- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
Teams also doesn’t support multiple “work” accounts, so I had to boot up a laptop to accept the call. 🤷
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Well they are just lying, it works fine with Firefox and has worked fine for years. I live in the EU though. Sucks to be american these days, I guess?
These days? It’s sucked to be an American for decades.
Better than being in a third world country ig. But it’s frustrating, because our issues are generally fueled by greed and were entirely preventable
As I saw somebody once say, “The US is a 3rd world country in a Prada belt.” If we didn’t have that big chunk of post-WW2 money keeping our economy chugging along all these years, we probably wouldn’t look all that different from them.
When you have to compare yourself to a “third world country” to feel not so bad it’s not a compliment.
I have the same issue, but I am also in the EU. however, I just used an extension to spoof my user agent and now it works fine. there is some weird behavior sometimes, like when I call someone it doesn’t actually ring the other person etc.
Used it today using Firefox on OSX, no issues whatsoever.
EU resident here, doesn’t work for me as well
Same for me, tried it today and it worked perfectly
What the hell does it have to do with being American?
Certain restrictions related to Microsoft Edge are applied less in the EU
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This isnt Hexbear man, wrong instance.
But we’re good with Eat the Rich, right?
Yes, that’s still fine.
Just one more upside to Firefox, less interruptions during work~
Its cool how all these companies are allowed to just lie to you about their products functionality.
If you use Firefox, you are a communist; and if you are a communist why would you need the glorious tools of corporate communication? Just make do with rotten turnips as Lenin intended
This whooshed a lot o’ folks.
Conversely, I should maybe try to use the /s thingy and stop thinking people can read my mind. Will I learn this lesson today? Hmmm
“glorious” + “rotten turnips” = /s
Don’t give in to the dark side.
You went from -12 to +16!
Fuck /s ✊
Using Firefox makes you a communist?? Maybe you just enjoying have your data harvested by Google.
Looks like your sarcasm detector is broken. Just like Teams.
You got me, not gonna lie
To be fair sarcasm is impossible to express via firefox.
Firefox supports the standard just fine
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Sarcasm/Attributes
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Sarcasm/Attributes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thanks for the warning bro!
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Sorry if this was not clear, but it was only a joke. I assure you, I only subscribe to first-quality ideologies.
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Yeah I’m more referring to sites that do this ans then work perfectly fine once the user agent reads some brand of chromium. The only serious offender I deal with on a weekly basis is Apple Business Manager.
This team block is so agressive to firefox users that it’s literaly hardcoded as if web browser firefox then deny.
You cam override that by changing a parameter in firefox to advertise itself as another we browser. I don’t remeber how i did it but, once i had to use firefox and i just changed that stting in order to advertise me to the host as a edge browser. With that changed i could use teams as normal.
Epic drm.
When I’d search “(location) weather” on Google (e: in Chrome) and I’d get a really nice at a glance forecast right on top. Do the same thing in Firefox and I’d get a whole bunch of weather websites I could go to. The former obviously being a better, more direct experience. I found an extension that fools Google into thinking it’s Chrome and all works fine with that.
I’m amazed if this doesn’t violate some antitrust regulation
Just checked: Duck Duck go displays the forecast right on top.
Android addon to fix this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search-fixer/
My main problem with this is getting amp links in the results after.
Try Redirect AMP to HTML. It’s worked pretty well for me.
Started using https://qwant.com a few years ago and the bliss of forgetting about amp links is real. (though I am considering https://kagi.com instead.)
They do worse than this. Search it on a weather site, pretty easy to get around
Got a name for that chrome spoofing add on for FF on a PC by chance?
UserAgentSwitcher has been the gold standard for like 20 years.
The intangible sloth who replied to me provided a link to the one I use
User agent string.
This is likely legacy code. Firefox used to have a lot of issues with WebRTC, so practically all video conferencing systems blocked it. Teams probably has some “block Firefox because it doesn’t work properly” check that was written 5+ years ago and none of the current developers are even aware of its existence.
Well-coded ones did feature detection instead of checking the user-agent, meaning they automatically started allowing Firefox as soon as it implemented all the required features.
