Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Skype on web does not support Firefox

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 166 posts

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

#31

Post by Nextgrid »

taneq wrote: post #27
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?

> what even is a user agent string for?

Tracking. Safari actually stopped updating its user agent for this reason.

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

#32

Post by agloeregrets »

hypfer wrote: post #12
sodosopa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%

Yeah but to support safari, you need a way to test your web application with it. The only way to do that is to buy a Mac. That's why a lot of sites don't support it.

Browserstack.com

Also 50% of the US mobile browser market. (Don’t forget iPhone and iPad.)

This is a bs excuse. The only really hard one to test with is IE11, simply because the dev tools are so incredibly slow on a web app.

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

#33

Post by albertshin »

tpaschalis wrote: post #17

Also, Skype for Business is being replaced with Microsoft Teams. Bold prediction : Skype has less than five years of life left.

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...

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

#36

Post by corey_moncure »

tpaschalis wrote: post #17

Also, Skype for Business is being replaced with Microsoft Teams. Bold prediction : Skype has less than five years of life left.

As for Microsoft Teams, they claim video conferencing and desktop sharing is not supported in the browser on Linux, but spoofing the user agent enables them.

They also do not provide a standalone app for Linux, despite the fact it's an Electron app, yet here is the standalone client supported by one individual that works perfectly.

https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux

It really makes you think!

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

#38

Post by dhimes »

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…

Don't give up. We are exactly the people who can change this.

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

#39

Post by phkahler »

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…

Getting rid of ads IS a compelling reason to switch. People will switch if the default is better. They dont want to get a new browser, pick and install an ad blocker, then configure that stuff.

People will stop at the slightest uncertainty. I bet if there was a one-click to install firefox with ad-blocker and some other stuff enabled by default people would start switching.

Installing, extensions, configuration, those are sysadmin function, not stuff Joe public wants to do no matter how easy the developers think they are.

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

#40

Post by gmueckl »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #29
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.

The Windows login screen does other startling things, too. I have also seen it display sneaky advertising for Netflix.
Post reply on HN