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Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

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

#151

Post by Carpetsmoker »

ceejayoz wrote: post #77
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 :-/

That's odd, and I'd be more inclined to blame a plugin than Firefox itself. I'm Firefox all day, every day, and my job revolves around Facebook, without that sort of issue.

I only have uBlock and disabling it makes no difference. It's been broken like this for at least ~6 months (possibly longer, but I don't use Facebook much).

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

#152

Post by godelski »

lostgame wrote: post #130
gregdoesit wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

People here aren't really asking for support. They are complaining that they are locked out. Specifically targeted. They get that an error might exist on an unsupported browser. What they are mad about is that they are explicitly locked out, and for seemingly no purpose.

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

#153

Post by jrockway »

cameronbrown wrote: post #68
mcv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we back to the "built for Netscape 4.7" days? Sites shouldn't support browsers, but standards. By all means check if a browser supports a certain standard, and provide an error message for browsers that are too far behind, but don't ban them simply for having the wrong user agent.

I think so. A solution to this might be to croudsource an extension which changes the User Agent on known good apps (where changing it just works but they've decided not to let you use it).

I feel like the endgame here is that everyone will just ship Electron apps. Then the web goes completely dark.

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

#154

Post by The_rationalist »

Santosh83 wrote: post #95
The_rationalist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would chromium stagnate? Everybody can improve it, even mozilla.

And that is truly disturbing, because it is not an implausible future where even Mozilla is finally compelled to rebase Firefox upon yet another Chromium fork, just to stay relevant with the fast-moving, extremely complex web ecosystem. Of course if their market share improves then they'll still be able to exercise relatively significant influence upon the Web's direction, but the big challenge in front of them is ex…

I wish this future for mozilla but I expect them to make that decision when it will be too late for them.

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

#156

Post by gregdoesit »

lostgame wrote: post #130
gregdoesit wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I was on the team who built this, five years ago. I left Microsoft about that time ago. I don't have information on how and why decisions are being made now.

Having worked at Microsoft though, if your team cannot guarantee that a feature works on a browser that uses some non-standard things, is a decision that product will make on how to proceed. Display a warning or just don't support? Perhaps there might be security issues in the future the company wants to avoid this way, knowing they could not patch it? And so on.

Beyond speculation, I don't have much more to offer.

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

#157

Post by michaelanckaert »

dTal wrote: post #105
taneq wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say "Great, so Chrome/X.X is going to be the new Mozilla/4.0" but then looked it up and apparently Chrome already reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36" so what even is a user agent string for?

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

Great resource, thanks for sharing!

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

#158

Post by albertshin »

mathw wrote: post #58
albertshin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wager they'll shut down the consumer facing portion too? It's a fairly decent brand. Although I guess with VoIP so ubiquitously free (WhatsApp, etc) I'm not sure how they monetize these days...

It's a well-known brand but Microsoft have dragged it through the mud since they acquired it and among those I know it now has a reputation for being extremely unreliable. They might want to retire it rather than fight to rehabilitate its image.

True, on second thought, I found myself saying let's Skype soon and end up using some other app during facetime...

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

#159

Post by taneq »

lostgame wrote: post #131
taneq wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I've been using Facebook in Firefox since IE6 stopped being cool, and it's always worked fine.

IE6 was cool? (j/k - I do remember the years where it was actually alright, before it became the plague on the dev community it evolved into)

So you understand how long I've been using Firefox, then. :P

(And yeah, compared with Netscape 4, IE6 was great!)

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

#160

Post by taneq »

dTal wrote: post #105
taneq wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say "Great, so Chrome/X.X is going to be the new Mozilla/4.0" but then looked it up and apparently Chrome already reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36" so what even is a user agent string for?

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

That was brilliant, thanks!
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