Aside from the ads, you also have to sift through all of the crappy clones and shovelware to actually find something useful.
This was my exact experience a couple of days ago when I was trying to find a CSV viewer.
Using GBoard begrudgingly because there's no better alternative for me personally. I depend on the swipe typing and gestures a lot. Personalisation is off, and I don't use the next-word suggestions that often.
I don't really like SwiftKey's design or its Microsoft affiliation. I wish there was a good open-source alternative. Florisboard looks promising, but the last time I tried it, it was still lacking in features.
Same, I am yet to find a website notification that is actually useful to me.
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.
I can't believe they named their browser "Comodo Dragon" lol
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.
My bank also does this shit. It's aggravating to use their website when every step along the way they put the burden of security on the user.
Pasting is disabled on almost every text field, even for things like account numbers (which they make you type in twice) when you want to do a transfer. The only way to log in is to manually type in your username, password, and a damn captcha everytime. The 6 digit 2FA code is the icing on the cake. If you idle for a minute or two, they log you out and force you to go through the whole thing again.