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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
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.
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.
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?