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Comment by ominous | Hacker News Reader

trying to go to meet.google.com yields:

    Your browser doesn't support Hangouts Meet

    To join this meeting, install the latest version of Google Chrome

Thank you, Google. I do have Chrome installed. I have other browsers installed. I also have my gym clothes at home, graduated sunglasses and contact lenses. But right now I am dressing casual, with regular glasses and using firefox. So you are out of luck.

Everything but "an enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts". Hangouts is multiplatform application that connects gmail addresses through chat. Meet is just a chrome app?

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> Your browser doesn't support Hangouts Meet

No, Google, it's the other way round. Hangouts Meet doesn't support my browser. Quit trying to blame your lazy coding on others.

This is extra lazy on their part if this is legitimately an effort to hit the enterprise market, where users might not necessarily have the freedom to install Chrome on their company machines. Or it's an attempt to force corporate IT into approving chrome.

The enterprise market would be the least likely place you'd find Firefox.

I'd guess IE, Chrome, Firefox in that order. Maybe Edge in there but since it's new a lot of Enterprises will be fearful.

Sort of like how my Firefox does support yubikey through an extention, but Google just hardcodes the user agent as not working.

It is a bit different, Firefox doesn't support one TLS extension that Google wants to perform a Yubikey authentication.

Not trying to blame FF here as I am also using it...

I wonder what so new technology they use that is bundled in the chrome that they need it that bad?!

The cynic in me things this is a case of "We use chrome so we developed for chrome - we'll fix other browsers later" (Yes I'm bitter about the state of the cross-browser development sometimes)

That's nowhere near as cynical as "the more things are exclusive to Chrome, the more market share Chrome gets through lock-in and so the more data we can harvest." Which is what I'd guess is the real reason.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect the key to success in videoconferencing is doing really extensive testing.

The users are going to try to transition from NATed-mobile-data to corporate-wifi-with-ssl-mitm while reinserting their USB headset and connecting an external monitor while screensharing with participants running five different OSes.

Maybe they've had time to do all that testing on Chrome, but they haven't got around to it yet with Firefox.

Possibly the same thing that powers Hangouts and requires to install plugin in other browsers (as other browsers don't support plugins anymore, Hangouts works only in Chrome too).

Chrome has a baked-in plugin for Hangouts. They used to have you install a plugin for Firefox, but since Firefox has removed NPAPI in version 52 it no longer works. Supposedly they are working on a standards-based solution.

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts...

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