FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox
apple.com
apple.com
However, you are helping push the web become an increasingly centralized place, controlled by just a few entities, with interests which are very different from yours.
You may think that there is no harm in doing so. Most people use Chrome anyway. And what difference can one more web app make?
However, it is exactly this laziness by skilled developers, who are the only that understand the problem, which brought us to the current situation. There is no way to fix this problem, if the people that understand it do not take a stand.
Next time that your manager asks you if you can have that sweet feature, instead of saying "sure, we just need to drop support for Firefox", please consider trying to explain what are the consequences in the long term.
I know this isn't easy for many people, which do not feel comfortable questioning orders or plans. However, this is our responsibility. Nobody else is going to care, if we do not care.
Does it? Open source standardization is a good thing. Still not sure why html/css/js engine should be the exception. No one is calling for competition for QR code, torrent protocol, or the other billion of very dominant open source projects.
This idea that only Chrome matters is absolutely coming from the bottom up and when you point out something broken in Safari the first response from them is "Does it work in Chrome?" before they even look at it because they themselves don't even test in a second browser.
There's an annoying assumption from other devs that I must be using Safari out of ignorance. They quickly get over it, but it's a problematic first impression thing when working with new teams.
I would have thought at least iOS Safari would be a major consideration for anyone due to the ubiquity of iOS devices.
1) Smartphone use, both in general and for web browsing, and
2) Spending on smartphones
These have been true long enough and to a large enough degree that they're usually taken as assumed, baseline facts by anyone involved in mobile software products.
The two of which are why companies not only care about them, but, in fact, iOS' numbers are so good on both of those that it can be tempting to go iOS first for many products, if you have to choose only one platform, even if your demographics don't skew iOS.
iOS devices are used more than Android devices, and their owners spend a lot more on average. There are probably several reasons for this and its unclear which is dominant, but in the end, it doesn't really matter why, if you're just chasing the market.
If web developers give any consideration to iOS, it usually results in a comparison of Mobile Safari to IE 6.
In reality, Google Chrome’s unilateral provisioning of unratified features drives developers to dismiss competing products as obsolete. In this way, Google Chrome advances the “extend” phase of technological dominance while well-intentioned and overworked web developers implement the “extinguish” phase.
Safari is a different beast because I don't have a Mac and it's support for a lot of standards is pretty dismal. It's like the IE6 of browsers these days.
I keep the JS simple though and for CSS I keep around a few handy LESS functions so I can get some basic stuff on crap browsers. Stuff like:
.opacity(@default, @percent) { -webkit-opacity: @default; -khtml-opacity: @default; -moz-opacity: @default; -ms-opacity: @default; -o-opacity: @default; opacity: @default; // ms-filter *SHOULD* work on IE8 & 9 but ... doesn't always // for me? WTF... anyway (filter should also work). This // should be listed before filter to be safe -ms-filter:"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=@percent)"; filter: alpha(opacity=@percent); /* support: IE8 oh god we're all gonna die*/ }
or
.box-shadow(@value) { -webkit-box-shadow: @value; -khtml-box-shadow: @value; -moz-box-shadow: @value; -ms-box-shadow: @value; -o-box-shadow: @value; box-shadow: @value; }
This way I don't rely on some framework like Bootstrap, and I can write fairly simple stylesheets. I used to transpile compliant and legacy sheets and serve different urls depending on user agent strings but that didn't work well and was generally crap so - one it is.
Don't worry, when I transpile I strip my unprofessional comments.
I suppose we're back in the golden era of "Works Best With Internet Explorer."
If the future of the web relies on developers groveling at the feet of a manager, then there's no fight or discussion to be had, because the web has already unequivocally lost. The only thing that's happening is a discussion about whether to parade on the corpse or not.
I see a lot of this 'devs v suits' type language used on HN, with the implication being that the developers are principled stewards of technology suffering under the cosh of KPI-obsessed MBAs.
