> What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.
The danger that the history will repeat for browsers instead of OSs is real. The less market share for browsers other than Google Chrome or Chrome-based ones, the more likely it is, that we will be forced to use those because of incompatible web applications.
E.g. at work, using a Linux Computer, I switched to Chrome for Teams and Outlook, because of compatibility issues.
Did you try setting your User Agent to Chrome? I have to use Teams for work. Under Firefox it has problems and missing features, setting my user agent to Chrome solves all of it. Highly uncompetitive if you ask me.
Also, pro tip: copying the most popular user-agent string gives you a bit of extra protection against fingerprinting. As of the time of writing, the most populated user-agent string is this: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
To me that sounds more like bad software dev/test procedures at MS than anything intentionally uncompetitive. For example, maybe they don’t keep their Firefox support up to date because not enough Teams users use Firefox to warrant the effort, but maybe Firefox is increasingly Chrome-compatible. Firefox is not popular enough for MS to intentionally cripple.
The danger that the history will repeat for browsers instead of OSs is real. The less market share for browsers other than Google Chrome or Chrome-based ones, the more likely it is, that we will be forced to use those because of incompatible web applications.
E.g. at work, using a Linux Computer, I switched to Chrome for Teams and Outlook, because of compatibility issues.