-73e75b389508.webm

Pinklink , 5 months ago

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

drolex , 5 months ago

Sorry if this was not clear, but it was only a joke. I assure you, I only subscribe to first-quality ideologies.

dubyakay , 5 months ago

This whooshed a lot o' folks.

drolex , 5 months ago

Conversely, I should maybe try to use the /s thingy and stop thinking people can read my mind. Will I learn this lesson today? Hmmm

Klear , 5 months ago

Don't give in to the dark side.

dubyakay , 5 months ago

You went from -12 to +16!

Fuck /s ✊

lemmingnosis , 5 months ago

“glorious” + “rotten turnips” = /s

skullgiver , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

Sanctus , 5 months ago

Yeah I'm more referring to sites that do this ans then work perfectly fine once the user agent reads some brand of chromium. The only serious offender I deal with on a weekly basis is Apple Business Manager.

eager_eagle , 5 months ago

given the love Teams receives, it not working in [ insert browser ] is definitely a feature

seedd , 5 months ago

I use floorp, it has user agent spoofing. Set it to chrome, works like a charm.

possiblylinux127 , 5 months ago

Or you could just install the extension that does it.

seedd , 5 months ago

Dude, just try floorp, it is just better.

possiblylinux127 , 5 months ago

Why again? It seems pretty obscure and can easily be replaced my customized Firefox or librewolf.

seedd , 5 months ago

Yeah thats what i thought too, ive been a librewolf user for a long time. Then i tried this, its underrated af. It just has a shitload of features.

Magister , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I'm in Linux, I had so much problem with FF and Teams that I installed Edge and Teams as a PWA, no more problem with calls and video

PrimalHero , 5 months ago

Same this is how I got teams to work.

DizzyTlacuache , 5 months ago

Same, but still sucks

unwillingsomnambulist , 5 months ago

Same…but with Ungoogled Chromium as Flatpak because it made me feel the least dirty.

bjorney , 5 months ago

Problem with that is that when you click a link in the teams PWA it opens in edge rather than your default browser. I just use the unofficial teams electron app

qupada , 5 months ago

Fortunately, there's an extension that solves that: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/ajgodcbbfnpdbopgmfcgdbfhabbnilbp

Magister , 5 months ago

oh nice :)

hemko , 5 months ago

I love you

PoolloverNathan , 5 months ago

Teams also doesn’t support multiple “work” accounts

Firefox lets you have completely separate profiles with separate accounts (URL: about:profiles, it can't be linked to for security reasons) and also an official extension to have another layer of profiles on a per-tab basis (containers).

Thorry84 , 5 months ago

Also no idea what he is talking about, I have 4 work accounts in Teams. Ever since they rebuilt their frontend to the "New Teams" multiple accounts have been working just fine.

In the past I had multiple Team instances as PWA for different work accounts, nowadays it's all in one app and works pretty good.

Not to defend Teams, it's total shit, a lot of shit straight up doesn't work half of the time, including important shit like notifications for new messages and content. But it has come a long way from the days including any image in chat would crash Teams for all participants. It isn't perfect and the amount of resources it used to do what it does is awful, but compared to most modern apps it's pretty good.

Just don't tell a Teams dev Microsoft Messenger did 99% of the same stuff and ran super fast on a Pentium 3 333mhz with 64MB of ram, they'll cry and you'll be called out for being a bully.

Jaysyn , 5 months ago

Works fine for me in Firefox.

dan , 5 months ago (edited 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 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.

hemko , 5 months ago

Teams used to have more features on Firefox. Microsoft has intentionally started stripping off shit to move people to edgium

dan , 5 months ago

Oh... I didn't know this. Maybe it is intentionally malicious then. Hmm.

drathvedro , 5 months ago

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.

Monument , 5 months ago

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

dan , 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 , 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.

dan , 5 months ago

whose business model it is to sell user data

So I know what you mean, but Google doesn't sell user data. That's a common misconception. The data is what makes the company valuable - they're not going to just give that to anyone with money. Instead, they sell your attention. Advertisers can target their ads based on data collected about you. Advertisers never actually see the data nor do they know exactly which users are seeing their ad - they just get aggregate statistics.

Having said that... Edge is basically Chrome but better (e.g. it uses less RAM). I use Firefox but if I didn't, I'd give Edge a try. It's unfortunate that Microsoft are trying to push it so hard, since it's actually a decent browser that's being ruined by Microsoft trying to force everyone to use it.

raspberriesareyummy , 5 months ago

While I don't know of course whether Google actually sells the data itself, let me rephrase my original criticism: "whose business model is based on monetizing user data - which can lead to severe privacy breaches / leaks of sensitive personal data".
Thanks for pointing that out, but I would say my prime concern remains.

Monument , 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 , 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 , 5 months ago

This is tough to implement when the feature is present, but implemented wrong

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 , 5 months ago

Sometimes it’s doable if you can call the API and check that the result is what you’d expect

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’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

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.

DacoTaco , 5 months ago

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..

raspberriesareyummy , 5 months ago (edited 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 :/

Edit: never mind, I found it here: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6224391

User Agent String that works for me:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Natanael , 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 , 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.

Iceman9665 , 5 months ago

Do you get all teams functionality? I tried user agent sppof but couldn't join conference calls properly on work teams so back to Chrome or was

DacoTaco , 5 months ago

There are a few quirks. Mostly doing video calls that doesnt work and makes me unable to join calls. Not a big loss for me haha.
But as long as i dont enable video on my end, its fine.
Teams is very fragile though, and a few of my privacy addons totally makes teams glitch once in a while

kibiz0r , 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.

pedroapero , 5 months ago

It's never worked on FF for me. I installed Chromium just to be able to log into several Teams accounts. And tabs are still not working. Classic Microsoft mess.