Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

ratcliff ,
@ratcliff@lemmy.wtf avatar

Jitsi is better

qaz OP ,

But I can’t accept a Teams call on Jitsi, can I?

Dehydrated ,

No

camelbeard ,

Do you think I'm using teams because I want to use teams??

frankenswine ,

You can make it work by changing your UserAgent string (there's plugins for that) to some older chrome version to make things work.

helpmyusernamewontfi ,

The problem I have with this though is if enough people on Firefox spoof their user agent to Chrome, it's gonna look like less and less people are using Firefox and Chrome will eventually have a monopoly.

And009 ,

Not sure that's how monopoly work, the folks on both end will still have data of their actual userbase

helpmyusernamewontfi ,

Sorry I dont really understand your point, it could be my bad English.

I'm gonna explain my point further; You can make it look like you're using Chrome when you're not, and if everyone just makes it look like they're using Chrome, then developers will only support Chrome and Google can and will pull off whatever shit they want to like Web DRM, just under a different name which they've done in the past.

So the minority using Firefox won't have proper support and will see more pop ups like these from more websites. The only difference being whatever feature the website needs actually won't be supported on Firefox because developers only see that everyone is using "Chrome".

Kyouki ,

How about not having these arbitrary not needed restrictions in the first place? This is just the usual scummy behavior from this company.

And009 ,

Yes the developers will see the spoofed data like you said.. But is the UA the only classifier?

Would like to hear a devs opinion. Maybe the people making those decisions need to be sensitive about this skewed data.

hypertext ,

They already have a monopoly. The amount of people using FF is pretty small unfortunately. And there's a bunch of sites that only test in Chrome and sometimes even actively "block" Firefox like here without making an effort to check for capabilities instead of user agent.

helpmyusernamewontfi ,

sadge.

frankenswine ,

I think you can spoof per tab/container. i used an exclusive Firefox Profile for the bad/contaminated (read: not privacy respecting) browsing - in there i'd ocasionally switch the UserAgent to make Teams calls.

there's no way i'd work on a machine with M$ spyware installed and always running

mariusafa ,

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.

spongebue , (edited )

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

IntangibleSloth ,
@IntangibleSloth@lemm.ee avatar

Android addon to fix this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search-fixer/

GhostMatter ,

My main problem with this is getting amp links in the results after.

uranibaba ,

Started using https://qwant.com a few years ago and the bliss of forgetting about amp links is real.
(though I am considering https://kagi.com instead.)

seth ,

Add a single letter and you'll get one of the best comic strips of all time: Dinosaur Comics! https://qwantz.com/

uranibaba ,

Haha, thanks for the reading.

ilinamorato ,

Try Redirect AMP to HTML. It's worked pretty well for me.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

Got a name for that chrome spoofing add on for FF on a PC by chance?

Telodzrum ,

UserAgentSwitcher has been the gold standard for like 20 years.

spongebue ,

The intangible sloth who replied to me provided a link to the one I use

Asnabel ,

Just checked: Duck Duck go displays the forecast right on top.

ratcliff ,
@ratcliff@lemmy.wtf avatar

They do worse than this. Search it on a weather site, pretty easy to get around

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

User agent string.

vox ,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

use teams classic, most professional workspaces are switching to it since the "new" teams came out

kralk ,

What is the difference? I had an IT guy remote into my system yesterday to delete Teams and install Teams classic

JustARegularNerd ,

New Teams is a rewrite of the old Teams client which is intended to be faster and better to develop for MS as it's based on a newer framework.

However it does seem to still have a few odd bugs here and there. I do find it faster myself though.

vermyndax ,

Teams won't even open on Safari. Must use a chrome-based browser (like... Edge!)

Kayel ,

To be fair, I don't know many complex websites that work on Safari

vermyndax ,

It's really not as bad as people portray. Most sites do work in Safari. There are some problems, but they've been pretty good about licking them over time. It's passable enough that I only have to punt to an alternate browser once in a while.

I've tried to use Firefox, I really have. But Firefox absolutely murders my battery and I'm sorry, but they need to do some serious usability improvements... especially around the container implementation and tab management. It's confusing as fuck (to me).

jol ,

Neither can slack.

chpsnick ,

I use Slack on Firefox everyday

jol ,

You use Slack voice calls?

chpsnick ,

The Huddles? Yes all the time

jol ,

Huh. I always get the message that they are not supported on my browser.

Thermal_shocked ,

You can use multiple work accounts in the app, have some clients that have their clients give them accounts to communicate internally with them. Just have to keep switching.

potustheplant ,

Just wanted to point out that this is a feature in the "new" version of teams. Until about a month ago it was impossible to log in to two work accounts simultaneously.

Thermal_shocked ,

she may have been on the new one, i don't remember.

abbadon420 ,

I feel validated, reading about my daily struggles with Teams.

scytale ,

The other issue I have with conferencing apps on browsers is that they request access to your microphone even if it's a one-way audio session (i.e. webinar). It should be set in a way where you can separately join a meeting with audio without allowing access to your microphone.

dukk ,

I mean, there’s probably some workaround involving faking the microphone, right?

pedroapero ,

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.

dan , (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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 ,

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

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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

drathvedro ,

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 ,

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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 ,

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 ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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 ,

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 ,

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 ,

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 ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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 ,

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 ,
@DacoTaco@lemmy.world avatar

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 , (edited )

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 ,

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 ,

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 ,

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 ,
@DacoTaco@lemmy.world avatar

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 ,

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.

Jaysyn ,
@Jaysyn@kbin.social avatar

Works fine for me in Firefox.

PoolloverNathan ,

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 ,

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.

Magister , (edited )
@Magister@lemmy.world avatar

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 ,
@PrimalHero@kbin.social avatar

Same this is how I got teams to work.

DizzyTlacuache ,

Same, but still sucks

unwillingsomnambulist ,

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

bjorney ,

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 ,

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

Magister ,
@Magister@lemmy.world avatar

oh nice :)

hemko ,

I love you

seedd ,

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

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Or you could just install the extension that does it.

seedd ,

Dude, just try floorp, it is just better.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

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

seedd ,

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.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •