Closed Bug 1727100 Opened 3 years ago Closed 2 years ago

Validate UA override for Slack.com to potentially make Huddles work

Categories

(Web Compatibility :: Interventions, enhancement)

enhancement

Tracking

(relnote-firefox 95+, firefox95 fixed)

RESOLVED FIXED
Tracking Status
relnote-firefox --- 95+
firefox95 --- fixed

People

(Reporter: denschub, Assigned: denschub)

References

Details

Attachments

(1 file)

Based on the comments from a community member in a webcompat report, Slack's Huddles feature appears to be working in Firefox if we spoof as Chrome.

After some internal chats, there doesn't appear to be anything hard-blocking us on overriding the UA here. However, we have to be a bit careful not to break even more, because if other core-features of Slack break in Firefox with a spoofed UA, this may not be worth it.

I'll coordinate the testing with an experimental intervention here.

voice communication and screenshare receiving works (ff92), hosting a screen sharing session doesn't (Linux/Wayland/PipeWire). I only gave it a short test.

spoofing Chrome in ff92 will also make the audio part of "Slack Calls"work bi-directional (bug#1626121). I wasn't successful in sending my video stream, but as I wrote, could be due to my setup.

Spoofing the agent has downsides (stats, user expectations). Maybe something is brewing at slackhq if spoofing is all it takes to have audio conversations.

Blocks: 1720142
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED

After some careful testing with a UA spoof on our side, we've determined this to be a good path forward. The User Agent override is built, and will ship in Firefox 95 as part of bug 1720142.

If you notice new problems caused by this, please file a new bug, and mark the new bug as being regressed by this one. Thanks! :)

Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 2 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
See Also: → 1626121

Trying this out in Firefox Nightly 96.0a1 (2021-11-04) and I get this error window popup. The window is not draggable and I had to highlight it to show the error message.

I can create it as a new bug if that's the right approach.

Regressions: 1739491

Release Note Request (optional, but appreciated)
[Why is this notable]:

We're spoofing the User Agent string on Slack to a Chrome UA. This makes Huddles and other Call-related features work. The lack of Huddles support in Firefox was a pain point to a lot of users.

[Affects Firefox for Android]:

No.

[Suggested wording]:

We can be more or less specific, depending on what y'all deem the best fit:

  • "Added an User Agent override for Slack.com, allowing Firefox users now to use more Call features and access to Huddles."
  • "Added a Web Compatibility Intervention for Slack.com, allowing Firefox users now to use more Call features and access to Huddles."

[Links (documentation, blog post, etc)]:

N/A. We're investigating setting up an official Mozilla WebCompat blog for future noteworthy cases, but that's unlikely to be done in this cycle.

relnote-firefox: --- → ?

(In reply to Dennis Schubert [:denschub] from comment #5)

  • "Added an User Agent override for Slack.com, allowing Firefox users now to use more Call features and access to Huddles."

Added the note with this ^ wording on 95 beta release notyes, thanks.

No longer regressions: 1739491

Hi Dennis,

I am not that experienced to resolve bugs, but signed up in case this note is helpful to you:
I too could never use Slack huddle in Firefox, however today after installing the latest update 95.0 (64-bit), the huddle now works in Firefox.
This may well be thanks to your work here, that they fixed it!

Thanks for that either way, much appreciated!

PS: One should also note to those who use plugins, like privacybadger or ublockorigin, that such plugins still block the huddle (in my case), so turning them off for Slack seems very reasonable.

Hehe. This is technically off-topic for Bugzilla, but I really appreciate you commenting this. Thanks so much for your feedback, and I hope you'll continue to enjoy Firefox!

Hello – this is Johnny from Slack.

We learned of this change in Firefox 95 today. We see Karl's note about notifying Slack here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1626121#c21 but can't find a record of that from our CE or Accounts teams.

We want to support Huddles in Firefox. We already had work in flight to do so – an historical version of our WebRTC infra, now deprecated, was incompatible with Firefox. Our new infra does support Firefox for Huddles on Windows/Mac (not Linux, yet). We are presently accelerating bringing this change to production with a target for release on Monday December 13th.

The UA override outlined in this bug will have other negative repercussions for user experience when using Firefox on v95+. We have a number of browser-specific conditions across features that will degrade under this change, including keyboard shortcuts, referer policy, scroll behaviour, accessibility, and redirects. We do this in various instances for all of our supported browsers, including Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Firefox is not exceptional in this treatment.

I'd like to request reverting this change. It is going to lead to user experience problems as outlined as well as customer support load for us at Slack.

I'd also like to offer to arrange for a point of direct contact for any future Firefox-specific considerations. We want to make sure Slack works well in all of our supported browsers, but it is hard to do so with global UA spoofing.

Flags: needinfo?(dschubert)

Hi Johnny, I appreciate your message.

We've had many conversations about Slack support in Firefox over multiple years (see-also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1626121#c4), and we had no indication whatsoever that you're planning on supporting Firefox - in fact, we got the opposite impression. This lead to our decision to spoof the UA here - because in many of our QA runs, everything worked with no issues.

It's unfortunate that this is causing issues now, and we certainly would like to learn more. Can you send me details (preferable directly via email to dschubert@mozilla.com so I can handle this accordingly, instead of Bugzilla)?

If you plan on releasing general Huddles support on Monday, December 13 anyway, this is great. We have the ability to remove the User Agent override and have that change shipped to all our users directly in a very short timespan, without the need of waiting for Firefox releases. I'll absolutely prioritize removing it on Monday if that change hits production. We, too, would much rather be in a state that does not require us to spoof User Agent strings!

I'm also happy to coordinate getting direct contact points started. We're more than happy to set up mailing lists internally, which allows us to get in touch with y'all in private, but also allows you to get in touch with Firefox Engineers directly to get issues looked at! Again, I suggest you send an email to me (ideally form your Slack address, because you're Bugzilla account is using a private address, which is ... suboptimal if we're dealing with this kind of topic. :)) and I'll ping the right people to get that list set up.

Flags: needinfo?(dschubert)

Setting a needinfo flag, just to make sure the previous message is noticed. :)

Flags: needinfo?(johnny.rodgers)
Depends on: 1745313
No longer depends on: 1745313
See Also: → 1745313

I filed a new bug, bug 1745313, to track the removal.

Greatly appreciate the quick reply, Dennis. Thank you. I'll follow up directly from my Slack email and we can get this sorted out.

Slack loves Firefox and open source. We will get that direct line set up and work together going forward.

Flags: needinfo?(johnny.rodgers)
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