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[Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture

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  [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2019-03-11 21:00 +0000
    Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2019-03-11 22:29 +0000
      Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) - 2019-03-11 23:44 -0500
        Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2019-03-12 07:08 +0000
          Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2019-03-12 07:10 +0000
            Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2019-03-12 18:43 +0000
        Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2019-03-12 11:37 +0000
          Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-03-12 22:08 +0000
            Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-03-13 08:37 -0400
    Re: [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-03-11 20:34 -0400

#17537 — [Link Posting] Microsoft's new Skype for Web client: An early taste of the browser monoculture

      ####################################################################
      # ATTENTION: This post is a reference to a website.  The poster of #
      # this Usenet article is not the author of the referenced website. #
      ####################################################################

<URL:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/microsofts-new-skype-for-we
b-client-an-early-taste-of-the-browser-monoculture/>

The text below is a quotation from the URL above:
>
>  One of the greatest fears when Microsoft announced that it was ditching
>  its EdgeHTML rendering engine and switching to Chromium\u2014the open
>  source engine that powers Google's Chrome, along with a range of others
>  such as Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera\u2014is that Web developers would
>  increasingly take the easy way out and limit their support and testing
>  to Chrome. That would leave Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and any
>  other browsers, present or future, out of the fun.
>
>  This is, after all, substantially what we saw during Internet Explorer's
>  heyday. Microsoft's browser grew to about 95 percent of the market, and
>  wide swathes of the Web proudly announced that they were "best viewed in
>  Internet Explorer," often to the point of not working at all in any
>  other browser. IE's hegemony presented an enormous challenge for the
>  upstart Firefox browser, which wa built to support Web standards rather
>  than Microsoft's particular spin on those standards. Though Internet
>  Explorer was eventually displaced\u2014by Chrome\u2014this arguably
>  would have gone much quicker if developers had been less fixated on
>  Microsoft's browser.
>
>  Last week, Microsoft made a major update to the Web version of its Skype
>  client, bringing HD video calling, call recording, and other features
>  already found on the other clients.
>
>  And as if to prove a point, the update works only in Edge and Chrome.
>  Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out. In the past, the Skype
>  team has pointed to codec issues as the reason for inconsistent browser
>  support. But that shouldn't be a concern these days, as both the H.264
>  and VP8 video codecs are supported in Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. Google
>  Hangouts and Google Meet support plugin-free video calling in Firefox,
>  for example, as have other online services. For a long time, Apple
>  refused to support WebRTC\u2014the underlying browser technology used
>  for real-time voice and video chatting\u2014in Safari. But even that
>  feature gap doesn't exist any more, and Safari should now support
>  everything required. Further Reading Google isn\u2019t the company that
>  we should have handed the Web over to
>
>  Further, users who have tried changing their user-agent\u2014the
>  identification string, sent by browsers, that tells Web servers what
>  version of which browser they are\u2014have reported that much of the
>  app works in both Safari and Firefox, with reports that even voice and
>  video calls work in Firefox. It's not clear that everything works, and
>  WebRTC is arguably persnickety enough that Microsoft would have to
>  explicitly test and perhaps tweak its code to work in Firefox or Safari.
>  But ultimately, none of this appears to be a fundamental tech issue.
>
>  Rather, it's a being bothered to do the work issue. Microsoft has said
>  that its decision to prioritize Edge and Chrome is based on "customer
>  value." Or, to put it another way, there's not much point in taking the
>  time and effort to support browsers that have a small audience. This
>  creates a negative feedback loop for those browsers, discouraging their
>  use and pushing developers toward a world in which Chrome is the only
>  browser that developers think about and target.
>
>  ...

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#17539

Rich quoted:

> the update works only in Edge and Chrome.
> Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out.

The new web skype works in firefox 65 for me (with no jiggery-pokery 
like agent spoofing, or killing javascript).

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#17544

Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Rich quoted:

> > the update works only in Edge and Chrome.
> > Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out.

> The new web skype works in firefox 65 for me (with no jiggery-pokery 
> like agent spoofing, or killing javascript).

Not for me with my v65.0.2 in a decade old, updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 PC:

"Browser not supported

Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web experience.

Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer."

I had to change its user agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; 
x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.47 
Safari/537.36". :(
-- 
Quote of the Week: "The constant creeping of ants will wear away the stone." --unknown
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
  /\___/\   Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org /
 / /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail.
| |o   o| |
   \ _ /
    ( )

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#17545

Ant wrote:

> Andy Burns wrote:
>
>> Rich quoted:
> 
>>> the update works only in Edge and Chrome.
>>> Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out.
> 
>> The new web skype works in firefox 65 for me (with no jiggery-pokery
>> like agent spoofing, or killing javascript).
> 
> Not for me 

When you posted over in m.s.firefox, I tried it and it worked, I didn't 
try it again when Rich posted here, but now it does tell me "browser not 
supported", maybe the new version was slowly rolling out first time 
around ...

