Teams apparently can't call when using Firefox

qaz@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 1086 points –

Teams also doesn't support multiple "work" accounts, so I had to boot up a laptop to accept the call. ๐Ÿคท

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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?

These days? It's sucked to be an American for decades.

Better than being in a third world country ig. But it's frustrating, because our issues are generally fueled by greed and were entirely preventable

As I saw somebody once say, "The US is a 3rd world country in a Prada belt." If we didn't have that big chunk of post-WW2 money keeping our economy chugging along all these years, we probably wouldn't look all that different from them.

I have the same issue, but I am also in the EU. however, I just used an extension to spoof my user agent and now it works fine. there is some weird behavior sometimes, like when I call someone it doesn't actually ring the other person etc.

Used it today using Firefox on OSX, no issues whatsoever.

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

If you use Firefox, you are a communist; and if you are a communist why would you need the glorious tools of corporate communication? Just make do with rotten turnips as Lenin intended

This whooshed a lot o' folks.

Conversely, I should maybe try to use the /s thingy and stop thinking people can read my mind. Will I learn this lesson today? Hmmm

You went from -12 to +16!

Fuck /s โœŠ

Using Firefox makes you a communist?? Maybe you just enjoying have your data harvested by Google.

Looks like your sarcasm detector is broken. Just like Teams.

To be fair sarcasm is impossible to express via firefox.

Firefox supports the standard just fine

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Sarcasm/Attributes

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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.

When I'd search "(location) weather" on Google (e: in Chrome) and I'd get a really nice at a glance forecast right on top. Do the same thing in Firefox and I'd get a whole bunch of weather websites I could go to. The former obviously being a better, more direct experience. I found an extension that fools Google into thinking it's Chrome and all works fine with that.

I'm amazed if this doesn't violate some antitrust regulation

Just checked: Duck Duck go displays the forecast right on top.

Android addon to fix this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search-fixer/

My main problem with this is getting amp links in the results after.

They do worse than this. Search it on a weather site, pretty easy to get around

Got a name for that chrome spoofing add on for FF on a PC by chance?

UserAgentSwitcher has been the gold standard for like 20 years.

The intangible sloth who replied to me provided a link to the one I use

This is not mildly infuriating this is the free internet being eroded through Googleโ€™s control of Chrome

I think this is more a push towards tightly couplings with Edge.

No it seriously means the feature isn't available yet in the browser. Like there is a part of Firefox missing that they need to use the website. Basically all websites are coded in HTML, css, and js or a form of that. The browser controls them and the code operates out of it. If a feature is on chrome and chromium but not Firefox, the site won't work on Firefox. Not sure exactly what is missing but it is mozillas fault not Microsoft.

Google meets and zoom work perfectly well in firefox, this is just ms stuff

You clearly don't fully understand what I'm talking about but that is unrelated since they don't have to use the features they implement.

Firefox implements everything the various web standards require. There are a few non standard features that Chromium implements that certain websites take advantage of, but the fact that their code isn't portable is not Firefox's fault. As for Teams... Microsoft's just being a dick: if you change the user agent it works just fine.

And maybe Microsoft requires it. Also the could be more under the surface we don't know about with the user agent, where it might have some kind of security exploit or something.

If there was a known security exploit, it would have been patched. Everything works, so nothing essential is missing. The way I see it, it's yet another attempt to manipulate users into switching away from open standards.

Also, it's a multi billion dollar company, can they really not afford to put a couple of devs to work on changing a few lines of code to fix whatever small incompatibility there may be?

But we don't know if Microsoft can fix it, as it's most likely on Firefox's end.

You really don't want to lose this argument do you? As a software engineer myself, I can assure you that that's complete bullshit.

Teams is nothing special, it doesn't intrinsically require any functionality only available in Chromium. It isn't some weird magical piece of software that can't be made work strictly using standard web protocols and features, something that, apparently, it already does because it does work if you trick it. It's not even cutting edge, chat and video conferencing web apps have been around for ages at this point, many were implemented years back with only a fraction of what's available today. They worked everywhere and still do. Microsoft is perfectly capable of making it work, because it can.

