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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

Just discovered this by chance today in my FF/Linux, I'm still on 117

> Video Effects and background blur are now available to Firefox users on Google Meet! (Note: These effects have also been released retroactively to support Firefox versions back to Firefox 115.)

Now, does everyone know where the issue actually was? Giving that all of a sudden is retro-compatible, I would say at least a good chunk of the issue was on Google side

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Most people believed it was on Google's side, possibly even on purpose to make people use Chrome vs. Firefox. It is no coincidence that the Firefox / Google Antitrust case kicked off two weeks ago and this magically started working better.

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopol...

Read the issue I linked above. There seemed to be performance issues in Firefox, and the feature was turned off with a UA string test. At some point, spoofing the UA string made the feature work acceptably but broke other things. Then the feature was enabled, back to the versions where it worked on.

Doesn't invalidate the above claim that the slowdown could have been made by Google.

I tried Firefox with Google Meet today and found the performance to be, ehm, not to write mom about. Still, it's nice to have it and my computer is not really the latest and greatest these days (although Chrome works fine).

Seems like it:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/google-meet-fir...

They worked with the Google team to resolve it.

Yeah this was confusing since it does not reference functionality or ticket in the release notes page. I found this ticket though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668 It seems like there were some cache improvements "Cache the World (the new a11y architecture)" and other performance improvements then a Firefox targetted roll out by Google following on from those improvements. I guess Google Meet's team didn't want to offer users a choice that will slow down their web app so they didn't but since the performance got better they stopped blocking the feature to Firefox users with a minimum set of requirements? But does Firefox typically have backports of security patches and others like performance improvements to some base versions?

I didn't read all of the comments on the issue, but it does look like it was a fix on the Google side: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668

But it seems they enabled it more widely after Firefox made some performance improvements.

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