Feature detection is usually the way to go. If your website / webapp depends on a particular feature, check if that specific feature exists, rather than checking for particular browsers. Browser checks are still needed in some cases, for example Safari sometimes reports that it supports particular features but it really doesn’t (or they’re so buggy to the point where they’re unusable), but that’s relatively rare.
Feature detection is usually the way to go. If your website / webapp depends on a particular feature, check if that specific feature exists, rather than checking for particular browsers. Browser checks are still needed in some cases, for example Safari sometimes reports that it supports particular features but it really doesn’t (or they’re so buggy to the point where they’re unusable), but that’s relatively rare.
This is tough to implement when the feature is present, but implemented wrong. Or, even worse, when it’s implemented right, but the most popular browser implements it wrong and almost everyone else follow suit for compatibility reasons, except for one that takes the stance of following standards. I know safari is notorious for this, think pale moon had those issues, too, and there are still echoes from the past from pre-chrome internet explorer, thank god it’s finally dead.
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
At least Chrome is mostly standards-compliant and doesn’t do anything too weirdly. I’d say Safari is the new IE - lots of weird bugs that no other browser has, and sometimes you need hacks specific to Safari.
That’s fair. I meant that more in terms of using market dominance to shape the browser market, and not in entirely good ways.
I’ll rue the day that every website insists it only works with Chrome because of some user-privacy degrading feature that Google insists is a core web technology.
However, Chrome is a browser collecting user data for a company whose business model it is to sell user data. Edge is a shitty bloatware collecting user data for a company that has (for now) a business model selling software licenses.
I wouldn’t say it’s “better” to use Edge, but I wouldn’t install Chrome either(!) on any device whose data I care about.
whose business model it is to sell user data
So I know what you mean, but Google doesn’t sell user data. That’s a common misconception. The data is what makes the company valuable - they’re not going to just give that to anyone with money. Instead, they sell your attention. Advertisers can target their ads based on data collected about you. Advertisers never actually see the data nor do they know exactly which users are seeing their ad - they just get aggregate statistics.
Having said that… Edge is basically Chrome but better (e.g. it uses less RAM). I use Firefox but if I didn’t, I’d give Edge a try. It’s unfortunate that Microsoft are trying to push it so hard, since it’s actually a decent browser that’s being ruined by Microsoft trying to force everyone to use it.
While I don’t know of course whether Google actually sells the data itself, let me rephrase my original criticism: “whose business model is based on monetizing user data - which can lead to severe privacy breaches / leaks of sensitive personal data”. Thanks for pointing that out, but I would say my prime concern remains.
I couldn’t say that it is. Chrome team’s usual approach is to make and release stuff first, write specifications later. By the time the other browsers come along, there’s already both market adoption and bunch of dumb decisions set in stone as a standard. Most notable examples of this would be QUIC and WebUSB
This is tough to implement when the feature is present, but implemented wrong
Sometimes it’s doable if you can call the API and check that the result is what you’d expect. For example, a long time ago some browsers incorrectly handled particular Unicode characters in JSON.parse. Sites could check for the incorrect behaviour and shim JSON.parse with a version that fixes the output.
I’ve never worked with WebRTC but I imagine it might be difficult to do that with some of its APIs given they require camera or microphone access (meaning you can’t check for the bug until the user actually tries to use it).
Sometimes it’s doable if you can call the API and check that the result is what you’d expect
Yeah, you can even test visual and network stuff at a cost of latency, but it’s hard and lots of developers are too lazy to do this, I’ve often seen sites that don’t even check if function exists before calling it, crashing the entire site because adblock cut out google tags or they call API that isn’t even implemented in firefox.
I’ve never worked with WebRTC but I imagine it might be difficult to do that with some of its APIs given they require camera or microphone access
I did. It’s a complete mess. First and foremost exactly because it’s a soup of completely unrelated tech - P2P, webcams, audio in&out, stream processing and compression, SIP(!?). There’s no good debug tooling available and lots of stuff is buried inside browser’s implementation. And, on top of that, any useful info on the topic is usually buried under lots of “make a skype killer in 5 minutes” kind of libraries with hardcoded TURN servers - the developer’s overpriced TURN servers, that is.
