But ultimately, none of this appears to be a fundamental tech issue. 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. Advertisementįurther Reading Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over toįurther, users who have tried changing their user-agent-the identification string, sent by browsers, that tells Web servers what version of which browser they are-have reported that much of the app works in both Safari and Firefox, with reports that even voice and video calls work in Firefox. But even that feature gap doesn't exist any more, and Safari should now support everything required. For a long time, Apple refused to support WebRTC-the underlying browser technology used for real-time voice and video chatting-in Safari. Google Hangouts and Google Meet support plugin-free video calling in Firefox, for example, as have other online services. 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.
In the past, the Skype team has pointed to codec issues as the reason for inconsistent browser support. Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out. 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.Īnd as if to prove a point, the update works only in Edge and Chrome. Though Internet Explorer was eventually displaced-by Chrome-this arguably would have gone much quicker if developers had been less fixated on Microsoft's browser. IE's hegemony presented an enormous challenge for the upstart Firefox browser, which was built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's particular spin on those standards. 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. This is, after all, substantially what we saw during Internet Explorer's heyday. That would leave Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and any other browsers, present or future, out of the fun. One of the greatest fears when Microsoft announced that it was ditching its EdgeHTML rendering engine and switching to Chromium-the open source engine that powers Google's Chrome, along with a range of others such as Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera-is that Web developers would increasingly take the easy way out and limit their support and testing to Chrome.
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