Teams also doesn’t support multiple “work” accounts, so I had to boot up a laptop to accept the call. 🤷

  • Kallioapina@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Well they are just lying, it works fine with Firefox and has worked fine for years. I live in the EU though. Sucks to be american these days, I guess?

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Its cool how all these companies are allowed to just lie to you about their products functionality.

  • mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
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    11 months ago

    This team block is so agressive to firefox users that it’s literaly hardcoded as if web browser firefox then deny.

    You cam override that by changing a parameter in firefox to advertise itself as another we browser. I don’t remeber how i did it but, once i had to use firefox and i just changed that stting in order to advertise me to the host as a edge browser. With that changed i could use teams as normal.

    Epic drm.

  • dan@upvote.au
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    11 months ago

    This is likely legacy code. Firefox used to have a lot of issues with WebRTC, so practically all video conferencing systems blocked it. Teams probably has some “block Firefox because it doesn’t work properly” check that was written 5+ years ago and none of the current developers are even aware of its existence.

    Well-coded ones did feature detection instead of checking the user-agent, meaning they automatically started allowing Firefox as soon as it implemented all the required features.

    Feature detection is usually the way to go. If your website / webapp depends on a particular feature, check if that specific feature exists, rather than checking for particular browsers. Browser checks are still needed in some cases, for example Safari sometimes reports that it supports particular features but it really doesn’t (or they’re so buggy to the point where they’re unusable), but that’s relatively rare.

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Feature detection is usually the way to go. If your website / webapp depends on a particular feature, check if that specific feature exists, rather than checking for particular browsers. Browser checks are still needed in some cases, for example Safari sometimes reports that it supports particular features but it really doesn’t (or they’re so buggy to the point where they’re unusable), but that’s relatively rare.

      This is tough to implement when the feature is present, but implemented wrong. Or, even worse, when it’s implemented right, but the most popular browser implements it wrong and almost everyone else follow suit for compatibility reasons, except for one that takes the stance of following standards. I know safari is notorious for this, think pale moon had those issues, too, and there are still echoes from the past from pre-chrome internet explorer, thank god it’s finally dead.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          11 months ago

          At least Chrome is mostly standards-compliant and doesn’t do anything too weirdly. I’d say Safari is the new IE - lots of weird bugs that no other browser has, and sometimes you need hacks specific to Safari.

          • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
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            11 months ago

            That’s fair. I meant that more in terms of using market dominance to shape the browser market, and not in entirely good ways.

            I’ll rue the day that every website insists it only works with Chrome because of some user-privacy degrading feature that Google insists is a core web technology.

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            However, Chrome is a browser collecting user data for a company whose business model it is to sell user data. Edge is a shitty bloatware collecting user data for a company that has (for now) a business model selling software licenses.

            I wouldn’t say it’s “better” to use Edge, but I wouldn’t install Chrome either(!) on any device whose data I care about.

            • dan@upvote.au
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              11 months ago

              whose business model it is to sell user data

              So I know what you mean, but Google doesn’t sell user data. That’s a common misconception. The data is what makes the company valuable - they’re not going to just give that to anyone with money. Instead, they sell your attention. Advertisers can target their ads based on data collected about you. Advertisers never actually see the data nor do they know exactly which users are seeing their ad - they just get aggregate statistics.

              Having said that… Edge is basically Chrome but better (e.g. it uses less RAM). I use Firefox but if I didn’t, I’d give Edge a try. It’s unfortunate that Microsoft are trying to push it so hard, since it’s actually a decent browser that’s being ruined by Microsoft trying to force everyone to use it.

              • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                While I don’t know of course whether Google actually sells the data itself, let me rephrase my original criticism: “whose business model is based on monetizing user data - which can lead to severe privacy breaches / leaks of sensitive personal data”. Thanks for pointing that out, but I would say my prime concern remains.

          • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            I couldn’t say that it is. Chrome team’s usual approach is to make and release stuff first, write specifications later. By the time the other browsers come along, there’s already both market adoption and bunch of dumb decisions set in stone as a standard. Most notable examples of this would be QUIC and WebUSB

      • dan@upvote.au
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        11 months ago

        This is tough to implement when the feature is present, but implemented wrong

        Sometimes it’s doable if you can call the API and check that the result is what you’d expect. For example, a long time ago some browsers incorrectly handled particular Unicode characters in JSON.parse. Sites could check for the incorrect behaviour and shim JSON.parse with a version that fixes the output.

        I’ve never worked with WebRTC but I imagine it might be difficult to do that with some of its APIs given they require camera or microphone access (meaning you can’t check for the bug until the user actually tries to use it).

        • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          Sometimes it’s doable if you can call the API and check that the result is what you’d expect

          Yeah, you can even test visual and network stuff at a cost of latency, but it’s hard and lots of developers are too lazy to do this, I’ve often seen sites that don’t even check if function exists before calling it, crashing the entire site because adblock cut out google tags or they call API that isn’t even implemented in firefox.

          I’ve never worked with WebRTC but I imagine it might be difficult to do that with some of its APIs given they require camera or microphone access

          I did. It’s a complete mess. First and foremost exactly because it’s a soup of completely unrelated tech - P2P, webcams, audio in&out, stream processing and compression, SIP(!?). There’s no good debug tooling available and lots of stuff is buried inside browser’s implementation. And, on top of that, any useful info on the topic is usually buried under lots of “make a skype killer in 5 minutes” kind of libraries with hardcoded TURN servers - the developer’s overpriced TURN servers, that is.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This is indeed the case. I use firefox daily, including for teams. I have to fake my user agent to do it, but it works. Its purely teams just saying fuck you to firefox…

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Could you share your user agent string please? I am still on the Teams desktop app for Linux, but that’s been discontinued in 2022 already, so I am anticipating the day it will stop working altogether. And I haven’t even managed to log in to teams web with Chromium yet (and no, I don’t want to install f*cking Chrome itself) - I get a permanent login loop on successful username / password :/

        Edit: never mind, I found it here: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6224391

        User Agent String that works for me:

        Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          11 months ago

          You should update the spoofed agent occasionally or else you may get an update warning from some sites and get blocked. Just check what a current version of an allowed browser reports and copy it.

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Yeah, probably a good idea. Nevertheless, I am pissed (but not surprised) to see that Firefox is getting locked out on purpose. A sincere “Fuck you” @Microsoft.

      • Iceman9665@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Do you get all teams functionality? I tried user agent sppof but couldn’t join conference calls properly on work teams so back to Chrome or was

        • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          There are a few quirks. Mostly doing video calls that doesnt work and makes me unable to join calls. Not a big loss for me haha.
          But as long as i dont enable video on my end, its fine.
          Teams is very fragile though, and a few of my privacy addons totally makes teams glitch once in a while

    • kibiz0r@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      They might be doing feature detection on one of the more obscure APIs, too. I know there’s some audio manipulation APIs that aren’t available.

      Someone complained about Discord deliberately blocking Firefox users because of that, but it turned out that spoofing the user agent would actually break the feature.

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      Teams used to have more features on Firefox. Microsoft has intentionally started stripping off shit to move people to edgium

      • dan@upvote.au
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        11 months ago

        Oh… I didn’t know this. Maybe it is intentionally malicious then. Hmm.

  • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyz
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    11 months ago

    Try changing your user agent to a Chrome one (e.g. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36). Works a treat!

    • waigl@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Sidenote:

      HTTP user agents have become absolutely bonkers over the years.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        11 months ago

        There’s an API called “client hits” that’s replacing user-agent. Some of the hints will require the user to provide permission for the site to use them, since they could be used for fingerprinting.

        Major browsers (Chrome and I thibk Firefox) are freezing the user-agent. The only thing that’ll be changing in user agents is the major browser version. Other parts including platform will be static. Chrome on Windows will always report itself as Windows 10 for example. https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

      • eek2121@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Not really. The example listed above is perfectly readable.

        Knowing the versions of webkit, browser version, etc. is important due to inconsistencies, new features, mossing features, and deprecated features. Sure it can be faked, but that is on the end user.

        • waigl@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          There is more information in there that isn’t actually true and only supposed to trick some old web servers into treating it a certain way than there is actually correct information,

          It mentions three different browsers, only one of which is actually true, and three different rendering engines, none of which is actually what’s used.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          11 months ago

          Chrome doesn’t use Webkit, and the referenced Webkit version is probably 10 years old at this point. The user agent is full of stuff for backwards compatibility. That’s why it’s being deprecated in favour of a better API (client hints)

    • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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      11 months ago

      Feels like we’re back to 2007 again when spoofing firefox user agent to IE would fix websites not working properly, only now we spoof it to chrome instead.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

      thank you, this worked for me! :)

  • Zuberi 👀@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 months ago

    Just change your Useragent, Microsoft is a bunch of dummies and didn’t even bother to code it in a way that makes sense as a DRM lmfao.

    • MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I had to look it up, here’s what I found (please correct me if I got it wrong):

      To change the user agent in Firefox, you can use the built-in Developer Tools. Here’s how you can do it:

      1. Open Firefox.
      2. Press Ctrl + Shift + I on Windows or Cmd + Option + I on macOS to open the Developer Tools.
      3. Click on the “Network” tab.
      4. Look for a small icon that looks like a mobile phone and a tablet together, usually located at the top-right of the Network tab. This is the “Responsive Design Mode” button. Click on it.
      5. Once in Responsive Design Mode, you’ll see a dropdown menu at the top of the screen where you can select different user agents (like various mobile devices, different browsers, etc.).