This is indeed the case. I use firefox daily, including for teams. I have to fake my user agent to do it, but it works. Its purely teams just saying fuck you to firefox…
Could you share your user agent string please? I am still on the Teams desktop app for Linux, but that’s been discontinued in 2022 already, so I am anticipating the day it will stop working altogether. And I haven’t even managed to log in to teams web with Chromium yet (and no, I don’t want to install f*cking Chrome itself) - I get a permanent login loop on successful username / password :/
Edit: never mind, I found it here: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6224391
User Agent String that works for me:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
You should update the spoofed agent occasionally or else you may get an update warning from some sites and get blocked. Just check what a current version of an allowed browser reports and copy it.
Yeah, probably a good idea. Nevertheless, I am pissed (but not surprised) to see that Firefox is getting locked out on purpose. A sincere “Fuck you” @Microsoft.
They might be doing feature detection on one of the more obscure APIs, too. I know there’s some audio manipulation APIs that aren’t available.
Someone complained about Discord deliberately blocking Firefox users because of that, but it turned out that spoofing the user agent would actually break the feature.
Teams used to have more features on Firefox. Microsoft has intentionally started stripping off shit to move people to edgium
Oh… I didn’t know this. Maybe it is intentionally malicious then. Hmm.
Try changing your user agent to a Chrome one (e.g.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36). Works a treat!Sidenote:
HTTP user agents have become absolutely bonkers over the years.
I like how this guy explains the history of browser user agents and why they have this strange configuration today:
And that’s why you shouldn’t parse them and use feature detection instead.
Useragent parsing is still a thing?
It is similiar in nature to greping html.
There’s an API called “client hits” that’s replacing user-agent. Some of the hints will require the user to provide permission for the site to use them, since they could be used for fingerprinting.
Major browsers (Chrome and I thibk Firefox) are freezing the user-agent. The only thing that’ll be changing in user agents is the major browser version. Other parts including platform will be static. Chrome on Windows will always report itself as Windows 10 for example. https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/
Oh so like how other browsers reported Windows NT for decades… cool.
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Not really. The example listed above is perfectly readable.
Knowing the versions of webkit, browser version, etc. is important due to inconsistencies, new features, mossing features, and deprecated features. Sure it can be faked, but that is on the end user.
There is more information in there that isn’t actually true and only supposed to trick some old web servers into treating it a certain way than there is actually correct information,
It mentions three different browsers, only one of which is actually true, and three different rendering engines, none of which is actually what’s used.
Chrome doesn’t use Webkit, and the referenced Webkit version is probably 10 years old at this point. The user agent is full of stuff for backwards compatibility. That’s why it’s being deprecated in favour of a better API (client hints)
Feels like we’re back to 2007 again when spoofing firefox user agent to IE would fix websites not working properly, only now we spoof it to chrome instead.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
thank you, this worked for me! :)
This is not mildly infuriating this is the free internet being eroded through Google’s control of Chrome
I think this is more a push towards tightly couplings with Edge.
Just change your Useragent, Microsoft is a bunch of dummies and didn’t even bother to code it in a way that makes sense as a DRM lmfao.
I had to look it up, here’s what I found (please correct me if I got it wrong):
To change the user agent in Firefox, you can use the built-in Developer Tools. Here’s how you can do it:
- Open Firefox.
- Press
Ctrl+Shift+Ion Windows orCmd+Option+Ion macOS to open the Developer Tools. - Click on the “Network” tab.
- Look for a small icon that looks like a mobile phone and a tablet together, usually located at the top-right of the Network tab. This is the “Responsive Design Mode” button. Click on it.
- Once in Responsive Design Mode, you’ll see a dropdown menu at the top of the screen where you can select different user agents (like various mobile devices, different browsers, etc.).
Remember, changing the user agent can sometimes lead to unexpected behavior on websites, as it tells the website that you’re using a different browser or device than you actually are. This is usually used for testing and development purposes.
Edit: a word
And here I was just setting
general.useragent.overrideeach time.Fun fact: Some time in past Firefox used to support per-domain overrides (without add-ons).
There are add-ons to select a different user agent without getting that technical.
There’s an addon that can do it and remember the setting per domain or website.
