My child cares about privacy and switches browsers. Chrome for Meet, Firefox for most non-Google things.
My solution to this problem was move everything off GDrive and into self-hosted options. If Google is going to intentionally hinder usage on non-Google software when no real technical roadblocks exist, I'll gladly use literally anything else.
GDrive I was able to replace more or less with LibreOffice and Collabora, I rarely need to share documents outside PDF or print, which makes compatibility a non-issue for me (and even when I need to, saving as a .doc usually maintains layouts, fonts, etc.).
But try disabling browser extensions and see if that fixes it -- a majority of the time that's the culprit. With videoconferencing specifically, it's often an extension or setting to block videos from autoplaying.
This isn't new territory for Google. They did the same thing to Windows Phone, simply excluding any of their products from working on Windows Phone, even when other developers tried to step in and fill the gap. [2]
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/micro...
and two other webcompat examples: https://webcompat.com/issues/56933 https://webcompat.com/issues/68844
Just to give an idea. That said, Meet works fine for me, besides some features, like background, which they have only implemented for Chromium based browsers (maybe Safari!?) - that is a bit annoying, as I doubt that it would break the devs leg to implement something for Firefox as well.
And there are no widespread reports of it not working on Firefox, so it's something specific to your machine. Not a general case.
Isn’t this the problem? Why do I have to disable something in Firefox to make it work for a google product.
It's not a Firefox problem, it's extensions you chose to install that neither Firefox nor Google have anything to do with.
For a work tool, this is a problem. I get reports of fuzzy microphones, audio that slowly descends into robotic noise and screenshares that don't in Firefox. So I switch to Chrome for Meet in work, it just looks bad if my meetings don't work like 10% or more of the time.
I'm sure this is a problem with Google more than Firefox, given I have none of the same issues with discord in firefox on my personal devices
Doing that is so absurd in my opinion.
If google devs code doesn't run as fast in firefox why should google take the blame ?
or maybe google is using non html5 apis to tap into chrome for faster perf in which case things are muddy.. since whatwg kinda allows unofficial apis
But things come also from Google (and Microsoft, they seem to use the same logic) implementing some logic but based on "how the web standard" works but by "how it happens to work on chrome", this leads to frequent issues with selected input devices and screen sharing.
And fixing it is easy, probably way less then 10h of work one single time. (As far as I know.)
Similar the codec issues only matter if certain slow devices are involved, e.g. non high end phones, high end phones in energy saving mode, old tablets. If no such device is involved it's not rare that the conference will anyway use different codecs. So they could support FF for many conference calls, but instead they decide to reflect to even try to work on FF (which is a web no-go btw.).
So there are "reasons", but it's clear that's they intend to not support FF at all.
Btw. Microsoft is the worst here as they reject to work with FF even for things which do not have any reason to have problems on FF.
And yet, I get flak if my code isn't performing well on 5 different browsers, including IE6.
Especially if it involves quasi monopolies.
I.e. the it's a quasi Monopoly of chrome like browsers spear headed by Google and Microsoft.
The problem is that they ram whatever internal Chrome APIs they want through standards bodies and call it a standard.
Others just can't keep up: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
E: Just saw the /s in parent's grandchild.
The "Change background" feature was not "supported" in Firefox, then suddenly I could use it so I thought they finally implemented it for Firefox as it was working perfectly.
Two days later the feature disappeared, and I keep getting that "your browser doesn't support this feature" popup since.
There's a dev running an experiment to whitelist more combinations of the huge space of (Device, CPU, GPU, OS, OSVersion, Browser, BrowserVersion) to use that feature. What would you do after seeing that the metrics show that most of the users on your experiment had a bad experience? In that case you'd want to rollback your experiment right away and figure out what's wrong. You really expected all, if not most of the combinations you selected to actually work well, but it's apparently not the case.
I'd like that you could opt-in into being aware of the experiments you are running, and be allowed to opt-out early of experiments when they don't work, or sign-up to run them permanently (as long as they are actually running) if they work great.
Although, letting users know about the experiments might also ruins some experiments as users could start assuming that the experiment really changes things. I imagine you can easily run a dummy experiment and have people talk about how much faster/slower their browser runs with it.
Have some examples? On Desktop, I don't see any, but I would get if you mean Mobile since Chrome is still the default browser there for Android.
https://support.google.com/docs/thread/18235069/google-sheet...
After i found that spoof browser agent fixed it. They locked the thread coincidentally and the bug is also fixed coincidentally a few days after.
