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Comment by gibba999 | Hacker News Reader

My child's school uses Google Classroom. The Google experience is unusable in Firefox. Meet doesn't work (e.g. he sees nothing when the teacher screenshares). This seems really quite anti-competitive.

My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.

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I was having crazy issues in GDrive and GDocs where I could download nothing using FF - no PDFs, no .docx files, none of my other backed-up files, you'd click download and nothing would happen. Do the same in Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, even changing my user-agent to Chrome, and it works flawlessly.

My solution to this problem was move everything off GDrive and into self-hosted options. If Google is going to intentionally hinder usage on non-Google software when no real technical roadblocks exist, I'll gladly use literally anything else.

Do you block third-party cookies? It prevents Drive downloads in any browser with that setting, Chrom{e,ium} included. Recently I saw Drive give a suggestion about this, but a year ago when I was testing third-party cookie blocking in Chromium it took me a day or two before I figured out the connection.

"even changing my user-agent to Chrome, and it works flawlessly." implies that blocking third-party cookies is not the culprit.

I experience the same. Can't really use YouTube, can't download files from gdrive. Google was the best thing that could happen to search engines. Chrome was a godsend. Now they are what Microsoft was two decades ago (Microsoft is still full of shit, but now they are not alone).

What self-hosted option did you pick just out of curiosity? Looking to do the same thing.

As another commenter mentioned, TrueNAS is my go-to for general storage and phone/PC/Mac backups; it's dead simple to setup and is extremely capable, not to mention it'll run on just about anything (barring the ZFS cache RAM requirements...). Personally, I keep a 'master' home folder on there that gets auto-mounted in whatever OS I boot into; this way I never have to go hunting around the NAS for files, for instance I just have a single "Documents" folder that effectively 'syncs' across my Mac, *nix, and Windows. I use CX File Explorer on Android to access the NAS, add a WireGuard VPN (which there's a great plugin for on TrueNAS) and you've got access to your files anywhere.

GDrive I was able to replace more or less with LibreOffice and Collabora, I rarely need to share documents outside PDF or print, which makes compatibility a non-issue for me (and even when I need to, saving as a .doc usually maintains layouts, fonts, etc.).

Nextcloud is pretty great. I use it for file storage/sharing, contacts, calendar, and notes. There is a way to run a GDocs clone on it as well but I have no need for an office suite.

FreeNAS is solid.

Meet absolutely works in Firefox, there's nothing anti-competitive going on. As do Google products generally (though there are occasionally performance issues where Firefox simply doesn't provide an API that Chrome does and the polyfill is slower, but then Firefox catches up).

But try disabling browser extensions and see if that fixes it -- a majority of the time that's the culprit. With videoconferencing specifically, it's often an extension or setting to block videos from autoplaying.

We know from multiple accounts from multiple Firefox engineers that Google engineers repeatedly expressed good faith in working together with the Firefox team to get performance parity on major sites like YouTube. We also know that they repeatedly violated this good faith agreement and when confronted could only exclaim, "Oops! Our bad." [1]

This isn't new territory for Google. They did the same thing to Windows Phone, simply excluding any of their products from working on Windows Phone, even when other developers tried to step in and fill the gap. [2]

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/micro...

Here is one long standing issue with many related compat links attached: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444

and two other webcompat examples: https://webcompat.com/issues/56933 https://webcompat.com/issues/68844

Just to give an idea. That said, Meet works fine for me, besides some features, like background, which they have only implemented for Chromium based browsers (maybe Safari!?) - that is a bit annoying, as I doubt that it would break the devs leg to implement something for Firefox as well.

It stopped working about two weeks ago or so. No video or screen share, only audio works

Tried it literally just now to check, it works fine on my Mac.

And there are no widespread reports of it not working on Firefox, so it's something specific to your machine. Not a general case.

> But try disabling browser extensions and see if that fixes it

Isn’t this the problem? Why do I have to disable something in Firefox to make it work for a google product.

Huh? Because you installed third-party software that interferes with Google's code.

It's not a Firefox problem, it's extensions you chose to install that neither Firefox nor Google have anything to do with.

Something is wrong with their system then. I use Meet in Firefox and it works. Sometimes it's buggy but I can always get it to work.

I had to switch to Chrome because my employer is a Google shop. Meet screenshare never worked in Firefox and would always get stuck on the first frame.

> Sometimes it's buggy

For a work tool, this is a problem. I get reports of fuzzy microphones, audio that slowly descends into robotic noise and screenshares that don't in Firefox. So I switch to Chrome for Meet in work, it just looks bad if my meetings don't work like 10% or more of the time.

I'm sure this is a problem with Google more than Firefox, given I have none of the same issues with discord in firefox on my personal devices

I frequently have to refresh Meet to get it working on Firefox. Not in Chrome.

i have frequently needed to do this on Chrome Pixelbook, so it might just be that Meet is generally buggy.

You can improve the situation somewhat by using bromite/ungoogled-chromium instead of chrome, for the purposes when Firefox doesn't work.

They just check against identifier. It even claim google chrome is a better solution on the new Edge browser (which is basically a ms'styled google chrome).

Doing that is so absurd in my opinion.

Huh, just an anecdote, but Meet runs perfectly fine on FF for me at work. Only issue is I can't blur my background unless I'm on Chrome.

Unless Meet and other Google apps are really tailored to subperform under firefox I don't think it's a solid case.

If google devs code doesn't run as fast in firefox why should google take the blame ?

or maybe google is using non html5 apis to tap into chrome for faster perf in which case things are muddy.. since whatwg kinda allows unofficial apis

Some of the problems come from codec licensing issues (which have a major competition hindering effect since over a decade? by now).

But things come also from Google (and Microsoft, they seem to use the same logic) implementing some logic but based on "how the web standard" works but by "how it happens to work on chrome", this leads to frequent issues with selected input devices and screen sharing.

And fixing it is easy, probably way less then 10h of work one single time. (As far as I know.)

Similar the codec issues only matter if certain slow devices are involved, e.g. non high end phones, high end phones in energy saving mode, old tablets. If no such device is involved it's not rare that the conference will anyway use different codecs. So they could support FF for many conference calls, but instead they decide to reflect to even try to work on FF (which is a web no-go btw.).

So there are "reasons", but it's clear that's they intend to not support FF at all.

Btw. Microsoft is the worst here as they reject to work with FF even for things which do not have any reason to have problems on FF.

> If google devs code doesn't run as fast in firefox why should google take the blame ?

And yet, I get flak if my code isn't performing well on 5 different browsers, including IE6.

Obviously, a private company can do what they want and they shouldn't be forced to make their code run on other platforms.

No, IMHO they should be forced to comply with web standard and at least try to work with browsers they don't support first class. (Microsoft simply doesn't allow you to open any of their web apps, weather it's for teams or some of their other apps.)

Especially if it involves quasi monopolies.

I.e. the it's a quasi Monopoly of chrome like browsers spear headed by Google and Microsoft.

> No, IMHO they should be forced to comply with web standard

The problem is that they ram whatever internal Chrome APIs they want through standards bodies and call it a standard.

Others just can't keep up: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

Maybe I should have called it "industry web standards" to explicitly exclude "google forced web standard"?

I agree, I should've made clearer I was being sarcastic. The quasi-monopoly thing is often ignored when it comes to Big Tech silencing voices.

Microsoft got in trouble for less than this in the EU and had to start offering firefox as an option on standard installs.

E: Just saw the /s in parent's grandchild.

I believe Chrome also has better support for new technologies/APIs thus the reason firefox doesn't work that well. But as others said that's not always the case.

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