Teams also doesn’t support multiple “work” accounts, so I had to boot up a laptop to accept the call. 🤷

  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    643·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • drathvedro@lemm.eeEnglish
      15·
      9 months ago

      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.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          33·
          9 months ago

          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.

          • Monument@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            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.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      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…

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Teams used to have more features on Firefox. Microsoft has intentionally started stripping off shit to move people to edgium

    • kibiz0r@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      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.