I don't know if it is really a coincident, but I definitely have 0 trust of them after it.
I wouldn't blame some possible hack a tired dev implemented on a busy Thursday on a grand scheme to strip you of your freedom - in the end it's just people working there. Especially seeing that the bug was fixed after someone complained/made them aware.
- then you better make sure you make it work everwhere instead of this constant "ooops"-thing that shows that Google doesn't even do the smallest amount of testing in Firefox, or they do it deliberately.
Automated tests can help with this, but you also need to maintain and write those in the first place.
Just trying to follow the thought process as an economist. It's likely hard to justify, especially with admins being quick at noticing these things and employees on docs products usually being receptive on bug trackers since it is a business offering.
(Multiple more examples exist for those willing to dig: at one point the search results page would peg one processor core briefly every 30 seconds as long as you stayed on that page - and used Firefox)
Edit: and as you mention, the situation with Chrome on mobile is basically a 1-1 of IE on Windows.
(Of course this is all anecdotal.)
How is that any different at all to what Microsoft was doing with IE in the 90's?
That 5 people wrote to them?
The fact that "but if 5 (or 10 or 50) people wrote them it would have an impact" I'm sceptical about.
99.9999% it would just be ignored. Campaigns with 100s of thousands of people are ignored all the time...
As I mentioned avove I think now is a particularly good time!
You can get a lot more done complaining to the right places.
Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle. Windows was the product everyone wanted, and Microsoft abused its dominance in operating systems to increase its share of the browser market by refusing to sell you Windows unless you also took Internet Explorer.
By contrast, Google does not condition the use of Search on the use of Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with promoting a product to customers who use one of your other products (or we’d have to break up pretty much every multi-product company).
Nope. That's what some people complained about, but it wasn't their legal issue (which is why today every OS vendor still does it).
The actual complaint, which is pasted below, shows it in much greater nuance, as it wasn't that they "required OEMs to buy the bundle" (in fact, there wasn't any buying, IE was free part of Windows).
> Nope.
Yes, it was.
> That's what some people complained about, but it wasn't their legal issue (which is why today every OS vendor still does it).
No, every OS vendor doesn't do illegal tying of a browser to the OS, which involves both the fact of a preexisting monopoly OS to which the tying occurs (that's essential to the illegality, since its an illegal method of leveraging one monopoly to another market), and the kind of business methods used to enforce the tying.
Google works poorly enough on non-Chrome browsers that it's the same thing.
5. To protect its valuable Windows monopoly against such potential competitive threats, and to extend its operating system monopoly into other software markets, Microsoft has engaged in a series of anticompetitive activities. Microsoft's conduct includes agreements tying other Microsoft software products to Microsoft's Windows operating system; exclusionary agreements precluding companies from distributing, promoting, buying, or using products of Microsoft's software competitors or potential competitors; and exclusionary agreements restricting the right of companies to provide services or resources to Microsoft's software competitors or potential competitors.
17. But Mr. Gates did not stop at free distribution. Rather, Microsoft purposefully set out to do whatever it took to make sure significant market participants distributed and used Internet Explorer instead of Netscape's browser -- including paying some customers to take IE and using its unique control over Windows to induce others to do so. For example, in seeking the support of Intuit, a significant application software developer, Mr. Gates was blunt, as he reported in a July 1996 internal e-mail:
18. Second, Microsoft unlawfully required PC manufacturers, as a condition of obtaining licenses for the Windows 95 operating system, to agree to license, preinstall, and distribute Internet Explorer on every Windows PC such manufacturers shipped. By virtue of the monopoly position Windows enjoys, it was a commercial necessity for OEMs to preinstall Windows 95 -- and, as a result of Microsoft's illegal tie-in, Internet Explorer -- on virtually all of the PCs they sold. Microsoft thereby unlawfully tied its Internet Explorer software to the Windows 95 version of its monopoly operating system and unlawfully leveraged its operating system monopoly to require PC manufacturers to license and distribute Internet Explorer on every PC those OEMs shipped with Windows.
But I think that's beside the point. Microsoft did a lot of anti-competitive things in a lot of markets. Limiting scope to one particular litigation isn't really helpful here. The phrasing, "THE compliant," makes it sound like there wasn't a mountain of complaints. There was.
Android is getting in trouble for it in the EU!
>But I think that's beside the point. Microsoft did a lot of anti-competitive things in a lot of markets. Limiting scope to one particular litigation isn't really helpful here. The phrasing, "THE compliant," makes it sound like there wasn't a mountain of complaints. There was.