What causes this? The majority of product managers I've met have technical backgrounds, and they have also had to cut corners to keep their product roadmaps on track.
At least in cases that line up. I doubt it's so universal. I've seen something quite similar happen first hand. To the point that I'm pretty beside myself about it. Hard to understand if you don't just assign it to them steamrolling anything but their ego. It's the only way you could just let core functions in your core product falter and not have a plan for it.
That said, I don't think that applies to excluding Firefox in this particular case. It doesn't sound permanent, and it sounds like it just hinges on FF catching up their available APIs to suit.
Web monoculture simply has a set of labor/$ incentives builtin. It's the default, and it's hard (and probably getting harder) to appreciate the long term system-wide risk that accumulates by allowing one company to control web standards.
I don't see it as a dev vs. suits issue at all. If anything, in my experience it's people who remember Internet Explorer and people who don't.
I don’t mean that as an insult; I’m happy there are folks like you with passion in this space.
If you’re old enough, you still wake up in the middle of the night sweating about IE 6 or 7 bugs that HAD to be solved with brute force even though the feature worked just fine in Firefox and Chrome. After years of struggle, most of the world uses a very compliant and continuously upgraded browser.
Please… take the win.
With out freedom life is miserable, and it saddens me that people seem to be valuing freedom less and less, one day they will look around and ask "how did we get here", and people like me will just shrug and say "you should have listened"
Or, in other words, it's just a matter of time until it's Chrome keeping you up at night eating all of your productivity to avoid some defect. It probably won't be a rendering bug, but there will be something there.
I know we don't want another situation of one browser dominating the web but Chrome (and Firefox) improved building for the web so much. I don't know if people forget or weren't around for the IE days but it was absolutely terrible and a life-waste.
Yes, many pages support only Chrome for no good reason at all, but in this instance, the ball is 100% with Mozilla.
If we could create an feeling that companies that claim to be developer friendly make sure that FF is also compatible, it would be a huge win for all involved.
check Mozilla CEO salary and stop finding excuses in open source.
Maybe the comment thinks about "not for profit" org - but even then it seems normal to pay people a competitive salary.
I think it's normal to pay competitive salary too, but the salary should reflect one's impact on the company. Looking at the current state of Firefox, I can't imagine why their CEO is compensated as they are.
The amt of politics required to be dealt with == big compensation.
Granted, its also understandable that Apple officially working on Firefox would be "article on The Verge" level of news and even an armchair commentator would be able to connect the dots from what they're working on to predicting Facetime was coming to web. Though, isn't that what Jobs originally promised? Open source protocol and such?
At the end of the day, I'm sick and tired of the prevailing hyper-endstage-capitalist excuse of "they won't make a billion dollars from doing this, so not only will they not do it, but they SHOULDN'T". Its everywhere on HN, and its actual brain worms. Corporate decisions shouldn't only be analyzed through this lens; there's a far broader humanistic lens that codifies a higher standard that we absolutely can reasonably hold all companies to; not from a legal sense (HackerNews isn't a court and your votes are not a jury decision, some armchair commentators need to be reminded), not even from a general population public relations sense; but from a viewpoint that Ethics is not a democracy, there are some ethical positions that won't make money, aren't required by law, and aren't even popular, but are nonetheless crucially important to avoiding a Blade Runner-eque corpo-cyberpunk future (or, with some very legitimate issues, species extinction or at least achieving and maintaining a high standard of living for most of our species).
The sibling argument of Firefox's CEO making a ton of money being reprehensible is... I mean, jeeze, they make awesome software, open source, freedom respecting, privacy respecting, and manage to pay their leadership & employees well? Isn't that the dream? That should be the goal; not be derided. There's a middleground between hyper-endstage-brain-worm-capitalism and "all software is developed by starving monks in a monastery". I understand its hard to believe this, because it isn't an extreme; its easy to let gravity drag your ethical viewpoint to an extreme on the left or right in this age of outrageous social media, but neither extreme on any ethical dimension is conductive to a positive future for humanity.
