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Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#121

Post by ryandrake »

Santosh83 wrote: post #9

You can expect to see more and more of this as most of the world converges on the Chromium browser base. There is very little incentive for these companies to test for Firefox. Device users have spoken. They do not bother to change the defaults that come with their devices (Chrome, Edge, Safari) and do not really care about the deeper aspects of privacy or control or FOSS. At most they care about blocking ads, which…

I remember people saying the same thing about IE6. “Internet Explorer will soon be 95% of the browser market, so there is no reason to develop for any other browser.” This was used to justify IE-only development, further boosting that browser’s share.

User apathy and developer laziness produces this self-reinforcing circle of platform lock-in.

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#122

Post by dao- »

gregdoesit wrote: post #67

Original Skype for Web developer here. I was part of the launch team who built the first version for this product in 2014[1]. Back then we supported Chrome, IE 9+, Safari and Firefox. Already we had internal debates to support Opera, but the decision was to focus on the largest browsers. For each browser, we had to add support in our standalone plugin, that was (and still is) required to install for audio/video calls…

> For each browser, we had to add support in our standalone plugin, that was (and still is) required to install for audio/video calls.

Is this true? What kind of plugin are we talking about? I believe both Chrome and Firefox deprecated NPAPI, with only Firefox still supporting the Flash NPAPI plugin for a year or so? Is this a pepper plugin?

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#124

Post by andrewshadura »

userbinator wrote: post #30
hawski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video calls do work. There is an extension, that will change the UA only for Skype: https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-web-skyp...

There are plenty of extensions that will let you change the UA for any site; having yet another one with such a narrow function seems to me like those "we have a smartphone app too" whose only purpose is to open the browser to their site.

Just add this to your prefs.js/about:config

  user_pref("general.useragent.override.web.skype.com", "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36");

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#125

Post by gregdoesit »

edm0nd wrote: post #110
gregdoesit wrote: post #67

Original Skype for Web developer here. I was part of the launch team who built the first version for this product in 2014[1]. Back then we supported Chrome, IE 9+, Safari and Firefox. Already we had internal debates to support Opera, but the decision was to focus on the largest browsers. For each browser, we had to add support in our standalone plugin, that was (and still is) required to install for audio/video calls…

Is it true that Microsoft revamped Skype in order to comply with law enforcement wiretaps and log everything for subpeonas?

Skype was non-reliable by 2013 due to P2P. Messages were not being delivered reliably. All our competitors were using a centraised-server model, the biggest threat being WhatsApp at the time.

So we kicked off the same effort before Microsoft bought Skype. The effort them took a LOT longer due to the merger. It finished a few years after the acquisition. Without MS acquiring, we would have gotten it done much faster.

Somehow the internet got this idea “Skype is going centralised to allow wiretapping, because of Microsoft”. We did it as we were fighting to be functional/somewhat reliable, with (chat) messaging becoming so big. I have a longer version in a comment[1] from a few years ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927600

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#126

Post by extra88 »

joaobeno wrote: post #82

Tweeted them about this, their response: "Request/vote for this feature on our community site", with the following link: https://skype.uservoice.com/forums/914527-welcome-to-skype-i...

I don't know what "Preview" is but it sounds more specific than supporting Skype for Web in Firefox overall. There are a number of other UserVoice ideas about Firefox support. Microsoft should consolidate the ones that are essentially saying the same thing.

https://skype.uservoice.com/forums/914527-welcome-to-skype-i...

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#127

Post by pzmarzly »

GoToRO wrote: post #107
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook "kind of" works in Firefox, but there's loads of subtle breakage: for example pasting anything in Messenger (with ctrl+v) breaks the entire site for me. Middle-click kind-of but kind-of-doesn't work, depending on planetary alignments or some such :-/

This is what I got... https://www.facebook.com/i.valentin.maxim/videos/10219098431...

The same happens to me in Chromium and Vivaldi - it looks like most (all?) currencies with postfix currency symbol are broken. Just press left arrow after entering a digit.

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#128

Post by mtarnovan »

debaserab2 wrote: post #96
zsrxx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is sitting at 8.3% quota in NA and dwindling. It's reasonable not to support it.

I can’t imagine making the case to anyone at my work that we can/should voluntarily stop supporting 8.3% of our audience.

heck, we're supporting IE11 at great pains with ~4% audience

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#129

Post by JeremyNT »

realusername wrote: post #4

The worst is that just changing the user agent makes everything work.

There has been so much loving praise of Microsoft on hn lately, while they would continue to use their same old tricks. A similar case is MS Teams, which won't enable audio or video on Firefox Linux without spoofing the ua as well.

This is especially insidious since so many companies are already locked into the MS ecosystem, users have no choice but to use edge or chrome and IT departments will start wondering why they would bother allowing the use of Firefox at all.

Re: Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

#130

Post by lostgame »

gregdoesit wrote: post #73
realusername wrote: post #4

The worst is that just changing the user agent makes everything work.

As above, I was on the Skype for Web launch team. While chat will probably work, as it doesn't have anything browser-specific, I am not sure video/audio calls will be reliable. Even if they work now, that flow is no longer tested or fixed if it breaks on Firefox. The downloadable video/audio plugin on Windows and Mac, supporting Firefox is the expensive part that the team likely stopped supporting.

It's said often, but this is why I love HN - when the folks who actually work at these companies can provide insight.

Because what we are seeing certainly seems malicious - the idea that it can work by changing the user header looked, at least to me, as a swipe to Firefox, but instead, you're explaining that you simply couldn't guarantee support.

Now, it would be cool if you could simply just state that on the page, instead of simply saying it won't work - but I do understand the desire to not present something with potential issues to the general public.

Thanks for taking the time, here.

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