And If there was a known security exploit, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PATCHED. It doesn't matter if it's on Microsoft's end or Firefox's end.

The only reason they don't make it work on Firefox by default is because they don't want you to use it on Firefox, that's it.

You seem to not want to lose either. I'm a software developer myself who specializes in websites. If Microsoft knows a severe exploit, they probably wouldn't go around telling everybody exactly how to exploit it, would they? And we don't know that it works perfectly, just that it works enough to use it.

They'd disclose it to Mozilla and the Firefox team if they knew. It would make no sense for them not to. Why are you so obstinate when it comes to this exploit theory, it's the least likely reason you could pick for them not to support it.

Corporate shill energy all the way through this comment thread

MS purposefully not respecting the standards for its softwares to only work on their own browsers is a feature since they made Internet Explorer. It's an industrial strategy to trap the users into their own tools. It's to the point they don't respect even their own standards in the case of docx for example so that there is no easy interoperability with libreoffice.

That remark, while truthful a long time ago, didn't really apply during the later periods of IE, or the early periods of Edge before it became a webkit clone. When it needed to win back users, there was a lot of focus on standardization, meaning that when I worked on sites, I tested them through MDN Docs, and in Firefox and IE first, made sure my solutions were not using any -webkit- nonsense, and then they would be fine on other browsers. Anytime I did find IE bugs late in its life, it was usually because some other browser coder was not correctly following standards.

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It used to work months ago. Iโ€™d try switching the user agent to spoof Chrome.

This may open a security exploit or something, I don't recommend it.

They support meetings in Firefox so it's a bit weird why they would block calls... They're effectively the same thing

Additionally, if you change your userAgent to be Chrome things are working pretty good in Firefox as far as I've tried it (not too extensively)

But that could open a security exploit, for example letting other users take your IP and use it within the call to perform a ddos or other kind of attack on your system. They could have been trying to fix that.

Last time this came up, just spoofing the Firefox user agent to Chrome made it work perfectly. Maybe they block it because they haven't tested it on Firefox yet, but it works as well as it does in Chrome.

And if they haven't had the time to validate it in Firefox yet, that is a conscious choice by MS to not dedicate time specifically to validating in Firefox and treating it as a second-class web browser.

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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.

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 doesnโ€™t (or theyโ€™re so buggy to the point where theyโ€™re unusable), but thatโ€™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.

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

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.

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

Iโ€™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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

Sometimes itโ€™s doable if you can call the API and check that the result is what youโ€™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.

Iโ€™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.

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..

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

They might be doing feature detection on one of the more obscure APIs, too. I know thereโ€™s some audio manipulation APIs that arenโ€™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.

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!

Sidenote:

HTTP user agents have become absolutely bonkers over the years.

Useragent parsing is still a thing?

It is similiar in nature to greping html.

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/

Oh so like how other browsers reported Windows NT for decadesโ€ฆ cool.

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.

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.

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)

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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.

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! :)

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Teams won't even open on Safari. Must use a chrome-based browser (like... Edge!)

To be fair, I don't know many complex websites that work on Safari

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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

Luckily, Iโ€™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.

Teams rarely works well internally.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I just had to switch to New Teams last week because Classic teams just continued to have more and more call drops and connection problems. The New Teams doesn't even have an option to change the notification sound, and now I can't move the banner that appears in the top center of the screen when screen sharing that covers up tabs in browsers and the main preferences/search dialog in VS Code...also a Microsoft product. Apparently no one at Microsoft noticed that one of their most used products used in the most normal way blocks out important functionality from another one of them.

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.

Im sure if you swap user agent to chrome they wouldn't give a fuck

It crashes right after a call starts.

Everything else works fine though.

It'll complain later that the browser is blocking its spyware and adware.

Teams also doesnโ€™t support multiple โ€œworkโ€ accounts

Firefox lets you have completely separate profiles with separate accounts (URL: about:profiles, it can't be linked to for security reasons) and also an official extension to have another layer of profiles on a per-tab basis (containers).

Also no idea what he is talking about, I have 4 work accounts in Teams. Ever since they rebuilt their frontend to the "New Teams" multiple accounts have been working just fine.

In the past I had multiple Team instances as PWA for different work accounts, nowadays it's all in one app and works pretty good.

