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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

#21

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

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…

The sad thing is that we've lived through all of this with Internet Explorer. I'd be willing to be that we will once more when Chrome stagnates and something bigger and better comes along...

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

#22

Post by mcv »

realusername wrote: post #4

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

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.

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

#23

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

lovelearning wrote: post #15

LinkedIn too behaves strangely on Firefox/Ubuntu. Endless login loop, even if all add-ons are disabled. I'm surprised that such popular websites treat Firefox so poorly.

Fellow Firefox/Ubuntu user here. Are you blocking Captchas somehow? This is usually my problem (and specifically very recently with LinkedIn, hence the comment).

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

#26

Post by mcv »

sodosopa wrote: post #8
sgt wrote: post #2

Also not supported in Safari. That's fine, I wasn't going to use Skype anyway.

That’s a larger problem since Safari has a larger userbase. Mozilla is generally at 5% Safari has been at 7-8%. Collectively, Microsoft is fine with losing potentially 12%

They don't just lose that 12%, but also the people they want to talk to.

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

#27

Post by taneq »

realusername wrote: post #4

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

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?

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

#28

Post by loudmax »

userbinator wrote: post #18
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 never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft would support the Google monopoly... despite all the hate IE got, at least it was from a company whose primary source of profit wasn't online advertising. To see MS give up on IE, and then Edge, was very disappointing.

It was from a company whose primary source of profit is vendor lock-in. Poorly supporting or not supporting open standards is SOP for Microsoft.

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

#29

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #6

Would be interested to know how successful they are at switching people to Edge (not just with this, but in general).

I recently had to use Windows 10 for some .NET work and found it really surprising that it nags so much when changing the default browser. Not just in the control panel prompt, but repeatedly afterwards via notifications and even on the login screen.

Hint: Your OS shouldn't do this. It should stay out of your way and honour your choices.

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

#30

Post by userbinator »

hawski wrote: post #14
Bigpet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've been doing the same thing. Although I only use it for text chatting in the browser. I don't know if video or audio calls work with it.

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.
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