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Comment by DanielHB | Hacker News Reader

the web version of Microsoft Teams doesn't work with 3rd party cookies disabled. I have been eagerly awaiting this change so I can use browser teams, it is the one thing I care about that doesn't work with 3rd party cookies disabled.

edit: to my surprise apparently web teams (both "old" and "new") no longer needs 3rd party cookies enabled. Last I checked was a few months ago.

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The only good thing about Teams is the fact that I can use the web version to join meetings and avoid using Teams.

It had one @&_+ing job...

And they managed to instead product design something with 2 (3?) different chat models, limitations around every corner, an incomplete API for basic use cases (e.g. getting notified of @'s), and an embedded ability to build entire apps inside Teams.

One-to-one calls won't work on web Teams for me using Firefox, but group calls will, for some reason.

It is annoying, but Firefox asks if you want to allow to use the 3rd party cookies for specific domain.

Example of how it looks:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/files/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-0...

In the example, the 3rd party is a sub-domain name. Are sub-domains treated the same as unqualified, "second level" domain names?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name

when you set a cookie, by default it sets it at the sub-domain level. You can opt-into setting it at a parent sub-domain (or the root-domain) level if you want.

So for example:

a.foo.com sets cookie X (Set-Cookie: X=value;)

a.foo.com sets a cookie Y on foo.com (Set-Cookie: Y=value; domain=foo.com)

b.foo.com can read Y, but can not read X

You could use Multi-Account Containers in Firefox for MS Browser Teams, to keep their 3rd party cookies contained to themselves (and thus useless).

I use Brave, when I want to use browser teams I just open another browser exclusively for that.

Pure speculation, but maybe there's more to this. If Teams refuses to work in Chrome, it might drive run of the mill employees to Edge?

That seems a bit too conspiracy theorist, especially considering most people have 3rd party cookies on and teams has been around for a long time now (I assume before Google announced removing 3rd party cookies)

I think the answer is more banal in that some of their oauth flow runs in a different domain from the main application. I think this is tied to wanting to reuse part of oauth flow in the desktop application.

The auth flow for Teams has always been very buggy so that is a good guess.

The funny thing is that they actually have a specific error message for this asking you to enable 3rd party cookies. I guess it is easier than fixing the issue.

Microsoft auth flows are such a dumpster fire that it makes me curious about how it got to be that way.

> That seems a bit too conspiracy theorist

Remember "DOS Isn’t Done Until Lotus Won’t Run"?

That large companies do self-serving underhanded tricks is not a conspiracy, just yet another Monday in the office.

On Windows I have switched to Edge for Teams.

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