Within the US, Safari and Chrome mobile have roughly equivalent marketshare, recently with an edge to Safari. Globally, Chrome mobile is significantly larger than Safari mobile.
None of that actually matters though; Firefox, Safari, and Edge all deploy advanced analytics blocking features which distort their marketshare. In many instances, these blockers self-report their browser as Chrome, as a "blend in with the crowd" strategy.
"Google Chrome first release: 2008-09-02." "We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others" (1)
If there's ever a reason for Apple to be more involved in a Windows browser, that's still an option.
But implementing some functionality in a third browser on Windows... why should they? The two which already have the feature are already by the competing companies.
1) https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browse...
It's not like they have to build this whole thing out, then hope and pray that Mozilla accepts the changes.
"Opened Apr 2020"
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/330
Then in October added "Insertable streams is worth prototyping"
Also: "I will remind people that this isn't the place for advocating for what gets implemented in Firefox. This is something that the media team needs to work out."
then "closed 26 Oct 2020"
But, hey, it's June 2021, you just got a new UI redesign which nobody wanted (I guess, except the managers who invented it), and which uses up more vertical space. (Hint: about:config browser.proton.enabled false helps at the moment).
Even the iOS version of Firefox got an UI redesign. One has to care for the priorities! The color of the shed is always the biggest impact a manager can bring!
And apparently the board thumbs that up. That's the scope of the problem: "look we make the UI changes" is the "color of the shed" easy to understand illusion of "something" being done.
Also honestly any developer worth keeping could figure out the task at hand given sufficient time. So to talk about developers as if there's a developer who can only alter the rendering of tabs and what not is kinda silly.
i really want to support firefox in my development but their tooling is just not presented in a rational footprint. when i inspect a vue proxy object, i dont want to see all the setters and getters.
they are losing mind share because neight to user facing components normthe dev facing have a well considered presentation or pefformancd
if i can solve a slow experience with another stick of memory, thats of a lesser probldm
That's the problem. Firefox isn't keeping up with standards.
And to be clear, Firefox is behind on the relevant standard here. Though even then, it's more nuanced than that: Mozilla is ok with prototyping it even though they would prefer for it to use a more secure mechanism -- see https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webrtc-insert...
From what I can tell, Mozilla is in the place of playing catch-up because the other players chose to forge ahead without resolving their objections.
[Ok, "our objections". I work for Mozilla. Not in a relevant area until recently, but it looks like I will be doing some very relevant work starting as soon as I close this damn tab.]
my webrtc-based video conference app doesn't currently support ff and never will unless compatibility with chrome's implementation comes around. My manager would have me committed if I tried to pull that shit, and I'm already notorious for refusing to do things on principle. Suggesting that we don't support firefox because I'm lazy? No, vendors force us to choose, and if the alternative is NO video? Here on earth, where we're trying to cultivate a competitive advantage and survive as a business venture, that's an incredibly easy choice.
edit: other commenters have made the point much more elegantly than I but I leave my words here as a testament to how infuriated I am at this condescending suggestion.
I configure FF to use a different user agent, as a security measure. It's a short hop from browsing the Internet with FF to disabiling browser identification.
Well, maybe. I don't know the usage patterns of your site. And from that interaction, I'm not sure you know either.
If Mozilla moved to some Webkit/Blink/Chromium derivative like everyone else, the world could standardize on that renderer and they are still free to "innovate" on the browser UI/chrome surrounding that engine and differentiate themselves that way.
As it is, Gecko adds nothing to the web ecosystem anymore and wastes everyone's time.
Using features that not all browsers have implemented _yet_ isn't always bad for the open web. If the feature is important, the other browsers prioritize it.
