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Comment by carpenecopinum | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously it's more fun for people to assume it's been done on purpose & bash MS

I mean, it definitely is, but you also have to admit that it's very in-character for Microsoft to intentionally break stuff, just to push their own software.

MS Teams, for example, will pretend that Video calls aren't possible to do on Firefox. Until you use a tool like User-Agent-Switcher to set the user-agent to MS Edge and you find out that video calls and screen sharing work flawlessly.

Chrome works as well. With their browser essentially being a reskinned version of it, I guess even they considered it to be too unbelievable if they claimed that video calls couldn't be done in it.

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It wouldn’t surprise me if they just don’t want the testing and support overhead of supporting Firefox, and so it’s easier to block it than let people use it but it might be broken (and they then file a support ticket regardless of if it says “unsupported” etc). A shame for sure but probably makes good business sense given Firefox’s declining user base.

There's no need to be apologist to a megacorp that does stupid things. They're going to continue even if you don't make excuses for them.

It's amazing, eh, how people will actively defend a company like Microsoft as if they're friends. They think it's fair to treat them with the same level of forgiveness and fairness you'd treat a colleague. Corporations behave like a hungry psychotic animal, simply because of the number of people in them and the incentive structure. The bigger, the crazier. Our colleagues and peers deserve the benefit of doubt. Microsoft deserves a leash.

Indeed. I'm all in with Apple, but I ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years, and ran my own infra out of my house. I keep close tabs on Apple. It was a lot of work, but if they renege on their current "privacy" stance, I have an escape path.

Many of us have colleagues and peers who work at Microsoft and many of us have experienced something similar where our company gets hated on based off misinformation / not having the complete story which we often can't provide because of NDAs.

They've admitted to gaming Hackernews in the past. Nothing is sacred to them. Their 45 plus year reputation as a shitty company is their own fault. Your friends don't need to work for Microsoft. They made their choice.

I hate capitalism as much as the next far left person but sometimes too much malice can be attributed to corporate actions when it's actually just stupid bureaucratic bullshit

We recognise that in people the internal state is fundamentally unknowable. That is why we judge them first on what they do and second on why they did it (if we can figure it out at all). Corporations are often judged the other way around when the actual internal processes that happened are just as unknowable. Know them through their actions, this is how you figure out whether or not they are bad.

"Apologist to a megacorp", either argue your case against or hold the veiled insults. Parent made a reasonable argument to give an alternate explanation, perhaps you can, too.

There's a difference between apologetics and explaining

To explain, you'd need to know the truth, which you don't. So you're just assuming they're innocent when history has proven time and time again that Microsoft is an active troll/bad actor.

> To explain, you'd need to know the truth

Unless you have some imagination, in which case you can explain a hypothetical or a possible truth.

> So you're just assuming they're innocent

The post you are responding to does not really suggest innocence overall, just perhaps they are guilty of something else (laziness or incompetence) in this instance and perhaps that they are covering that up.

I don't have a dog in this fight (the only MS thing in my life is my xbox, everything else is Apple/Google/Amazon/OSS), but can we dispense with the low-effort flame bait posts?

Similarly you are assuming that they are is an evil intend behind these issues without information. We truly can't know why (unless someone in Microsoft runs an investigation) but we can think of potential reasons.

The language used is positive. For example instead of "good business decision" one could say more neutrally "maximally lazy, standard breaking and anti competitive". In the context of mega corps it means the same but doesn't try to present it in a positive light.

That is not more neutral. Perhaps it is as neutral, but in the opposite side of the neutrality spectrum.

A neutrality "spectrum" does not have sides any more than the autism spectrum has "100% neurotypical". Imagine a gearbox - neutrality is a Boolean, either in gear or definitively not.

Lol the parent ruined the outrage party, but he’s likely correct. I’ve worked at companies that did the same thing and they weren’t “stupid megacorps”.

> I’ve worked at companies that did the same thing

The companies you worked for published their own browsers?

I'm not sure where exactly you're going with this. I can imagine several possible arguments that someone might make based on this observation, but all of them are pretty obviously poor so I won't impute them upon you.

That was some damned fine word smithing to diplomatically state what savages like myself would have just mangled into less flattering prose. <golf clap>

"Apologism for a megacorporation" should be the subtitle to HN, emblazoned in big neon lights under the Y-Combinator logo.

User A: "They intentionally sabotage Firefox" ... no evidence of this behavior

User B: "What if it's just them being cheap or incompetent?"... no evidence of this behavior either

Asshole take: "You MS Apologist! Quit making excuses for them" ... no evidence of this behavior either

> It wouldn’t surprise me if they just don’t want the testing and support overhead of supporting Firefox, and so it’s easier to block it than let people use it but it might be broken (and they then file a support ticket regardless of if it says “unsupported” etc)

So many companies mistake "support" for "support". You can have software that supports platform X without providing technical support for it when run on platform X. Commercial software companies tend to confuse these two very different meanings of support.

