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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

#51

Post by userbinator »

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...

I'd be willing to be that we will once more when Chrome stagnates and something bigger and better comes along...

IE was overtaken by FF at a time when there was less complexity in browsers and MS wasn't really into the sort of feature-racing that's happening today; Google has already achieved an effective monopoly-by-complexity with its control over web standards and constant churn and feature addition under that "push the web forward" excuse. It has used its resources to make a moving target and keep it moving, making it impossible for others to even try to catch up. MS tried with Edge and gave up.

I really don't like this, because unless the population manages to change its viewpoint completely and think "better" is not "bigger", I highly doubt Chrome will ever "stagnate".

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

#52

Post by aphextim »

phkahler wrote: post #39
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, thos…

>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.

Check out Brave, been getting my friends to switch as it has a built in blocker that is even more verbose than ublock. Works on mobile as well which helps them save data and load websites faster.

https://brave.com/

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

#53

Post by aphextim »

aphextim wrote: post #52
phkahler wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thos…

>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. Check out Brave, been getting my friends to switch as it has a built in blocker that is even more verbose than ublock. Works on mobile as well which helps them save data and load websites faster. https://brave.com/

It even has a built in 3 node "Tor" browsing for their private windows if you want.

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

#55

Post by lovelearning »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #23
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).

I don't think I have changed anything related to captchas, at least not intentionally.

I see a lot of "Request to access cookies or storage on https://www.linkedin.com/ was blocked because of custom cookie permission." in console.

However, my Preferences > Content Blocking is set to "Standard"; no add-ons are enabled; not a private window. I have DNS-over-HTTPS enabled. There are no linkedin-related entries in about:config.

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

#56

Post by loudmax »

userbinator wrote: post #43
loudmax wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lock-in is anti-user.

If you don't like Chrome/Edge, then switch to Firefox. Open standards give you have that freedom.

Unless, of course, you can't switch to Firefox because the set of people you need to work with are communicating using proprietary protocols, eg. Skype. Or developing software you need that only works on proprietary operating systems. Now you're locked in.

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

#57

Post by lovelearning »

shrikant wrote: post #19
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.

Have you got a Pi-Hole setup or some such? LinkedIn on FF/Ubuntu works fine for me at home, but I think I had to whitelist something on Pi-Hole admin console.

Don't have Pi-Hole. DNS-over-HTTPS is enabled.

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

#58

Post by mathw »

albertshin wrote: post #33
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...

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.

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

#59

Post by jacquesm »

Spivak wrote: post #41
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.

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.

'unsupported browsers' are browsers that are old or broken. FireFox is a perfectly good browser, it is current and should be supported.

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

#60

Post by avian »

userbinator wrote: post #11
realusername wrote: post #4

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

I always thought having a UA header in the HTTP spec was a bad idea, because it just encourages things like this. Unfortunately, I've tried browsing with no UA header, and a surprisingly large number of sites --- even ones without any sort of "app functionality" --- will return strange errors.

Because it's such a rare corner case. I've been running my blog for 10+ years and apparently I've never seen a request without the UA header - until a post got to the front page of HN a while back and someone like you caused a bunch of "Use of uninitialized value" errors in my logs. It's fixed now.
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