Jitsi-meet: Please warn about Firefox worsening the experience for all participants

[fnorf]

I know you are probably swamped with the influx of interest in meet.jit.si but this is a minor scale request that might make user experience much better.

Re: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758#issuecomment-548795402

Please make the browser warning a big bold warning that tells users about their browser affecting the experience of everyone else. That is absolutely not intuitive nor mentioned anywhere on the site! As it is, even highly technical users will simply try it, decide it works well enough for them (they get audio and video) but have no idea about the mess that it creates in the background. Especially in bandwidth situations like Corona right now, this is baaaad.

Is your feature request related to a problem you are facing?
Yes, bad experiences when Firefox users are present in a call.

Describe the solution you'd like
A big bold warning that Firefox usage will worsen the experience for all participants. Something that is not collapsed. Something that cannot be hidden the next time. Something that makes the user wait and pause before even joining the call.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Continuing to have to explain the issue on a side-channel and looking like a fool. Text like "not fully supported" are easy to dismiss when it does seem to work "technical but badly" ("so Jitsi sucks!") from the Firefox user's perspective.

[freechelmi]

Can you detail how Firefox affect Non-firefox users ?
because it Will create more traffic on each Non-Firefox user?

[damencho]

Exactly. But we are working hard on fixing that.

[saghul]

Please make the browser warning a big bold warning that tells users about their browser affecting the experience of everyone else. That is absolutely not intuitive nor mentioned anywhere on the site!

It is:

Better support for Firefox is coming soon, please see https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758#issuecomment-604463127

[fnorf]

Dear @saghul, sorry if I was not clear in what I meant. Let me try again: That message is not explicitly warning about the user's browser affecting the experience for everyone. That's the issue. The meeting appears to be working for them, everyone will have a worse experience and no one knows why because the cause it not communicated. "your" experience versus "all participants". Please consider re-opening this.

[damrath]

Even technical users will ignore this warning. I know, because i would. The phrasing is so vague and looks like "yet another warning" against using non-chrome browsers. Especially technical users are often quite principled on what kind of (niche) browser they use and will tolerate quite a few hiccups or problems if they're not rendering an app completely non-functional, just so they can avoid using those other browsers.

As @fnorf said. The warning should be very clear about the actual issue. I'd suggest preventing someone with Firefox from joining. A modal saying something along the lines of "It seems you are using Firefox. This will cause problems for everyone in the call. Please use a fully supported Browser" Buttons: [Leave] [Accept risk].

[hex-m]

You could add Firefox to the list of unsupported browsers to show this to the users:

[spipau]

I hope this will only be a temporary fix. I'd like to use Firefox, since it is my preferred default browser and it is annoying to always switch to Chrome for calls. Chrome is becoming the new Internet Explorer 6 and this sucks!

[Echolon]

Is this still a valid issue as Firefox 76 has been released?

[jallamsetty1]

This is no longer the case after we made improvements to our FF support.