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Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

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Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#191

Post by curtisblaine »

capableweb wrote: post #96
WirelessGigabit wrote: post #62

It's 2023. Why are we still doing user agent detection? We're supposed to do feature detection. userAgent is deprecated. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/u...

Does using `window.navigator.userAgent` still work? Does it still return the actual user-agent? Yes, and because it does, people will use it. You (or standards) bodies can scream from the top of the mountains that it's deprecated, but it won't matter, because if it's there, it will be used.

The alternative is breaking backwards compatibility, which means breaking the Web. (I'm not necessarily against that)

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#192

Post by capitainenemo »

criley2 wrote: post #117
nerdponx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupidity is only ever acceptable when it agrees with business objectives. Malice is the sensible default assumption when money is on the line.

Money isn't on the line w.r.t. to Firefox Nightly. I don't even think real money is on the line w.r.t. to Firefox entirely. We may love it, but Firefox is a big fat nobody in the browser space of 2023.

Well, everyone is a nobody compared to Chrome at this point. Google has been extremely effective at taking over this space (enormous engineering team implementing new standards far faster than others can keep up, marketing (including on google landing page), poor/selective support for other browsers on the major platforms of the web that they wrote, install by default on 90% of the world's phones, pay for install by adobe and other products long ago).

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... 7% firefox, 10% safari, 11% edge.

By the measure of desktop browsers, Safari and Edge are nobodies too, and that is even with Microsoft's browser being a chrome skin and preinstalled on Windows.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#193

Post by mulmen »

parasti wrote: post #189
scarface74 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m about the same age as MS so I’m going to push the analogy. I was 26 in 2000. I hope to God I’m not the same person at 49 after 6 jobs, one failed marriage (and a 12 year current successful one), going through the real estate crash where I lost my shirt, etc. I really hope I’m not the same person I was in college in 1996

"I used to abuse people physically and/or emotionally in my early 20s but now I really hope I'm a different person" seems like a far fetched world view to conjure, to me. Do these people exist?

If you believe in incarceration as rehabilitation then they do. But I don’t recall Microsoft ever serving time.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#194

Post by [deleted] »

wkat4242 wrote: post #123
jzombie wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if Google tweaked their Chromium licensing so that Edge couldn't use it. Then Microsoft wouldn't have a browser at all.

That's the weird thing about Microsoft expanding marketshare. If they'd actually succeed in capturing the majority of the market, there's a big chance Google would throw in the towel and then what??

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#195

Post by kyle-rb »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #102
jzombie wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if Google tweaked their Chromium licensing so that Edge couldn't use it. Then Microsoft wouldn't have a browser at all.

[flagged]

Most of these patent numbers seem to be incorrect; all the numbers except for the first one seem to point to unrelated patents.

I was curious about the email one, but "7,536,726" points to a different Microsoft patent (also expired), and I couldn't find a patent with the name "System and method for providing remote access to electronic mail".

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#196

Post by MaxLeiter »

magicalhippo wrote: post #156
plorg wrote: post #56

My organization (which uses Teams) forcibly migrated all Firefox users to Edge a couple of weeks ago and uninstalled FF. They were citing incompatibility with some software and I assumed that meant the new ERP system being adopted by one of the larger departments.

> forcibly migrated all Firefox users to Edge Man, I can understand doing that for regular users who don't care, but as a developer? Just a few weeks ago an integrator for an ERP system our customer had bought was trying to show some details in a Teams call when his PC suddenly rebooted. He came back and apologized, turns out it was a company policy forced reboot. In the middle of the day because what are timezones?…

From a security perspective, I feel like my employer can do what they need to. I wouldn’t accept 24/7 active monitoring, but ensuring programs are up-to-date and trusted seems like basic steps in preventing a security incident.

The two programs I’ve used that auto-update your machine give you plenty of a heads-up that you should do it yourself.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#197

Post by TheRealPomax »

nerdponx wrote: post #67
TheRealPomax wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as long as you don't include any of the firefox or mozilla branding, because you don't have the rights to those: absolutely.

There are also Firefox extensions that let you set a custom user agent. It might make you easier to fingerprint (unusual combination of user agent and browser features means very very high uniqueness), but it will allow you to bypass buggy user agent checks if needed.

Although of course an even better solution is to complain and get MS to fix their shit. This was almost certainly someone not realizing they should feature test instead of checking a UA.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#198

Post by curtisblaine »

dijit wrote: post #30
behnamoh wrote: post #19

Controversial opinion: I used to like Firefox but at some point you have to accept the reality: No developer likes to have 2 backlogs, one for Chrome and one for FF. IMO It's better to adopt Chromium-based browsers and put pressure on Google to avoid letting it become the sole decision-maker about the web.

Respectfully, I don't care that you have two backlogs. Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer. I'm already sick of how much I have to kowtow to large companies because they treat developer time as costly, but user time as free.

That works in reverse though: they can do that to people that they're happy to lose as a customer. In case of ff nightly, number of users are a rounding error. It's entirely possible that cutting them off is worth having a smaller backlog.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#199

Post by CamperBob2 »

kyle-rb wrote: post #195
CamperBob2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Most of these patent numbers seem to be incorrect; all the numbers except for the first one seem to point to unrelated patents. I was curious about the email one, but "7,536,726" points to a different Microsoft patent (also expired), and I couldn't find a patent with the name "System and method for providing remote access to electronic mail".

I did wonder about the ethics of pasting a list derived from ChatGPT without checking them personally. Thanks for doing the legwork on that.

What I'm finding (over the last few minutes of experimentation) is that patent references in ChatGPT are valid, but tend to have the wrong numbers associated with them. If you ask it to summarize the claims in a given patent, it will sometimes pull up the wrong patent. Interestingly, you can correct it with a suitable prompt -- see one example at https://i.imgur.com/EQrhFt8.png -- at which point it will do the right thing or at least come close to it.

Anyway, the point stands: there is only so much Google can do to stand up to Microsoft. Royalties in 2013 reached $2 billion ( https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-pe... ) and it's safe to say they didn't stop filing bullshit patents in 2013.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#200

Post by vlovich123 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #149
WirelessGigabit wrote: post #62

It's 2023. Why are we still doing user agent detection? We're supposed to do feature detection. userAgent is deprecated. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/u...

How do you detect whether the user's browser has a slow implementation of an API without actually freezing the browser for 8 seconds?

1. Pick the API that's most likely to be the fastest (based on marketshare) as the default to use.

2. Use `setInterval` to start your benchmark routine.

3. Benchmark function runs the API using a simple loop that will return quickly (i.e. within 2ms) using performance.now to evaluate.

4. When you obtain enough samples to indicate an alternate path is faster disable the benchmark function

No freezing the browser. Shouldn't take too long to switch to an optimized version.

That being said, this is a lot of complexity / hard to implement in a robust and fast way so I'm not saying it's a better answer.

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