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Comment by gnomewascool | Hacker News Reader

What's even more ridiculous is that for Firefox, if you change the "User Agent" it works perfectly fine[0][1]. Since Opera is now a re-skinned Chromium, it's highly likely that from a technical point of view it should also work, if you change the UA. (No idea about Safari.)

It's either extreme laziness or deliberate monopolistic behaviour...

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/apu2u6/the_bad_old...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/aw1umv/skype_web_i...

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It's not ridiculous. It just means that they are not ready to provide regular long-term technical support for Firefox users yet, even if it technically works in the current version of Firefox.

The reason can be anything - lack of resources, ongoing work on edge cases, licensing issues, etc.

Back in Nov 2018, Dropbox went down this same lazy and inexcusable path, by programming their Linux client to shut down on any file system that was not Ext4.[1] I was using F2FS. Their excuse was that extended attributes support was critical to Dropbox, which is not a valid excuse since F2FS, XFS, ZFS, etc, all support extended attributes.[2] It would have been just a few lines of code to check if the user was running a filesystem that had extended attributes support. So presumably, they probably just didn't want to QA on multiple systems, so laziness won. I had to back up all my files, reformat my F2FS partition to Ext4, and restore my files, to get Dropbox working again. I've been a paying customer for 4+ years (at the $9.99/month level), and this is what I have to deal with.

Moreover, the Dropbox mobile apps and web UI still do not support editing plain text files (.txt / .md) -- even though they've added support for editing MS Doc (.doc / .docx) files. Compared to supporting editing MS Doc files, supporting plain text file editing would be so trivial for them to add, yet they haven't. I keep all my notes and thoughts in plain text files. When I don't have my Linux laptop, I'm forced to use Google Docs on my phone, even though I'd prefer to have all my notes/thoughts in my neatly organized collection text files.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any solid alternatives to Dropbox, that have reliable non-flaky support on Linux, and good iOS and Android apps.

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes#Linux

iPhone Dropbox lets me edit txt files. I also had to reformat even though mine was ext4 but i was using ecryptfs which wasn’t supported.

Thanks for the note. They must have added .txt file editing support after I last tried editing one on their app.

For encryption, I'm using dm-crypt with LUKS on my root partition on Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_...

It works pretty well. I didn't have to mess with the underlying encrypted LUKS partition/volume in order to reformat.

Actually, Dropbox's Android app does let you edit text files. It was one of the main reasons I went with Dropbox.

This seems rather bizarre, as Microsoft apparently want people to move away from edge since they are working on a new chromium based browser.

I thought it is still going to be named Edge. Is that wrong?

Not wrong.

Same thing with AutoCAD Web and probably many more "Web apps". Enterprised devs have a duck syndrome, nothing new.

In Microsoft's defence, just because its functional, doesn't mean they're ready to spend time supporting it on other clients from day 1.

They may be planning a more gradual roll out to other clients once they have confidence with Chrome.

» We recommend that web developers avoid UA sniffing as much as possible; modern web platform features are nearly all detectable in easy ways. Over the past year, we’ve seen some UA-sniffing sites that have been updated to detect Microsoft Edge… only to provide it with a legacy IE11 code path. This is not the best approach, as Microsoft Edge matches ‘WebKit’ behaviors, not IE11 behaviors (any Edge-WebKit differences are bugs that we’re interested in fixing). In our experience Microsoft Edge runs best on the ‘WebKit’ code paths in these sites. Also, with the internet becoming available on a wider variety of devices, please assume unknown browsers are good – please don’t limit your site to working only on a small set of current known browsers. If you do this, your site will almost certainly break in the future.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...

Being a large company, I wouldn't expect every team there to have read that. Looks like the Skype Web didn't.

More likely someone said "We don't want to put effort into testing Firefox right now."

> More likely someone said "We don't want to put effort into testing Firefox right now."

The product teams should NOT have to test on Mozilla Firefox. We (disclaimer: I am not an Mozilla employee. Just someone who loves the web.) have a very robust Web Compat program https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/27435

and Web Compat is very interested in helping product teams.

I think what the Edge team was trying to say above was detect feature support, not browser vendor. In fact, I would say there are many professionals at Microsoft willing to help the Skype team use feature detection properly. or there is always the Mozilla Developer Documentation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

Now that’s funny.

This smacks of the bad old days of the web, where UA checking was de rigour (usually to lock sites to IE).

And then, as now, the page usually functioned fine under alternatives with a masked UA.

"Warning: You browser is unsupported. You may experience issues. Continue?" is the only defensible roadblock.

This is why we have alpha's or beta's, such that you can "opt in" but be warned it may break. Simply not supporting a browser at launch is not a good look for your product.

Especially when it's a major product and you literally have thousands of engineers.

They can easily just display a warning that the site is not officially supported on X browser, and the user may run into unexpected errors. This is an active thing that Microsoft is doing, not something they're forced to do.

> In Microsoft's defence, just because its functional, doesn't mean they're ready to spend time supporting it on other clients from day 1.

It’s on the public web. It should work in all major browsers.

EOT

It does work for the majority (> 50%) of users. Is it enough ? No. Is it sufficient to be published ? Yes.

Basic functionality works fine on Safari as well. Just change the UA.

Not supporting Safari is weird, but not supporting Firefox is perfectly normal, given that it's at a whopping 4.46% of market share in the US.

"Not supporting" and "Deliberately blocking user agents" are two completely different things though.

They simply don't want to read any bug reports from Firefox users because they don't want to support that browser.

That is the most likely explanation. "It killed our precioussss IE, we hates it, we hates it!"

Firefox's market share is presumably comparable to safari on desktop, and edge which is supported.

For desktop, where one would use this, it is 8%

Whereas Edge has...oh wait. Yet there it is - supported.

It’s even weirder than that: it’s discontinued and supported.

I can’t find any source saying Firefox market share is below 8% in the US on desktop. Can you cite your stat.

StatCounter has Firefox at 7.63% in North America on Desktop. That puts it just behind Edge in usage too.

http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/north...

Specify just US as the thread is about that and it is back to 8%. Still behind Edge. Which isn’t surprising. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unite...

It wouldn be interesting to see an evening, past work hours, US/Canada browser split. I would assume IE would tank vs being in 2nd. Edge would probably go down too though not as much.

What's even more ridiculous is that for Firefox, if you change the "User Agent" it works perfectly fine.

On your hardware, using your OS version, on the single internet connection you tried, in your language, with your set of installed plugins, using your particular browser settings, and trying the limited set of features that you used to test it.

That's practically the definition of "it works on my machine."

I imagine the Skype team have a somewhat more rigorous testing methodology.

I don't understand why so many people downvote this. He didn't say nothing wrong. "I opened in my browser" is not a proper testing, there are a lot might going on.

In recent year MS have showed itself in many good ways and I don't think that they will do such shady move without proper reason.

I would guess it's because it comes off as a bit snarky, and the same point could have been conveyed in a less patronizing way, but that's all completely subjective, so who really knows (besides, of course, The Shadow).

I've got to try harder if it was only a bit snarky. :)

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