[nextos]

Last time I checked, they also arbitrarily excluded Firefox, which works fine on other WebRTC platforms such as Google Hangouts or Zoom.

Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem.

Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during simple audiocalls.

[djbusby]

I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.

[nextos]

"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

[berkut]

That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).

[cess11]

Yes, they broke this somewhat recently. Video &c. doesn't work in Chromium either.

So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.

[cereal_cable]

Everyone I work with is constantly badmouthing Teams. It's buggy and flakey and they killed Linux support which my company actually made use of. Either way, it doesn't matter since it's bundled. Literally killed any chance of competition getting a fair shake at our usage.

Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.

[cogman10]

Yup. My company was seriously considering slack, but then teams came in the o365 bundle they were already paying for, so we went with teams.

It's better than where we were (Cisco jabber) but also worse than what's out there.

[cess11]

The customers I'm thinking of are in the public sector and quite non-technical, from us they learn that there are better options and realise that the tooling they have are causing them pain. Together with GDPR cases tightening things up on what software you can use I expect this to make a difference.

[dathinab]

> which they're deprecating

and didn't really maintain for at least the last 2 years either

(it basically ran a often very outdated version of the web app + some AFIK unnecessary and buggy custom audio handling)

[_cenw]

there's two kinds of teams calls. the kind attached to a meeting is hosted on an actual server and the one where you call someone directly is some p2p mess that is a lot less reliable (and doesn't work on those browsers).

[dathinab]

I do too and I'm not sure what happens in your case but they do block Firefox _for calls_ arbitrarily (it's not that it doesn't work but that the moment it thinks you are on Firefox it refuses to try to work.

Do you maybe only do calls through Chrome? Or maybe you have a user agent spoofing extension (or similar) installed in Firefox?

[USiBqidmOOkAqRb]

It is (was?) much worse than that. Last time I was forced to attend a Teams meeting roughly a year ago I used Firefox. The UI greeted me with two grayed out toggles informing that neither video nor microphone are usable. Out of morbid curiosity I enabled the responsive tester mode which, amongst other things, allows you to temporarily set the user agent string. I looked up one for Edge, grabbed the first I could find, reloaded the page, and... it worked. Joined the call with full features.

You can not convince me Microsoft isn't an evil company.

[Too]

It’s up to the admin of each organization to choose if anonymous guests are allowed or not.

[isodev]

Also Safari, for years it wasn't even possible to sign-into Teams (even to chat), let alone calls (all while apps like google meet had no trouble to provide both features).

[prismz]

High resource consumption is an unfortunate side effect of todays trend of making everything a chromium app...

[antifa]

MSTeams only uses chromium as a base, it's degrees of poorly written extends far past the scope of chromium and even beyond the stars.

[pnutjam]

You can't controls screen on teams with Linux, even running Chrome browser or Edge. Drives me crazy.

[7bit]

Teams works in Firefox. However, Firefox on Android is not supported.

[consp]

Try sharing a window on linux and see how that goes.

[mordae]

Random errors during calls, tab freezes etc..

"Supported."

[linmob]

I mean, on Windows with the official Teams, I see "Person is visibly talking, but there's no audio (and did not mute themselves accidentally)" multiple times a week. So, yeah, going from that baseline, that's surely "supported".

[zelphirkalt]

Please share how you make it work on FF then.

[TZubiri]

I can share a link to guests just fine

[mort96]

Eh Firefox doesn't work fine with at least Google Meet in my experience (which covers both Firefox on macOS aarch64 and Firefox on Linux amd64). It's alright in the beginning, but if Firefox has been open for a while, the out-going audio gets choppy and the recipients don't hear anything. Restarting Firefox fixes it, but this is enough of a problem for me to have Chrome installed on every computer where I may have to do a video call.

Firefox doesn't seem to be intentionally blocked by Teams in my experience (or at least not anymore?), but maybe it should be.

[dathinab]

I haven't had that experience, but then when it comes to audio there can be so many e.g. device (hardware+various OS parts) specific issues that only some of the browsers might have workarounds for that it's quite viable (but AFIK not the norm, and not limited to works on Chrom but not Firefox, the other way around is possible too).

Either way it doesn't matter much because:

- jitsi meet even when they still was a small startup managed to provide high quality video calling on all browsers/platforms

- MS Teams has more then enough resource to make things work, they just don't want to (same for properly maintaining their Linux app, which given that it can be a local deploy of the web-app a very little other code could be a 1.5 person job (the +.5 person in case the first is sick)) and have a good reason not to (they have been pushing edge hard, including using inappropriate means like deceiving windows users into using it when they clearly signaled they want to use another browser)

[mort96]

You're right that when it comes to audio, there can be hardware + OS specific issues. But we're talking systems as different as aarch64 MacBook Pro running macOS with built-in mic and speakers on one hand a amd64 desktop running Ubuntu with a USB headset on the other hand both consistently exhibiting the exact same issue, but only in Firefox (not Chrome, not Discord, not TeamSpeak). My money's on that being a Firefox issue.

And the issue in Firefox across both those wildly different systems is present in Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and (I believe) Slack's Huddle.

Microsoft has the resources to make it work, sure, but I'm betting "making it work" here means fixing the issue in Firefox.

[kevincox]

I've used Firefox on Linux to regularly attend multi-hour meetings for the last at least 5 years without issues from multiple devices and it has always worked smoothly for me. The only issue I have had is that in the last year sometimes the joining screen says that I have no camera and mic for a while (maybe 20s) before letting me join.

I regularly use Meet, Zoom and Jitsi on Firefox and Meet has been the only one that always just worked for me and my guests.