I, for one, would appreciate a link to said addon
I’ve used: User Agent Switcher
Successfully using;
- Whitelist mode
- Domain =
teams.microsoft.com - UserAgentString =
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Awesome I was on my phone so I couldn’t quickly check what addon I was using.
Thnx!
Ctrl+ shift + M
Sure, but the point is that you shouldn’t have to. There should be cross-compatibility.
Teams won’t even open on Safari. Must use a chrome-based browser (like… Edge!)
To be fair, I don’t know many complex websites that work on Safari
It’s really not as bad as people portray. Most sites do work in Safari. There are some problems, but they’ve been pretty good about licking them over time. It’s passable enough that I only have to punt to an alternate browser once in a while.
I’ve tried to use Firefox, I really have. But Firefox absolutely murders my battery and I’m sorry, but they need to do some serious usability improvements… especially around the container implementation and tab management. It’s confusing as fuck (to me).
given the love Teams receives, it not working in [ insert browser ] is definitely a feature
Have you tried changing your user agent string to Chrome? I know it can sometimes sidestep these types of “errors”. It can be changed manually through about:config under general.useragent.override, or there exists plenty of addons to switch it more easily.
I’ve avoided changing my user agent because Firefox’s apperant market share is already so low. I’ve installed the extension and will it try it with my work container though.
You can make it work by changing your UserAgent string (there’s plugins for that) to some older chrome version to make things work.
The problem I have with this though is if enough people on Firefox spoof their user agent to Chrome, it’s gonna look like less and less people are using Firefox and Chrome will eventually have a monopoly.
Not sure that’s how monopoly work, the folks on both end will still have data of their actual userbase
Sorry I dont really understand your point, it could be my bad English.
I’m gonna explain my point further; You can make it look like you’re using Chrome when you’re not, and if everyone just makes it look like they’re using Chrome, then developers will only support Chrome and Google can and will pull off whatever shit they want to like Web DRM, just under a different name which they’ve done in the past.
So the minority using Firefox won’t have proper support and will see more pop ups like these from more websites. The only difference being whatever feature the website needs actually won’t be supported on Firefox because developers only see that everyone is using “Chrome”.
Yes the developers will see the spoofed data like you said… But is the UA the only classifier?
Would like to hear a devs opinion. Maybe the people making those decisions need to be sensitive about this skewed data.
How about not having these arbitrary not needed restrictions in the first place? This is just the usual scummy behavior from this company.
I think you can spoof per tab/container. i used an exclusive Firefox Profile for the bad/contaminated (read: not privacy respecting) browsing - in there i’d ocasionally switch the UserAgent to make Teams calls.
there’s no way i’d work on a machine with M$ spyware installed and always running
They already have a monopoly. The amount of people using FF is pretty small unfortunately. And there’s a bunch of sites that only test in Chrome and sometimes even actively “block” Firefox like here without making an effort to check for capabilities instead of user agent.
Im sure if you swap user agent to chrome they wouldn’t give a fuck
It crashes right after a call starts.
Everything else works fine though.
It’ll complain later that the browser is blocking its spyware and adware.
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The new presentation blurb is really annoying bad at hiding itself.
That said, new teams finally supports multiple accounts, so I don’t have to keep using a web app for the second one on my work laptop.
Teams also doesn’t support multiple “work” accounts
Firefox lets you have completely separate profiles with separate accounts (URL:
about:profiles, it can’t be linked to for security reasons) and also an official extension to have another layer of profiles on a per-tab basis (containers).Also no idea what he is talking about, I have 4 work accounts in Teams. Ever since they rebuilt their frontend to the “New Teams” multiple accounts have been working just fine.
In the past I had multiple Team instances as PWA for different work accounts, nowadays it’s all in one app and works pretty good.
Not to defend Teams, it’s total shit, a lot of shit straight up doesn’t work half of the time, including important shit like notifications for new messages and content. But it has come a long way from the days including any image in chat would crash Teams for all participants. It isn’t perfect and the amount of resources it used to do what it does is awful, but compared to most modern apps it’s pretty good.
Just don’t tell a Teams dev Microsoft Messenger did 99% of the same stuff and ran super fast on a Pentium 3 333mhz with 64MB of ram, they’ll cry and you’ll be called out for being a bully.
