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Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

teams.live.com

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Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#211

Post by shp0ngle »

lights0123 wrote: post #118
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.

Microsoft could just keep an independent fork—just match features at a slower pace. Google can't change the license of Blink, their renderer, since it's a fork of KDE's LGPL renderer.

gnu license is working as intended - helping… microsoft? I guess

edit: but honestly, Google could go Apple open source way, making code changes in huge dumps that are impossible to integrate back. But I an not sure it’s worth the trouble.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#212

Post by l0b0 »

We need a third option in the malice/incompetence spectrum: active neglect. It's the safest way for big organisations to push users off of platforms they don't like. A combination of one or more of the following is going to ensure that the platform support is always wonky:

- Under-fund the testing. This can backfire if whistle-blowers point out the change.

- Assign bad apples to the platform. This can't really backfire, because of the woke "everyone's equally good at everything" thing.

- Keep moving the target, similar to the "extend" part of embrace-extend-extinguish. "Of course we can't support legacy platforms like Firefox, because they don't support this incredibly niche 3D tile caching optimisation flag, which only Teams and two other products on the globe use."

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#213

Post by cpeterso »

Szpadel wrote: post #120
capableweb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

but Microsoft should understand why this is an issue, they had to rename their windows from 9 to 10 because applications did check based on os name string and just exit after detecting it contains "windows 9" as it suppose to match windows 95 and windows 98

Similarly, Mozilla recently had to freeze part of Firefox’s User-Agent string because some websites mistook Firefox 110 as IE 11 and blocked access because they no longer supported IE 11. The websites misinterpreted “rv:110” in Firefox’s Use-Agent string as “rv:11”.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1805967

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#214

Post by breakingcups »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #199
kyle-rb wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Interesti…

Don't you think it's unethical to spread misinformation like this without doing your due diligence in checking?

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#215

Post by tredre3 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #18

https://teams.microsoft.com Firefox 110.0.1 on Linux, works perfectly What am I missing? The link in the submission points to https://teams.live.com/_#/unsupportedBrowser but https://teams.live.com/ works without issues

> What am I missing?

It's blocked on Nightly. 110.0.1 is the current stable version, not nightly.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#216

Post by dogma1138 »

hinkley wrote: post #97
dogma1138 wrote: post #47

Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent, w/e string matching they do is too strict they aren’t checking for actual JS/WebASM compatibility or anything like that. Chrome stable with a non standard user agent doesn’t work on via the windows live url but works through the O365 corporate one, same with Safari Mobile without any user agent modification. This to me looks like stupidity more th…

Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does. “We are the smartest developers in the world” I’m told used to be something you heard on campus, presumably during the recruiting process, and in the board room. But if the Justice department comes knocking, they turn into Steve Urkel. You can’t have it both ways, and they…

Someone created a story “for the new release of teams a minimum browser compatibility test is required”

The dev who picked it up got a list of supported user agents and decided that they’ll simply do a string match and didn’t think it through as it’s easier than implementing feature detection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#217

Post by dogma1138 »

usea wrote: post #126
KennyBlanken wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: I don't think blocking bleeding-edge browsers is necessarily "stupidity." If you're smart enough to understand all the caveats of running a bleeding edge software program, you're smart enough to change your user agent string. If you're not, you have no business running nightly, and you're probably going to generate a lot of "yOuR sITE is BRokEN!" support emails / forum posts / bug reports for other…

People can run whatever software they want. They don't need your permission, or to know how to file a bug report, or whatever other bullshit you've dreamed up. They're also allowed to complain when a site is broken in their browser. If you don't want to see unsophisticated complaints and bug reports, then you need to stop looking at them. Perhaps find a different profession/hobby where your user-hostile attitude actu…

To some extent that is correct, ironically this was likely an attempt to reduce user complaints and bug reports. The problem is that they didn’t went about the the correct way there is a better way to implement feature detection than to check the user agent: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#218

Post by CamperBob2 »

breakingcups wrote: post #214
CamperBob2 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Interesti…

Don't you think it's unethical to spread misinformation like this without doing your due diligence in checking?

Yep.

But do you care to address the actual point, which is still correct even if a few patent numbers are wrong?

Would it have been better not to mention specific patents at all?

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#219

Post by dogma1138 »

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...

Because you’ll be surprised how many developers aren’t familiar with these things and how many of them think that they are more clever than the herd and do not validate their assumptions.

It wouldn’t surprise me if some junior dev picked it up and then went to ask a senior dev how can they detect the browser version and they got a half assed reply hmm check the user agent and went on with that.

95% of the major bugs and security issues I see on a daily basis are due to this.

Re: Microsoft Teams is blocking Firefox Nightly

#220

Post by tag2103 »

We are a smaller company, only 10 users. We are in the process of fully ditching Microsoft for a full linux stack using Samba for AD (for the leprosy known as Quickbooks alone). I've blocked MS at the pihole and was expecting people to bring torches and pitchforks. The general consensus was we should have done this years ago and how did you make my computer so much faster. To hell with Microsoft and their tripe.
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