If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now

Frost Wolf@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 3193 points –
fastcompany.com

With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.

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Google Meet's background blur and visual filters do not work on Firefox. MS Teams straight up says that Firefox is not a supported browser. These decisions might be intentional on the part of Google and Microsoft, but to the average user of these popular products, it looks like a Firefox problem.

These decisions might be intentional on the part of Google and Microsoft

Well, yes - it's profitable for these corporations to portray Firefox as buggy and their own browser as superior. Change your user agent to one of a Chromium-based browser and watch how your "unsupported" Firefox suddenly works correctly in most cases.

Google products only supporting chromium is a tale as old as time. Try using this extension to enable background blur and see if it'll work: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mercator-studio/

Edit: Looks like background blur is working on the latest version of Firefox if you spoof your user agent to chrome. See my comment below.

This extension blurs the entire camera feed instead of only the background, so it's not really a solution unfortunately.

I've also tried a simple useragent change in Firefox, but the feature still didn't work. That leads me to think they're using browser features that are not available on Firefox.

Another thing I've noticed is that Google's background blur implementation has better edge detection than apps like Zoom, and it handles things like curly hairstyles more gracefully.

I got curious and started looking into this. Looks like you can enable background blur in google meet if you're using the latest version of firefox, I just did myself to confirm.

All I need to do is by spoofing the user agent in about:config, by setting general.useragent.override to Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36.

If I remove the user agent spoofing, google meet refuses to show the background effect options.

So my conclusion is google deliberately gate this feature behind user agent sniffing. Firefox is perfectly capable of supporting this feature.

Some discussion about the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668

You're right, I can confirm the feature does indeed work on Firefox by changing the useragent string. However, this introduces other issues such as input devices not being detected which makes normal use of Meet difficult. For now, there seems to be nothing else to do other than waiting for Google to enable this on Firefox.

Awesome, I'll have a look again. Last time I tried changing the useragent (it was a while ago), the whole Google Meet website had some issues and it didn't work. Maybe the specific useragent you use also has an impact.

A lot of that stuff can be fixed by switching your user agent to Chrome