Tell HN: Background blurring now requires Chrome and a Google account

[ornornor]

I couldn't understand for weeks why I couldn't blur the background on Meet video calls anymore.

Well, it turns out that it's because I use Firefox and I don't have a Google account.

If you log in AND switch to Google Chrome, then you get the privilege of blurring the background on your video.

It didn't use to be this way. First it stopped working on Firefox, and then it required logging in.

What a shameful dark pattern, and since most meetings that aren't on Zoom are on Meet, there is no way around it. Well done, Google.

[error503]

I don't think Meet has ever supported background effects on Firefox, has it? It certainly hasn't for at least a couple years.

There is a Bugzilla on it that suggests Google disabled it on Firefox due to performance issues that the Mozilla team is working on, though it seems a bit dubious to me that it's not just an effort to push people to Chrome, since they're doing aggressive browser detection too.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668

[hedora]

They also removed/hid the "log out" button recently. I tried to use meet on someone else's browser recently, and the only option was switch user, which required a username.

(This was on Firefox. It seemed to work otherwise.)

[tra3]

I tried https://jitsi.org, open source video conferencing, the other day and it worked just fine. I didn't use the camera, so not entirely sure how well that piece of works but at least there are options other than google.

[ornornor → tra3]

Blurring works just fine with jitsi and ff. I wonder what crazy hack or secret Firefox API the jitsi team came up with that google can’t figure out instead of shoving chrome down our throats…

[TechBro8615]

What is the issue with using Google Chrome for Google Meet? It's not like they'll be tracking you anymore than they already are, and it seems obvious you'll get better performance using their own browser for their video meeting product.

[error503 → TechBro8615]

It's pretty annoying if you're a Firefox-primary user to have to manually copy Calendar/Slack links and start up Chrome to paste them in.

It is also pretty annoying and sad to see the Web heading back to the siloed features and browser incompatibilities/lock-in of the 90s.

[TechBro8615 → error503]

Couldn't I just as well make the argument it's pretty annoying that Firefox doesn't implement the API features required for background blurring?

Blurring background during live video calls is a pretty niche feature, and if it works in one browser but not another, I'm not sure that is the best evidence of siloing. I'd like to have the option to use the feature where it works, rather than having it disabled everywhere.

[error503 → TechBro8615]

> Couldn't I just as well make the argument it's pretty annoying that Firefox doesn't implement the API features required for background blurring?

Maybe, if that were the case, though even the opacity of the messaging is also a problem. Not 'your browser doesn't support the XYZ API, which is required for this feature, try Chrome', or even 'your browser is unsupported, but if you want to try anyway, click here', but 'use a supported browser for this or fuck off <links to Chrome>'.

From what I've looked into on this in particular though, Google sends different code to Firefox, and does pretty aggressive browser detection to do so (spoofing UA is not sufficient to get the Chrome code), but if you can get it to run the Chrome code, it actually works fine. There may be some performance issues on Firefox that the Meet team doesn't like, but rather than doing an overrideable runtime performance check or exposing anything at all to the user, they just ban Firefox users from the feature. This is, if you ask me, totally against the principle of the web, which is meant to be based on open standards and running the same code everywhere, not deciding if you like the browser the user is using and giving them a degraded view.

We've seen where this leads before when we have a dominant browser vendor that wants to entrench that position, and now that vendor operates important web services too, which they can leverage to further cement that dominance. I don't think it is a good place to be.

[ornornor → TechBro8615]

> Blurring background during live video calls is a pretty niche feature

Is it? Since the pandemic happened, working from home is rather mainstream along with video meetings. I wouldn’t call it niche when office space occupancy is down 50%.

[TechBro8615 → ornornor]

Sure. Why does Firefox make it hard to implement this feature then?

And by the way, I agree with you/OP and feel similarly about siloed web features. But we're having a discussion here. It's unfortunate not everyone on HN remembers that downvotes are not for disagreement.

[ornornor → TechBro8615]

Google says Firefox is making it hard which is also a very convenient way to force users to use chrome (and log into their google account to enable the feature because… why?)

Other video conferencing software like jitsi meet doesn’t seem to think it’s too hard for them to implement as blurring works perfectly well there without chrome or logging into google.

[ornornor → TechBro8615]

Do you not remember the “built for internet explorer in 1024x768” buttons? That was annoying. It also goes against interoperability which is a core principle on the web.

[TechBro8615 → ornornor]

So do you think if Google Meet wants a feature that is unimplementable in Firefox, then it should not be available to Chrome users either?

[ornornor → TechBro8615]

It’s unimplementable in FF because google doesn’t want to implement it.

Background blurring on meet.jit.si works just fine in Firefox. They’ve obviously found a way to implement what google can’t.