I'm not a fan of some of the Corporation's recent non-FF work (Pocket acquisition, Mullvad-based VPN, etc). But saying that they're expensive and take away from FF funding is inaccurate. These projects are intended to create new revenue streams for the Mozilla corporation.
I think that Mozilla having to chase new revenue streams in questionable ways (like having a proprietary service, Pocket) in an indictment on the Web's complexity and how it takes billions of dollars to build a browser. Making ethical compromises to fund continued development is an extreme but real example of the consequences of software bloat.
Constant? Aren't those both ten years old or more? No organization can create successful projects by fiat; there's necessarily a lot of failure to find one success. If they ain't failin' they ain't tryin'.
It's more like they don't care than anything else.
Other codecs are better, but you have to do more testing and enable those codecs only on calls where all members are using a device that supports it.
Not that your point is wrong, but a lot of devices are too weak to encode/decode H264 as well. It's very recent for me to have access to second-hand hardware with H264 support and still i'm in western Europe where it's easier to come by.
Though as the other commenter pointed out, if you can afford to use hardware en/decoders then it's always the better option.
I'm kinda curious which devices don't support H264
In recent months, after bypassing the user-agent check, calls will at least work albeit not very well. (bit laggy, long connection time)
Firefox has a h.264 decoder, but not an encoder I think.
Important: Google Duo is available on Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
https://www.xda-developers.com/google-duo-lyra-codec-better-...
...though I'm not sure whether they use it consistently.
Why must every browser ship its own codec or even Unicode collection is beyond me.
Why would we encourage Firefox or others to do the same and develop a business model based on patents? Especially so when these patents are owned by huge conglomerates of corporate psychopaths (hello MPEG-LA) and the software editor we're talking about (Mozilla) had to lay-off a lot of staff during the confinement by lack of funds.
To be fair, Firefox is more than capable to encode/decode into free codecs and there's no reason why a third party plugin couldn't support H264 encoding as well. It falls on Apple to support proper standards for their communications platform and not on Firefox to support every piece of proprietary tech they can come up with.
But well, we all know what Apple thinks of standards. With their AirPlay, iMessage, iCloud and other Apple-specific solutions. If only we had free-software, standards-compliant solutions to all these computing problems. /s
All this stuff started in the days of Windows XP, which shipped with such a meagre selection of codecs you couldn't even play DVDs.
And the codecs you could download? Either they cost money (i.e. most users wouldn't have them), or they were dodging license costs by some questionable means, or they had bigger aspirations than just providing a mere codec (flash/realplayer/quicktime)
VLC arose out of that and became popular because, by ignoring the system codecs, it could actually play the damn file.
Support for system libraries first appeared on mobile platforms because it was essential. At the time (ca 2011/12) the likes of YouTube and Vimeo were only delivering MP4 to mobile clients.
The purists seemed to think that somehow if Firefox held the line on (likely but not guaranteed) unencumbered formats/codecs that every content producer would see the light and go with those objectively worse codecs with no hardware acceleration for video content.
This completely ignored the fact that Flash was common on desktops and supported encumbered codecs just fine. It was in fact the primary delivery vehicle for them. The NPAPI content hole let the purists be intransigent while actually using content on the web. They were also ignoring the design of the HTML5 video tag that encouraged inclusion of multiple source formats and some sort of fallback including object embeds.
As for Microsoft they were still pushing the various Windows Media codecs as the One True Way in the Windows XP and Vista eras. They had to support MP4 with Windows 7 because every smartphone and most stand alone cameras were capturing video in MPEG-4 codecs if not file formats.
[0] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/-xTei5rYT...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-video-audio-problem...
I also have some memory of asking all participants in Jitsi meetings to not use firefox, because the call would start to lag for all participants if bandwidth was an issue for the firefox users in the call. Don't know if that is still the case or not though.
EDIT: bug on bugzilla https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1631263
https://webrtcglossary.com/sfu/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60013467/one-to-many-liv...
