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If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now (www.fastcompany.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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 setting general.useragent.override to Mozilla/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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.