There was a short time when Google made Hangouts Chrome-only, but faking the User-Agent would make it load. Turned out, yep, Hangouts worked totally fine in Firefox. They just refused to let me load it and that's it.

I don't think you can do that anymore, though. But I haven't tried it in a while.

A huge problem I see with the web is that it's is missing concessions for "advanced" users. I get that we're a smaller market, but come on.

I don't know the situation, but in theory, it could work fine for you, but 1% of the functionality could have been not working properly for 1% of users. That's thousands of unhappy users that would decide that Google delivered unfinished not working product and that quality of their products sucks.

I would also say money wasted on providing support for those users but I'm still not sure if such thing exists.

Then they should have waited. Google gets zero leeway for this kind of behaviour from me. Especially considering how hard they leveraged google.com to push chrome.

Google is the new Microsoft. History repeats itself. The major difference this time is you aren’t the customer, rather more the product, but that’s just semantics in this specific case.

I tried to use Hangouts last week with the latest Firefox on a beefy machine. While it wasn’t explicitly blocked, it froze the whole browser after 30 seconds. Never got into the meeting.

I just tried using Hangouts yesterday. Did not work in FF, but oh wow it magically worked in Chrome. Also, the only Hangouts "Desktop" app still requires Chrome. Also when you use Hangouts on iOS, and you open a link, it asks if you want to use Chrome (which isn't even installed) or Safari. how about use the goddamn default browser? Nope, it's gonna ask me to use Chrome for the rest of eternity. Total shit.

I do have Chrome installed on iOS, although I don't generally want to use it. But now that I have it installed, Hangouts on iOS opens links ONLY in Chrome. It's infuriating.

Oh course the "desktop" (not really) Hangouts app also only opens links in Chrome.

Don't worry though, Hangouts will soon be discontinued and we'll have to complain about some Google chat app.

It's well known that that's simply because Safari is the only default browser option on iOS, so apps have to use workarounds if they want to let users open links in a different browser. Though even then all iOS browsers must use Apple WebKit.

On other operating systems you can set the default browser to be Firefox, Chrome, or whatever else you want, and different browser engines are allowed.

The inbox app for iOS has a “remember my choice” radio button for the Safari/Chrome choice. Somehow the app hasn’t remembered that choice for several months.

The same happens in Hangouts. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to choose safari.

My experience differs: using Google stuff on Chrome is worse. Occasionally one or another of my Gmail tabs jumps off into space on Chrome on my Mac and pins a core.

Chrome on Wayland, with GNOME 3 in particular, pretty much always pins a core too, but not for Gmail-related reasons.