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Comment by mjw1007 | Hacker News Reader

Good to see the new trustworthy Microsoft in action.

Coming soon: github.com "best viewed in Edge".

Like Google is doing on YouTube and their main site? What you'll say if GitHub loading times are 5x faster on Edge than on Chrome and Firefox [1]?

I don't want to be Microsoft apologist, but Google is doing this shit for years, and nobody says anything. One annoying popup in Windows and the end is near. Yeah, because we don't trust MS for things they did ten years ago. But we trust Google even if they're doing the same thing right now.

[1] https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

It gets worse.

Google Hangouts Meet doesn't work in anything but Chrome.

Meet works fine in Firefox nowadays.

That's changed recently o-o

Woo!

With Firefox 60, actually.

So it works even with the current ESR.

But was that on purpose or only incidentally?

On purpose; remember they whitelist UAs. Hangouts and Meet both supporting Firefox now was a deliberate move, enabled by Hangouts/Meet moving to the current WebRTC draft protocol (versus some much older one) and by Firefox introducing supports for some further JS APIs to monitor the WebRTC connection.

I'm not so certain.

About a month ago, on a fully-updated Firefox, one of those (I forget if Hangouts or Meet) refused to start for me, saying Firefox was not supported.

Even now, every time I'm in a Hangout, it'll work on Firefox, then after exiting it redirects to a page that says Firefox isn't supported.

It's like the user-agent check was switched with something less reliable.

Better, they might end up blocking other user agents, or give specific features you can only use with Edge. They love doing that.

I don't think they'll end up doing that for the same reason that Google didn't put the Dart VM in Chrome. Nobody wants to be the one to start the nuclear war.

Google has done this before. When they blocked Hangouts in non-Chrome browsers, spoofing your User Agent would allow it to load and, probably predictably since I'm making this comment, Hangouts worked absolutely fine in Firefox. Not sure if it still works these days, but I don't use Hangouts anymore.

There's also the whole Shadow DOM v0 stuff with YouTube that more or less artificially slows down rendering in non-Chrome browsers.

Google is just more subtle about it.

I have never had this problem with Hangouts in Firefox. Hangouts has a million bugs on its own, but it works similarly poorly in Chrome and Firefox and has for a long time as far as I can tell.

Hangouts / Chat don't work in Safari now, only Chrome

They'll be in good company with Google who's pushed their browser in similar ways for years.

Some features on Google services don't work on non-Chrome browsers. Others, like earth.google.com, don't work at all.

At least earth.google.com is built by google.

So users who only run Linux will get the shaft.

Use Bing 3 times a day for 21 days in a row and earn credits for Xbox games ... that'd work.

I think my head might explode if I ever see that in reality.

They already don't support IE anymore and require an up to date TLS connection, meaning old browsers can't connect.

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