dekatron

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.

Are you using a useragent changer?

I am still getting this:

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.

My university forced us to switch from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 and from BigBlueButton to Teams for online classes probably because Microsoft offered them an irresistible deal. It was a really annoying and user-hostile process for everyone.

Microsoft has been on a shameless crusade recently to make people adopt Edge. Upon launch, thier Bing AI had a rather absurd requirement to use Edge to access it.

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.

First it’s the number of sign ups, then it’s the posts and likes, then it’s the number of eyeballs grabbed and the ad revenue. This kind of metric chasing that these platforms encourage is one of the reasons why they become so toxic.

I don’t fully understand—would Meta be able to serve you targeted ads based on your non-Threads fediverse activities? Where would these ads appear? How do they know it’s you just from your fediverse accounts?

Not surprisingly, it does all the data tracking that it can for a “text-based conversation app”.