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

41–50 of 166 posts

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

#41

Post by Spivak »

mcv wrote: post #22
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.

This is a nice sentiment but for actual products you end up having to say X versions of Y browsers are supported.

It ends up being a feature requested by customer support teams that you prevent the app from working on unsupported browsers because users don’t read banners or pop ups and it generates pointless tickets. If you make your users change their UA there’s an awareness that things might break.

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

#42

Post by gmueckl »

vetinari wrote: post #13
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%

On desktops, it is ~9,5% for Firefox and ~5% for Safari (4,5% for Edge). On mobile, I would rather use native app than web one. On desktop, the "native" app is Electron anyway.

At least the native app for Linux comes with a few shared libraries in addition to Electron. So it's not JavaScript all the way down like the website has to be.

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

#43

Post by userbinator »

loudmax wrote: post #28
userbinator wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better than advertising and being anti-user. I've long realised that "open" anything doesn't really matter if it works against you. Example: Google trying to standardise how it hides URLs from the user (yes, really. https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-rendering ) There's also that whole commotion about including DRM in the HTML spec.

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

#44

Post by dhimes »

OT, but check out the comments in the code. It doesn't instill confidence:

    // Adjusts the position of the given element
    WebDeveloper.Common.adjustElementPosition =      
       function(element, xPosition, yPosition, offset)
    {
      // If the element is set
      if(element)
      {
        var contentWindow = WebDeveloper.Common.getContentWindow();
        var innerHeight   = contentWindow.innerHeight;
        var innerWidth    = contentWindow.innerWidth;
        var offsetHeight  = element.offsetHeight;
        var offsetWidth   = element.offsetWidth;
        var offsetX       = contentWindow.pageXOffset;
        var offsetY       = contentWindow.pageYOffset;

        // If the x position is less than 0
        if(xPosition

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

#46

Post by stanski »

kerng wrote: post #25

"Urges the user to use Microsoft Edge or Chrome." Meaning "Chrome only" is the strategy here (since Edge, mshtml.dll, as unique rendering engine will disappear). Welcome back to the past - have seen this all before in the late 90s.

Suddenly it's okay to develop for just one browser again. Even though browsers are lot more standardized now than they were before, it's still okay to do it. Bizarre.

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

#47

Post by The_rationalist »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #21
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...

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

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

#48

Post by masklinn »

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…

It's not even that it doesn't work on Firefox, it's that they're UA-filtering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818792

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

#50

Post by The_rationalist »

mcv wrote: post #26
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%

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

12% for Firefox marketshare? Source? Last time I checked it was ~4.4% (desktop + mobile)
Post reply on HN