I find the thought that Microsoft doesn't have the budget to support one more browser extremely amusing.

But it's likely just statistics as you said. Somebody made the genius move to say "we don't want to spend time testing a browser with 5-10% market share". Which of course it makes sense to MBAs but they are missing so much other nuance.

I wouldn't be surprised if it usage of Firefox is under 1% in the environments Teams is used in. I would expect most companies to just have everyone use Chrome or Edge to lower their own support overhead.

Considering you can do a lot of automated testing with many browsers at the same time, this excuse doesn't fly.

It's not the testing/finding problems it's the effort to fix them

If it already works 99.9% of the time, why not run a series of tests, at least?

If you aren't going to fix the problems why?

If you're a company with good intentions, solving trivial problems won't cost you any significant time, then.

So, if things are working mostly, and you're intentionally not fixing the trivial problems, then you have bad intentions either directly or indirectly.

Aren’t they the authors of playwright anyway? THE library to test with all major browsers.

I'm not a web dev, but oh, you're right [0].

[0]: https://playwright.dev/

I imagine the tricky bit is testing the audio/video parts – "does the video work reliably with multiple participants" or whatever is probably quite hard to entirely judge in an automated fashion. It wouldn't surprise me if a reasonable amount of tests for something like Teams were still manual, though I'd love to be proven wrong!

> I imagine the tricky bit is testing the audio/video parts – "does the video work reliably with multiple participants" or whatever is probably quite hard to entirely judge in an automated fashion.

I actually forgot that Teams has audio and video. You are right about testing those two, I don't have a good idea for that either. I would probably look into using a virtual cam, like OBS implemented one, and then just check the footage on the other end?

But honestly, Firefox usually just works.

I imagine at the 180k people strong corporation there may be some gaps between those who work on Teams and those who work on Playwright

I agree. Honestly most likely they don't have the resources, the management, the money, the development experience, the culture, the transportation, the air to breathe, the water to drink ro the food tør at to solve this immense problem. Most likely they never even heard of Firefox, Chromium, Puppeteer, Browserstack, Playwright, Selenium or the internet.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

I doubt that the costs of supporting firefox outweigh the benefits of forcing users to use Edge, especially since it already works on firefox.

Probably. I know it was a different time but they supported old versions of IE even when the market share dwindled below 10%. I guess they probably figure supporting Firefox isn't going to win them enough business to offset the cost.

MS Teams is the worst. Their Linux client has been in "Preview" for the past two years. It's still missing many features like background blurring or the ability to show more than 4 people on screen at the same time. After a certain point, you have to stop making excuses for them and accept they're abusing their monopoly position to intentionally harm competition.

They're not specifically screwing over Linux users. Teams just outright sucks. The Windows client is buggy and slow. I think they don't care to actually put development effort into Teams at all because it's not a product that sells people on their ecosystem other than satisfying their desire to not pay even more to another company just to get a chat application.

> MS Teams, for example, will pretend that Video calls aren't possible to do on Firefox. Until you use a tool like User-Agent-Switcher to set the user-agent to MS Edge and you find out that video calls and screen sharing work flawlessly.

Yes, video and screenshare works but audio does not. I have never succeed on that in Linux. Some component is missing.

I would love to give you a "just do X" solution for it, but when I tried it roughly 5 minutes before writing my original comment, it worked without any issues (on a somewhat up-to-date Arch Linux). Everybody in the call could hear me, see my webcam and look at my screen share.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you to get it working, though.

I haven’t tried it for half year, maybe something has changed. I have Arch Linux as well. It could not find audio devices on Firefox when using Teams. This happened with two different devices.

As side note, I only use Firefox Developer edition, but I doubt they have significant differences on this matter.

How did you get screen sharing to work? I never managed to get it to work on fedora in either chromium or Firefox. Something to do with wayland or not. Jitsi however worked the first time I tried it.

Wayland requires some additional work.

You need to install correct xdg-portal. Chromium also requires specific flag before WebRTC works.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#xdg-desktop-portal...

Have you looked at your microphone's volume in your OS's settings?

It does not find devices at all.

Conversely, I use Edge for Google sites (and nothing else) because Google goes out of their way to make them unusably slow on Firefox. They look for polyfilled, unimplemented, or bugged features that see low usage, implement them in Chrome, and then make Gmail, YouTube, etc. depend on them so Firefox takes 20s to load.

I don't know your use case, but I can recommend one of the invidious instances to access youtube. There's a handy list on the formerly main instance https://invidio.us from which one can pick.

So just like Google Hangouts...

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