Encryption keys are distributed out of band of the media, so it's the same as whatever the tradeoffs are for multi-party E2E-encrypted text chat there (I don't know what those are though!)
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-t...
More details: https://webrtchacks.com/zoom-avoids-using-webrtc/
Those two will never be unseated; the constant addition and change of new APIs means that trying to create a new browser is a herculean task beyond the resources of all but the largest corporations, and even if you did somehow manage to do it the standards will always be retroactively set to whatever Chrome does so you'll always be playing catch up.
Its not possible to compete anymore, though to be honest I'm not sure it was ever possible to.
I assume management just saw how much of each release was spent being bug compatible with Chrome and decided it wasn’t worth it.
So while a Chomium-only web would move faster, I didn't see as EdgeHTML a major drag and the cost of Google controlling the web is far too high in my opinion.
Also from Apple’s perspective, there may be x% of people using Firefox, but I bet every one of them has the ability to use Chrome if they wanted to, and the people that are sticking solely to Firefox aren’t the ones likely to use FaceTime anyway.
The thing is that only IT guys actually know what's going on on the IT world (most web-developers are excluded because their job requires Chrome!).
As such only ITs use Firefox (and a few privacy concern and well informed people!)
For months Zoom and Teams were both very buggy for me on Firefox, and both still seem broken for me on Safari.
That said, yes, the global south produces for west in slave like conditions and it's sad.
Using "the money to pay these people doesn't come from this line on a balance sheet it comes from that line" is not a justification for the, while unfortunately legal, unethetical employment conditions of others.
I thought it was the responsibilities of company which contracted by apple to assemble iPhone like Foxconn to distribute the wages, so the wages are fixed and not fluctuates based on phone sales? Or does Apple give some bonus from phone sales directly to Foxconn workers?
> Using "the money to pay these people doesn't come from this line on a balance sheet it comes from that line" is not a justification for the, while unfortunately legal, unethetical employment conditions of others.
I do hope that Fairphone is being honest about, in addition to sourcing from ethical supply chain, also improving factory workers, as evidenced from workers testimonies here[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBK0LepZoj8&list=PLIc1-wxSJg...
Preposterous, factory workers are usually paid the same wage whether their production sells 1000 units or 1 million units. Their wage isn't based on how many phones are sold or even if phones are sold since the factory is usually paid upfront in production, not when the phones are actually sold.
Phone factory worker wages are completely unrelated to phone sales.
You comment illustrates a complete misunderstanding of the supply chain business.
My previous phone was Xiaomi Mi A1, it died and I couldn't turn it back on, and disassembling the phone is very hard. Then the phone gone somewhere else I don't know. Yet another e-waste. I don't have any smartphone right now.
And whats worse is that these companies have the audacity to get behind social movements. Its predatory and just another scheme to improve their bottom line and lull their customers into believing that they are making an ethical choice by purchasing their products.
The raw reality is that everyone is getting exploited so we (the west) can enjoy using an iDevice while sitting on the toilet.
Its sickening.
The public knows, they simply do not care enough to pay the extra $x. We have known about sweatshops since I was a kid in the 90s, and it is even possible to but clothing made in the US. Yet the vast, vast majority comes from east and South Asia.
They don't really pay many taxes and abuse every loop hole they can.
Humans just can't ever play fair and be content with anything, they just always need to push for more.
It could be that this exists as a piece of evidence in an anti-trust fight.
One of the reasons why Firefox and Chrome use more power than Safari for video streaming is that they support modern/open video codecs that don't have hardware decoding on Macs. For example, YouTube has been using VP9 for years. Until Catalina, Safari would load a h.264 video (that's why Safari used to be limited to 1080p) which has hardware decoding, while Chrome and Firefox would load a VP9 video at higher resolutions and use software decoding, using way more power than Safari. Now YouTube is starting to use AV1 and again, Chrome and Firefox supports it, but Safari doesn't.
If you didn't want to use the actual app already on such a device.