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Comment by pavanagrawal123 | Hacker News Reader

I use skype right now to chat with some friends and it actually works really well for me. Cross platform, video calls, captioning now available is really awesome.

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Does it work from within a browser yet? Last time I tried, installing Skype was a surprising hassle on my Windows machine; there were at least two versions being offered through various Microsoft channels, and they appeared to have different feature sets, and I couldn't tell which one of them I ought to be using or if one was deprecated. Discord has spoiled me with chat that Just Works on the web.

Try https://preview.web.skype.com/

It is the universal Skype written in React (works natively on windows and electroned on other Desktop OSes)

> Browser not supported

> Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience.

> Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer.

That is on up to date Firefox on Debian unstable. Bravo.

Yikes, did not know that.

Same result on current Firefox with Windows 10

"Universal": Browser not supported

Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience.

Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer.

When in doubt, use the desktop version. To be honest, its a very simple decision in the windows world, and I'm not sure what tripped you unless you're nee to windows.

It really doesn't work well. I tried making a simple call with web skype with my parents the other day; neither them - android tablet - nor me - linux desktop - could accept the call when video was on by default. We couldn't turn video on if we initiated a voice call either, because it immediately crashed and stop the call.

We ended up using appear.in without a glitch.

... captioning?

You mean, Speech-To-Text that gets forwarded to the NSA, otherwise used by Microsoft for who-knows-what while the transition to an ad company with Win10 ?

Sounds great, but I don't think that's going to be a good alternative for the people who are looking to dump Facebook/WhatsApp/Google over privacy concerns.

Yep, that one!

Useful for people that are deaf and hard of hearing....

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