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Google Meet Firefox



Earlier this month, Microsoft moved its Edge browser over to Chromium - A Google-based open-source browser platform that supplies the vast majority of the code for the company’s Chrome browser. Naturally, one would assume this meant better support for Google’s services. However, as per recent reports that might not entirely be the case.

Google Meet gets a UI refresh to help ‘deepen the meeting experience’ The latest Google Meet update aims to make video calls more immersive, inclusive, and productive. Google Meet didn't work in Firefox on Windows 10 Home for me until just now. It did the whole 'we've got you connected, but you can't see or hear anyone and they can't hear you, and then we're going to kick you off after 30 seconds and say it was a network problem and to check your firewall'.

One service, in particular, Google’s Meet - used for video conferences - throws up an error message when trying to access it from the edge browser. “Meet doesn’t work on your browser” reads the message and recommends you download Google Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox. This is surprising because the Firefox browser doesn’t use the Chromium framework. Mozilla even derided Microsoft’s move to use Chromium in a lengthy blog post.

Google meet grid view firefoxGoogle Meet Firefox

All is not lost though, there is a way to make Edge work with Meet again and it’s not as hard as you think.

  • Open Edge and launch Developer Tools by pressing F12.
  • Click on the three dots (…) on the top right corner of Developer Tools.
  • Select More Tools>Network conditions.
  • Find user-agent and uncheck “Select Automatically”.
  • In the drop-down box, select “Chrome-Windows”
  • Reload meet.google.com.

Grid View Google Meet Firefox

There! A simple tweak and we are good to go.

Do note that these steps are unique for the Edge browser based on the Chromium code if you want to try Microsoft’s new browser out for yourself, you can grab a copy here. If you want to know more about the new Edge browser, click here. November 8, 2019

Removing Old Versions of DTLS

Google Meet Firefox

As you probably have read already old versions of TLS are going to be removed in March 2020. Obviously we don’t want to leave Firefox WebRTC users behind and vulnerable. Thus we are planing on disabling support for DTLS 1.0 also in March 2020.

According to our measurements the absolute majority (98.12%) of WebRTC services use DTLS 1.2 already today.

ExtensionFirefox

The remaining 1.88% need to start upgrading to DTLS 1.2 today.

Grant Permissions Google Meet

To help with the transition and testing we added new user preferences to Firefox 71 (currently available as Firefox Beta):

Google Permissions Screen

  • media.peerconnection.dtls.version.min = 770
  • media.peerconnection.dtls.version.max = 771

Google Meet Grid View Firefox

To test with DTLS 1.2 only simply open about:config and set media.peerconnection.dtls.version.min to 771. From now on your Firefox will no longer offer DTLS 1.0, as if it would be a release from March 2020.