      Remember, changing the user agent can sometimes lead to unexpected behavior on websites, as it tells the website that you’re using a different browser or device than you actually are. This is usually used for testing and development purposes.

      Edit: a word

      • vermyndax@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        It’s really not as bad as people portray. Most sites do work in Safari. There are some problems, but they’ve been pretty good about licking them over time. It’s passable enough that I only have to punt to an alternate browser once in a while.

        I’ve tried to use Firefox, I really have. But Firefox absolutely murders my battery and I’m sorry, but they need to do some serious usability improvements… especially around the container implementation and tab management. It’s confusing as fuck (to me).

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    given the love Teams receives, it not working in [ insert browser ] is definitely a feature

  • adONis@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I used to freelance for a big corp who used MS teams and provided me with separate credentials, while also having my private MS account, that I occasionally use for other corps I worked for.

    It was a hell using it that way. I had to run each one in a private Brave window to be able to work on two different accounts.

    I know they only use MS teams, bc their infra is all based on MS, and it probably works fine for them internally. But man, this shit needs to be fixed in some way to account for external people, especially the ones who chose their own stack and work simultaneously with others.

    • wigit
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      11 months ago

      Apparently the dumpster fire known as MS Teams supports multiple accounts now.

      • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        It does, but it basically reloads the app when switching. Which, if I recall correctly, means no notifications from the other account and really slow swapping between accounts. When I had to use multiple accounts I would use the app for one and a browser for the other.

        • wigit
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          11 months ago

          Luckily, I’ve been able to get away with only using Teams for meetings, so my exposure is limited, but last time I messed around in the top right corner there was an area that indicated it would show notifications from other accounts.

          I have had no need or desire to test this, though.

        • TheFonz@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          The new teams doesn’t seem to reload the app (or ita really fast). Still garbage program.

  • Evkob@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    Have you tried changing your user agent string to Chrome? I know it can sometimes sidestep these types of “errors”. It can be changed manually through about:config under general.useragent.override, or there exists plenty of addons to switch it more easily.

    • qaz@lemmy.worldOP
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      11 months ago

      I’ve avoided changing my user agent because Firefox’s apperant market share is already so low. I’ve installed the extension and will it try it with my work container though.

  • betz24@lemmynsfw.com
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    11 months ago

    I works for me without a user agent change if I enter through the Microsoft 365 teams workspace and not a teams share link.

  • frankenswine@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    You can make it work by changing your UserAgent string (there’s plugins for that) to some older chrome version to make things work.

    • helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today
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      11 months ago

      The problem I have with this though is if enough people on Firefox spoof their user agent to Chrome, it’s gonna look like less and less people are using Firefox and Chrome will eventually have a monopoly.

      • hypertext@feddit.de
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        11 months ago

        They already have a monopoly. The amount of people using FF is pretty small unfortunately. And there’s a bunch of sites that only test in Chrome and sometimes even actively “block” Firefox like here without making an effort to check for capabilities instead of user agent.

      • And009@lemmynsfw.com
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        11 months ago

        Not sure that’s how monopoly work, the folks on both end will still have data of their actual userbase

        • helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today
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          11 months ago

          Sorry I dont really understand your point, it could be my bad English.

          I’m gonna explain my point further; You can make it look like you’re using Chrome when you’re not, and if everyone just makes it look like they’re using Chrome, then developers will only support Chrome and Google can and will pull off whatever shit they want to like Web DRM, just under a different name which they’ve done in the past.

          So the minority using Firefox won’t have proper support and will see more pop ups like these from more websites. The only difference being whatever feature the website needs actually won’t be supported on Firefox because developers only see that everyone is using “Chrome”.

          • Kyouki@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            How about not having these arbitrary not needed restrictions in the first place? This is just the usual scummy behavior from this company.

          • And009@lemmynsfw.com
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            11 months ago

            Yes the developers will see the spoofed data like you said… But is the UA the only classifier?

            Would like to hear a devs opinion. Maybe the people making those decisions need to be sensitive about this skewed data.

      • frankenswine@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think you can spoof per tab/container. i used an exclusive Firefox Profile for the bad/contaminated (read: not privacy respecting) browsing - in there i’d ocasionally switch the UserAgent to make Teams calls.

        there’s no way i’d work on a machine with M$ spyware installed and always running

    • bob_lemon@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      The new presentation blurb is really annoying bad at hiding itself.

      That said, new teams finally supports multiple accounts, so I don’t have to keep using a web app for the second one on my work laptop.