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

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<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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[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

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