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#17546

Andy Burns wrote:

> now it does tell me "browser not supported"

But spoofing chrome69 as the user agent seems to be enough to let me in...

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#17554

In comp.misc, Andy Burns  <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Andy Burns wrote:
>> now it does tell me "browser not supported"
> But spoofing chrome69 as the user agent seems to be enough to let me in...

Other people have reported that and then said "but video doesn't work."

I haven't tried to use Skype since leaving the job that required it, so
I've got no skin in the game.

Elijah
------
in general has had a lot of trouble with video conferencing under Linux

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#17549

Ant <ant@zimage.comant> wrote:
> Not for me with my v65.0.2 in a decade old, updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 
> PC:
> 
> "Browser not supported
> 
> Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web experience.
> 
> Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer."
> 
> I had to change its user agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; 
> x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.47 
> Safari/537.36". :(

So, truly a return to the bad old days of IE's dominance during the 
early-Firefox timeframe, where nearly every site claimed "your browser 
is not supported" yet if one faked the user agent, the site often 
worked just fine.

Sadly, faking the user agent then makes Firefox's usage stats look 
lower, because now it (Firefox) gets counted as an IE instance not a 
Firefox instance.

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#17557

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
> Ant <ant@zimage.comant> wrote:
>> I had to change its user agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; 
>> x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.47 
>> Safari/537.36". :(
> 
> So, truly a return to the bad old days of IE's dominance during the 
> early-Firefox timeframe, where nearly every site claimed "your browser 
> is not supported" yet if one faked the user agent, the site often 
> worked just fine.
> 
> Sadly, faking the user agent then makes Firefox's usage stats look 
> lower, because now it (Firefox) gets counted as an IE instance not a 
> Firefox instance.

Plus of course the users who will know about the User Agent as a
solution will be a small minority of the small minority still using
Firefox, and even many of them might not like it. I just hope this
isn't the beginning of the end for Firefox/Mozilla. Presumably
there's a critical mass of users that allows Mozilla to raise enough
money to develop the complex beast that is Firefox. Though I've never
really understood fully how Mozilla works financially, besides the
standard line that Google pays them to keep their search engine the
default.

-- 
__          __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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#17560

> Though I've never really understood fully how Mozilla works
> financially, besides the standard line that Google pays them to keep
> their search engine the default.

And once that deal ended, the whole thing fell apart.  They had no
other strategy and were so drunk on the money they lost sight of the
road.  That place truly needed more mature leadership.  Shame.

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#17543

On 2019-03-11, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>>  And as if to prove a point, the update works only in Edge and Chrome.
>>  Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out. In the past, the Skype
>>  team has pointed to codec issues as the reason for inconsistent browser
>>  support. But that shouldn't be a concern these days, as both the H.264
>>  and VP8 video codecs are supported in Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. Google
>>  Hangouts and Google Meet support plugin-free video calling in Firefox,
>>  for example, as have other online services. For a long time, Apple
>>  refused to support WebRTC\u2014the underlying browser technology used
>>  for real-time voice and video chatting\u2014in Safari. But even that
>>  feature gap doesn't exist any more, and Safari should now support
>>  everything required. Further Reading Google isn\u2019t the company that
>>  we should have handed the Web over to
>>
>>  Further, users who have tried changing their user-agent\u2014the
>>  identification string, sent by browsers, that tells Web servers what
>>  version of which browser they are\u2014have reported that much of the
>>  app works in both Safari and Firefox, with reports that even voice and
>>  video calls work in Firefox. It's not clear that everything works, and
>>  WebRTC is arguably persnickety enough that Microsoft would have to
>>  explicitly test and perhaps tweak its code to work in Firefox or Safari.
>>  But ultimately, none of this appears to be a fundamental tech issue.
>>
>>  Rather, it's a being bothered to do the work issue. Microsoft has said
>>  that its decision to prioritize Edge and Chrome is based on "customer
>>  value." Or, to put it another way, there's not much point in taking the
>>  time and effort to support browsers that have a small audience. This
>>  creates a negative feedback loop for those browsers, discouraging their
>>  use and pushing developers toward a world in which Chrome is the only
>>  browser that developers think about and target.

Except, except, except ... Vivaldi (it's my main browser) is also based
on the Chrome rendering engine. So it's not even the laziness of not
wanting to develop for niche browsers, it's pure douchebaggery of the
sort we saw from this very same company just over a decade ago ... so
short a time period this "strategery" could easily be the result of the
very same asshats at Microsoft.

I know some cycles repeat themselves, but to have gone from a browser
monopoly to relative standards-based navigation back to a browser
monopoly means consumers are fucking morons.

Bring in a competent regulator, please. And a baseball bat with some
nails embedded in it, and a gallon of gasoline and a match.

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