61–70 of 166 posts
The worst is that just changing the user agent makes everything work.
who is using skype anyway?
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.
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.
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…
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "pu…
I agree with your post except for the bit quoted above. At that time Microsoft had already won the browser war and was then using that to lock people into Windows via ActiveX controls and such like. So there was feature-racing -- of sorts. It's just those features all lived outside of the web browser engine
For each browser, we had to add support in our standalone plugin, that was (and still is) required to install for audio/video calls. There was a small maintenance cost per browser, which was a bigger one whenever changes to the plug-in were made.
I left Skype/Microsoft a long time ago and Microsoft announced in March they will drop support for Firefox[2]. I can only speculate, but it’s likely due to not wanting to pay the maintenance cost of this product on an ongoing basis.
Not directly related story from building Skype for Web: a big internal battle those days was us vs the Edge team. We wanted Edge to ship the Skype plugin as default, making calls seamless for Edge users, not needing to install a plugin (we saw large drops in adoption due to this plugin). Chrome already did exactly this with Hangouts back in the day and we saw it as them eating our lunch.
This was at the time of Steve Balmer’s Microsoft, where collaboration between different orgs was difficult and facing strong political headwind. We got nowhere with the Edge team, who wanted no dependencies and prioritised performance above anything like this - and also wanted to hit their own KPIs, which had nothing to do with Skype users preferring to use Edge.
We reasoned, pleaded, argued, steamed, shouted names and even used the "C" argument ("but... but... but... even Chrome does it!"). No avail. So a separate plugin install it was, giving people zero incentive to use a Microsoft browser for a Microsoft product. The Edge team were pleased they did not have to cater for another dependency and their roadmap remained unchanged. We were frustrated and had little doubt which brodwser will keep gaining market share - being certain it will not be IE/Edge.
Other not directly related story: a few years ago I wrote in detail my take on why Skype failed, here on HN. Read it on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927600
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/microsofts-new-skype...
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.
Original Skype for Web developer here. I was part of the launch team who built the first version for this product in 2014[1]. Back then we supported Chrome, IE 9+, Safari and Firefox. Already we had internal debates to support Opera, but the decision was to focus on the largest browsers. For each browser, we had to add support in our standalone plugin, that was (and still is) required to install for audio/video calls…
Edge was in a weird position where it somehow looked fast but felt sluggish. A real shame it didn't work out though.