This thread was about their legal issues with IE. People complain about a lot of things, but that doesn't make them illegal.
Perhaps. I view threads more like human conversations.
> People complain about a lot of things, but that doesn't make them illegal.
Microsoft did a lot of illegal things in the nineties, which many people complained about. Some were litigated, most were not. Lack of litigation doesn't make it legal.
Google seems to be doing a few illegal things right now, although not nearly as many as nineties-era Microsoft.
Apple has about half the mobile market share in the US, and about a quarter globally. There are plenty of alternative ways to get on the internet. This is not a monopoly.
You can't just look at bundling the browser with the OS in isolation. The circumstances are significantly different.
There is nothing inherently wrong with tying, which you might also call "bundling." Quoting from the FTC's website:
Offering products together as part of a package can benefit consumers who like the convenience of buying several items at the same time. Offering products together can also reduce the manufacturer's costs for packaging, shipping, and promoting the products. Of course, some consumers might prefer to buy products separately, and when they are offered only as part of a package, it can be more difficult for consumers to buy only what they want.
For competitive purposes, a monopolist may use forced buying, or "tie-in" sales, to gain sales in other markets where it is not dominant and to make it more difficult for rivals in those markets to obtain sales. This may limit consumer choice for buyers wanting to purchase one ("tying") product by forcing them to also buy a second ("tied") product as well. Typically, the "tied" product may be a less desirable one that the buyer might not purchase unless required to do so, or may prefer to get from a different seller. If the seller offering the tied products has sufficient market power in the "tying" product, these arrangements can violate the antitrust laws.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It's only anti-trust when companies people don't like do it.
The Justice Department's complaint is an eye-opening view into what Microsoft's misconduct was: https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp
Genuinely curious where the market share and total number of users in the market (broken down) has shifted.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200731211652/https://twitter.c...
For a "light hearted joke", that is a lot of effort, extremely unprofessional and very poorly worded. I still don't blame people for taking issue with it. The harrassment though is another story, that sucks and shouldn't have happened.
100%
> extremely unprofessional and very poorly worded. I still don't blame people for taking issue with it.
Look, I like the Android browser and I think Geckoview is awesome. Back then, as soon as it hit the shelves enough people were complaining on a level where one can "light heartily" put them into the "haters" category IMHO, next to a much higher percentage of constructive feedback.
Also: yikes on that link. I would feel disillusioned if my feedback was responded to in that manner. Sometimes empathy can get you so much further.
If I recall correctly they backtracked, but it was a big deal for awhile.
I used to be firefox user since Phoenix, but I gave up on it after 89 when context menus were broken, megabar was still as shitty as when introduced first tie, and new stupid mobile look on my 4k screen? It's almost like they are killing firefox on purpose, but I realised that loyalty to a software product is stupid and moved to Brave.
Why do you care about Firefox and not Safari or Samsung browser?
I love keyboard driven browsers and had also some issues with nyxt and qutebrowser. I want to avoid installing chromium on my linux box and I just can't.
Recommending others also to report it.
If some googlers are reading this, please push the chrome team to be more interoperable. "Don't be evil!" :-)
Second this.
I want to like Google and did for the longest time.
You do so much great stuff but some stuff like this is so damaging for both the ecosystem and for you, because as long as this is going on my best hope is a giant fine.
If two - three other Norwegians do the same that should start to look like an earthquake ;-)
Same if ten - twenty Germans or Brits or French do the same.
I would mention:
1. that some of their web properties (calendar and YouTube) have been intentionally incompatible with Firefox as evidenced by how well they work in Firefox if one changes how the browser identify itself.
2. How they have pushed Chrome as a "better browser" on the front page of Google (were no one else have been allowed to advertise) to Firefox users since way before Chrome was anywere nearly as good as Firefox, making it both a lie and - more importantly - a massive abuse of dominance in one market to gain monopoly in another just like Microsoft did with IE.
As we saw yesterday with AWS authorities are willing to punish rampant abuse if they have a good case and this definitely is one.
Edit: since this comment is getting a lot of attention the relevant authority in Norway is Konkurransetilsynet with web address https://konkurransetilsynet.no
(Finding the exact correct form on that site and for this purpose seems to be an art and/or science it seems but if you can't find any just submit somewhere and explain the situation.)
It would be beautiful if everyone could post underneath with the address to the equivalent office in your jurisdiction.