Not to defend Teams, it's total shit, a lot of shit straight up doesn't work half of the time, including important shit like notifications for new messages and content. But it has come a long way from the days including any image in chat would crash Teams for all participants. It isn't perfect and the amount of resources it used to do what it does is awful, but compared to most modern apps it's pretty good.

Just don't tell a Teams dev Microsoft Messenger did 99% of the same stuff and ran super fast on a Pentium 3 333mhz with 64MB of ram, they'll cry and you'll be called out for being a bully.

I feel validated, reading about my daily struggles with Teams.

It really can't. If you spoof the user agent it'll crash immediately after a call starts.

I suspect they use something extra on top of normal WebRTC.

The other issue I have with conferencing apps on browsers is that they request access to your microphone even if it's a one-way audio session (i.e. webinar). It should be set in a way where you can separately join a meeting with audio without allowing access to your microphone.

I mean, thereโ€™s probably some workaround involving faking the microphone, right?

You can use multiple work accounts in the app, have some clients that have their clients give them accounts to communicate internally with them. Just have to keep switching.

Just wanted to point out that this is a feature in the "new" version of teams. Until about a month ago it was impossible to log in to two work accounts simultaneously.

can't, or won't?

Apparently it can when changing the user agent so it seems like itโ€™s more wonโ€™t than canโ€™t.

I'm not surprised. I guess they follow on Google's footsteps of anti-competitively neutering search results for things like weather and stocks from Firefox for Android vs. Chrome, which work fine if your change the user-agent. -_-

On a bullshit teams call right now. I'd call it not working a feature ๐Ÿ˜„

I'm in Linux, I had so much problem with FF and Teams that I installed Edge and Teams as a PWA, no more problem with calls and video

Problem with that is that when you click a link in the teams PWA it opens in edge rather than your default browser. I just use the unofficial teams electron app

Remember when Internet Explorer/Edge was only used to download Chrome. Well, ironically these days I only use Chrome to make video calls.

use teams classic, most professional workspaces are switching to it since the "new" teams came out

What is the difference? I had an IT guy remote into my system yesterday to delete Teams and install Teams classic

New Teams is a rewrite of the old Teams client which is intended to be faster and better to develop for MS as it's based on a newer framework.

However it does seem to still have a few odd bugs here and there. I do find it faster myself though.

I read this whole thread and didnt find a single person who uses teams inside ferdium like me.

Is this like Franz ? I used that for a while, was pretty good actually.

I now use the unofficial teams client, it works ok for me.

Microsoft made their minecraft website complete in functional for Firefox. You can't even download the launcher without chrome.... And I don't understand why. What in the world do they need chrome features that Firefox hasn't?

Wdym? I downloaded it on my PC last week without trouble

Mhh maybe because I was using Firefox on Linux. But I got a 404 when I was using Firefox. On chromium it worked

I'm on Ubuntu. Not the fav distro of this place, but to call it windows

I use floorp, it has user agent spoofing. Set it to chrome, works like a charm.

Or you could just install the extension that does it.

Dude, just try floorp, it is just better.

Why again? It seems pretty obscure and can easily be replaced my customized Firefox or librewolf.

Yeah thats what i thought too, ive been a librewolf user for a long time. Then i tried this, its underrated af. It just has a shitload of features.

It's never worked on FF for me. I installed Chromium just to be able to log into several Teams accounts. And tabs are still not working. Classic Microsoft mess.

Reason?

  1. Firefox does not support Microsoft Teams
  2. Microsoft disabled support for Firefox
  3. Problem for a specific computer/account

Its telling you to use the webapp. https://teams.microsoft.com

You cant share your desktop in it last i used it, but calls did work.

It says few opposite of that, i.e. to try the webapp in Microsoft Edge or Chrome, or use the desktop app.

I dont think you understand opposites, and it doesnt detract from the fact that It still works in ff on that url.

You can use private mode or a different browser to login with multiple Teams accounts.

Yeah, as far as I know it's not some browser chauvinism, but Firefox not supporting some multimedia protocols, that doesn't mean it's Firefox fault though, I'd install some chrome fork just for this kind of interactions