Well, it used to be that MS used ActiveX extensively, as with the original Outlook Web Access, to achieve things that weren't possible in the browser. It's entirely possible they try to use advanced features only available in IE depending on the User-Agent header.

Keep in mind, XMLHttpRequest was introduced by MS in IE, and then was adopted by other browsers. It's likely that some Google products use Chrome specific extensions if they detect Chrome. If you can provide a better experience, it's often worth doing so.

Unfortunately there may occasionally be problems where falling back to standard features may be buggy, or development has continued assuming the existence of proprietary features that has led to designs where the fallback to standard features isn't just a little slower, but massively slower, because it might be a less checked test case.

In other words, I think this is far more likely to be an oversight because of a poor testing regime than a purposeful action.

Just MS up to its old (classic) tricks.

Doesn't Hangouts only work properly on Chrome?

It works fine in every browser, but you might need to download a small plugin if you're not on Chrome due to WebRTC being a standard but not a standard.

Regardless of your browser, it'll heat your system up so you can fry an egg or broil a steak.

Not in FireFox anymore. They sent alerts for a long time saying FireFox was losing support for hangouts, and now it doesn't work at all.

True. But temporary: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts....

Ironically that's being caused by WebRTC not having compatible enough implementations across all major browsers (and as an aside being disproportionally difficult to debug). Otherwise they would've just dropped the plugin and be done with it much earlier. Though I'm surprised they didn't act earlier.

The biggest WebRTC interop problem is due to Chrome declining to implement the "Unified Plan" for multiple streams ... a plan they agreed to implement when the spec was worked out. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=465349

Yeah the Hangouts website is my main gripe with it. Great service for talking with friends and family. Absolutely horrible performance on their site.

Something to do with WebGL being used during background transitions would drop the performance of my graphics card into the dirt. Games running at the same time would incur a frame drop of 90% for the 5 seconds Hangouts is merely changing a PICTURE..

Try https://appear.in . I have no affiliation, I just find the idea of not logging in awesome.

There is a plugin for IE and safari. Some versions of Firefox work. The important issue is that chrome and Firefox are browsers that work on the big three platforms.

It is funny but in our experience around the company some people found out it works better on Safari than in Chrome (like, in Chrome oftentimes mic cannot be heard when one enters a hangout).

oh come on, don't you know google doesn't get held to the same standards \s

If the one creating a product also creates a OS, making that product run faster on your OS compared to others makes your OS look better I guess.

Kind of a corollary to "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run."

highly doubt that microsoft crafted this product to have lowe performance on purpose.

My office 365 Home install is not cloud based in any way as far as I can tell. All the 'traditional' office programs such as Excel and Word are installed locally.

There may be some cloud integration to OneDrive or something similar, but I haven't used that. It is nothing like Google Docs.

That's probably Office 2016. Office 365 is definitely a cloud based service which includes licenses for the desktop Office software.