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If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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They aren't "concerned about privacy", they are "concerned about privacy for the same price". And they are real cheapskates.
Note: for those who lack the knowledge, the "price" of a free product comes as an overall bugs / features ratio, where "bugs" and "features" are respectively defined as any undesirable / desirable behavior in the use case for the software.
I wonder if you deem Firefox buggy or having not enough features?
Using Firefox since it came out and never experienced any troubles.
Google Meet's background blur and visual filters do not work on Firefox. MS Teams straight up says that Firefox is not a supported browser. These decisions might be intentional on the part of Google and Microsoft, but to the average user of these popular products, it looks like a Firefox problem.
Well, yes - it's profitable for these corporations to portray Firefox as buggy and their own browser as superior. Change your user agent to one of a Chromium-based browser and watch how your "unsupported" Firefox suddenly works correctly in most cases.
Google products only supporting chromium is a tale as old as time. Try using this extension to enable background blur and see if it'll work: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mercator-studio/
Edit: Looks like background blur is working on the latest version of Firefox if you spoof your user agent to chrome. See my comment below.
This extension blurs the entire camera feed instead of only the background, so it's not really a solution unfortunately.
I've also tried a simple useragent change in Firefox, but the feature still didn't work. That leads me to think they're using browser features that are not available on Firefox.
Another thing I've noticed is that Google's background blur implementation has better edge detection than apps like Zoom, and it handles things like curly hairstyles more gracefully.
I got curious and started looking into this. Looks like you can enable background blur in google meet if you're using the latest version of firefox, I just did myself to confirm.
All I need to do is by spoofing the user agent in
about:config, by settinggeneral.useragent.overridetoMozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36.If I remove the user agent spoofing, google meet refuses to show the background effect options.
So my conclusion is google deliberately gate this feature behind user agent sniffing. Firefox is perfectly capable of supporting this feature.
Some discussion about the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668
You're right, I can confirm the feature does indeed work on Firefox by changing the useragent string. However, this introduces other issues such as input devices not being detected which makes normal use of Meet difficult. For now, there seems to be nothing else to do other than waiting for Google to enable this on Firefox.
Awesome, I'll have a look again. Last time I tried changing the useragent (it was a while ago), the whole Google Meet website had some issues and it didn't work. Maybe the specific useragent you use also has an impact.
Teams works fine on ff / linux ...
A lot of that stuff can be fixed by switching your user agent to Chrome
Teams works fine on Firefox.
Are you using a useragent changer?
I am still getting this:
Works fine: https://i.imgur.com/5dbLGNi.png
Might be cos I'm running on a mac?
I deem Firefox a bit buggy, but that's because I use it on platforms that get very little use, And I ain't got time to hunt bugs down. I barely have the time to report them.
But it's not people like you and me I'm talking about. It's people who discovered internet after 2000, who think Firefox doesn't have enough features, and is "being unreasonable", because essentially every. single. browser is now chrome or chromium, with the exception of Firefox (and safari?); and because of companies like adobe blaming Firefox for "not playing nice with others" simply because it isn't chrome/chromium...
Edit: to those who downvoted, which I can only assume is because of my comment on bugs, please install NetBSD 9.3, ctwm, set pkgin up against 2023Q1, and install Firefox 110.0.1 with noscript, umatrix and ublock origin. Now witness how all your menus disappear immediatey as you
mouseoverupon them. Now please explain to me how this isn't a bug...Edit 2: instead of attempting to "backseat debug" without any information on the actual problem, or even without trying to reproduce the bug (I gave all the info I would start with), please accept that Firefox can have bugs, and that people online can know what they are talking about. Thanks.
Sounds to me like some of the third party plugins/extensions you've installed are conflicting with one another. That's not Mozilla's fault. That can happen to Chrome too.
You're using several extensions that were all made by different people, and not necessarily designed to interact or be functional together. That's not a Firefox bug.
Yeah sure, the exact same set of extensions that worked with 102, and they also work with 110 on other OSes. Must be that...
Extensions are third party apps and most, if not all, of them are not made by Mozilla. If an unofficial, third party plugin doesn't work, it's not up to Firefox to fix that. The issue is with the third party apps.
FF is allowed to change their software, and they're not at fault if those changes break existing plugins that they had no hand in creating. That's not how software works.
Look like a bug on the edge of WM/App
Yeah well, Firefox is the only GUI software that shows this behavior, and it wasn't present with 102. The only thing that changed was Firefox.
It works fine with my Cinnamon window manager. So the bug could be in Firefox, in your WM, in both, or more likely in the integration of two, as a side effect, which why I've said "on the edge". It's nearly impossible to test your software with every combination of a system. So the solution here to file an issue both for WM and Firefox and hope someone from either communities will solve it. Or just get another browser or WM.
Never? Are you only browsing Lemmy and Wikipedia?
Seriously, not to take anything away from what is does good, but Firefox is littered with bugs. And most websites seem to be optimised for Chrome these days which makes the Firefox experience a bit less nice.
Links or it didn't happen. Seriously, I have used FF and only FF for the last 15 years and have had zero showstoppers.
Link me some links that work in chrome and not firefox, I wanna see!
The visual effects (background overlay, animations etc) in Google Meet do not work 😢
That's not a firefox bug but a deliberate google roadblock
Actually it works in Firefox since v112. You'll need to spoof your user agent to chrome to fool Google Meet into thinking you're using chrome.
I've had some instances of wondering why a website doesn't load or does it's function properly, usually government websites or application forms, and the issue gets resolved once I do it on Chrome or Edge. It's not a big deal for me, I daily drive Firefox and have Edge installed for those instances.
The only time I see websites break on Firefox is due to Firefox blocking their tracking script and somehow the website doesn't work because of it. In those case, it's not the browser's fault that the website doesn't work without the tracking scripts.
Other people mentioned Google Meet doesn't support background blur in Firefox. Firefox is actually capable to do that in the past few months, but you'll need to spoof your user agent to chrome, so it's not Firefox fault.