Web version of Skype can not longer be accessed using the Firefox browser
itwire.comI see a terrifying problem with this approach. It's like the Microsoft strategy of EEE. They exterminate Firefox - the last non-chromium browser. And if it's become a tendency, we will wallow in monobrowser culture dark age again.
It's not obvious for everyone, but Google started to byte FF. I just can't use google search in Firefox properly, they force me to train their artificial intelligence on each search. Google sites are not locked to chrome-based browsers yet, but they work significantly worse, especially youtube on a mediocre machine.
But in reality, Firefox is the much faster browser. I develop very large webgl web assembly unity game (30Mb of code), and Firefox handles with such burden much better, than chrome.
It's like opera crush. To be compatible with the web, they forced to be compatible with chrome bugs and hacks. After a long time mimicking to a Chrome-based browser, they surrendered to darkness and joined the swarm.
Now the last standing browser is under attack of the giant corporation. If we will not protest, they just swallow us and put onto the glossy walled garden.
But skype is kind of the worst of the worst of Microsoft. Hopefully it is just a lazy and/or incompetent team rather than reflecting the strategy of a tech giant.
Worst or not, many businesses are using skype. I am use skype for web, to chat with colleagues. Now I am forced to install chrome browser, to use skype.
It could be incompetent team, if they had no FF support at all. But they had and it was working perfect, even better than their hot pile of react native app on linux. But now for some reason they close it, without any explanations.
I guess, they forced to use some "special" proprietary WebRTC layer, for video and audio streaming, which not compatible with FF, and management decided that firefox 10% of users are not worthy to support.
But obviously, they just could not compete honestly, their 4% of browser market is laughable, especially take into consideration their desktop OS share. They have long going plan, to dominate browser market.
Strategy is very simple. If your system browser is chrome based, users would not bother to install chrome. The only competitior is firefox, easily devastated by EEE strategy.
Is it? It's not a great software but doesn't appear overly buggy or unmaintained compared to other office products. Office products and browser compatability are always an issue.
IDK. Skype used to be reliable, but now it seems utterly useless. They took ages, about a year if I'm remembering right, to bring out Skype for their own Windows Mobile platform. I've personally hit a bug where the web interface allowed you to set a password that was incompatible with the app (too long I think).
The enterprise version isn't production ready for serious use. $FORTUNE_500 where I'm at really wanted to make it work - I suppose we pay for it on a per-seat basis along with the Office 365 product - but client disconnects with >100 users for an internal webinar on our internal network resulted in an embarassingly broken presentation and a decision to bail off to a different vendor's product.
I think this maybe more related to that Microsoft is actually doing a massive rework of Skype, dumping the old Lync infrastructure and front end, and moving to their "teams" implementation.
In doing so they are dumping a lot of what they consider to be legacy support. With the advent and popularity of mobile apps, users today are seemingly fine with being told their their services are only available through this one channel.
So why take on the burden and effort to support something most people don't seem to care about (though they should) for what boils down to less than 2% of the user base?
This new, "we dictate to you, massive, breaking changes, and features you don't have control" mentality is a drastic change in behavior at Microsoft, Their adaptability, and building tools that worked on damn near everything, is what allowed them to dominate the office OS, this new change may play a part in them reinventing themselves and allow them to become more agile. But I can tell you, its pissing a lot of people off, from an administration perspective, their OS, and software are becoming a nightmare to manage when not used as they dictate.
Sadly though, currently there is no alternatives, Google's G suite might as well be DOA, they've let their promising online office suite wither on the vine. IBM never could get their product off the ground.
Aside from cobbling together multiple disconnected 3rd services, its really difficult to do anything but just site back and let them dictate terms.
What's wrong with G Suite? I know a couple companies that use it, and it seems pretty handy. I mean, there's still Windows and MS Office that Google doesn't compete with, but hangouts/gmail/google calendar all worked well when I was at a company that used them.
I use to be a large advocate of gsuite, back in the days of it being google apps. I still support several non-profits that still use their free organization tier.
But the fact is, google hasn't kept pace at all, and it largely feels like an abandoned product.
If you spend sometime comparing the functionality, features, and UI of office 365 to Gsuite, it's nearly impossible to recommend google over them at this point.
The fact that microsoft throws in the complete office suite for desktop, as well as a really solid web product at the same price as google is another thing that makes it hard to recommend them.
I really hope that google, decides to invest more in this product, but until they do, I can't recommend them anymore.
Microsoft seems to be focusing on cutting costs, and that’s causing these kinds of issues. It has already invested in Electron (Visual Studio Code) and Chromium (with Edge moving to it). Skype dropping support for Firefox seems to be a casualty of the same. The Electron site says that Skype is built on it [1]. So no reason to support any browser other than Chromium.
I wonder why there hasn’t yet been an Electron equivalent with Firefox underneath (with Firefox being embeddable like Chromium). Mozilla should consider focusing on this (if it’s not already in progress).
There are multiple reports of it working by simply spoofing your user agent to chrome https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/apu2u6/, which makes this even more worrying.
This is exactly what happened with the Skype desktop client. I was able to get another year out of Skype for my grandmother's PPC Leopard based Mac by simple nullrouting ui.skype.com.
It might be that Microsoft doesn't do testing/QA on Firefox, and thus they don't want to be responsible for any issues that occur.
What does Firefox lack? I was under the impression that all of Skype's features could be written in modern HTML and JavaScript. After all, isn't that what Google Hangouts does?
Hangouts doesn't need a plugin anymore?