Browser compatibility and teams in incognito mode in Chrome

[NeutralKaon]

Hi there, 

I have multiple Teams accounts through different organisations.  I've got three points to mention:

-- I'd like to point out that Teams, despite being a web application with (rather inefficient!) desktop Electron clients, only completely works in Chrome. I can't call people from Firefox, say, and get told to use Chrome. 

-- Relatedly, I can't log using incognito mode in Chrome. I get a message with a "Clock" logo and the message "To re-enable the application, the tab needs to be refreshed." with a button that says "I'm back". Clicking it yields nothing. I want to use it in incognito mode to have two separate accounts signed in at the same time.  Looking in the Javascript console, there are a large number of XSS related issues where I suspect OAUTH authentication is blocked, despite me authenticating successfully: 

21-03-02T09:49:18.198Z AUTHMSAL: Event: adal:tokenRenewFailure, code: interaction_required|Seamless single sign on failed for the user. This can happen if the user is unable to access on premises AD or intranet zone is not configured correctly
Trace ID: 0f7a6ad7-91d1-4165-9f55-7fe400ec0e00
Correlation ID: f2e1faf0-4cbe-44c1-80e2-9cb39dab88e2
Timestamp: 2021-03-02 09:49:17Z, resource: https://api.spaces.skype.com, action: loginFailure
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.198Z AUTHMSAL: Attempting to handle auth response: error:interaction_required|Seamless single sign on failed for the user. This can happen if the user is unable to access on premises AD or intranet zone is not configured correctly, resource:https://api.spaces.skype.com, error mapped to action:loginFailure
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.199Z AUTHMSAL: Attempting to handle auth response: error:interaction_required|Seamless single sign on failed for the user. This can happen if the user is unable to access on premises AD or intranet zone is not configured correctly, resource:https://api.spaces.skype.com, error mapped to action:loginFailure
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.201Z TenantService: [getTenants] Failed to get all tenants. Error: unknown
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.201Z SfbTeamsUpgradeService: Failed to get teams upgrade policy V2. HTTP Status Code = undefined
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.202Z TeamsMeetingConfiguration: Error in getTeamsMeetingConfigurationFromServer: {"status":401,"errorCode":1,"errorMessage":"1"}
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.202Z Failed to get teamsMeetingConfiguration through /me/settings/meetingConfiguration. HTTP Status Code = 401.
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.204Z PeopleResolverService: [doGetPeopleProfile] Unable to resolve given user UPN. Error: unknown.
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.204Z PeopleService: Failure on fetching user profile for id: au687846@uni.au.dk with reason: {"response":null,"status":-1,"_codeEnum":0,"_code":"ClientNetworkOffline","_message":"App offline cannot complete request"} and caller info: authenticationService 
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.204Z AUTHMSAL: Unable to backfill the UPN for logged in user.
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:18.205Z AUTHMSAL: message: App offline cannot complete request, code: ClientNetworkOffline, status: -1
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.903Z Appbar-powerbar: Failed to get skype tokens. Error: Max time reached
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.904Z Orchestrator: authenticationService_skype-auth failed.
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.905Z UserPreferences: Couldn't fetch preferences from the server: {"statusCode":401,"errorMessage":"Max time reached","errorCode":1}
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.908Z Orchestrator: myUserPreferencesStore_startup failed.
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.910Z AppsService: getUserAppEntitlementsFromMiddletier - Initial user app entitlements failed for the user: a0724a85-bed0-47c2-ac28-8f2798eb0f4a, error-code: undefined, exception: undefined
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.925Z Orchestrator: Unexpected error while executing stage 0, error: '[object Object]'
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.925Z Orchestrator: Required orchestration step failed: authenticationService_skype-auth, rejecting orchestration promise.
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:30.929Z APP: App loading "appLoadOrchestrationPlan_authenticationService_skype-auth" failed due to error: authenticationService_skype-auth-Max time reached, redirecting to oops page
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:31.071Z Analytics panel: Panel data not present in context, routing or state service. No way to infer panel data for panel view. Falling back to "undefined"
(anonymous) @ 0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114
0-angular-jquery.min-eee9041.js:114 2021-03-02T09:49:31.072Z Analytics panel: Panel data not present in context, routing or state service. No way to infer panel data for panel view. Falling back to "undefined"

Despite working in "normal" browser mode, this fails in Incognito mode. 

-- Finally, if things do go wrong -- which they do, regularly -- I find the "Something went wrong" or "Ooops, something went wrong" or similar messages absolutely patronising. Please tell me _what_ went wrong -- don't make me dig in the javascript console and see…  

[#2]

I also see all of those problems regularly, >1 year after your post.
Teams browser compatibility can indeed be described as "only recent desktop Chromium".

In the past, more browsers worked, after setting "user-agent" to something supported and going into "desktop mode" if applicable.
Microsoft EdgeHTML (the original Edge, not the version that surrendered and became Chromium on the inside!) of course worked (and was even promoted by Teams!). But MS dropped the (real) Edge browser entirely in 2021 and made its installation difficult.

Now, Mozilla (Firefox) & Apple (Safari) are the last major web browsers that are not Chromium based.    Safari is WebKit, which shares most of Chromium's engine other than JS, so really the world has only 2.5 web browsers.

One could argue that MS Teams isn't imposing the lack of diversity but rather is embracing the monopoly in order to simplify development.
But even that doesn't account for the poor compatibility.
Mobile Chromium (the most popular web browser in the world!) was usable until only days ago,  albeit with some glitches related to auto-pan/zoom.
And circa-2019 Chromium was usable until a few months ago.

So, Teams compatibility has undeniably been worsening.
If the Teams app was efficient, this might be understandable as the web being a secondary client, like in WhatsApp.
But the Teams app is Electron, meaning you're forced to run an additional copy of Chromium, without the latest security patches, and with unknown new problems introduced.

Teams also has no practical 3rd-party clients, and probably doesn't document enough of the API to enable them.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Teams is actually intended to force a Microsoft pseudo-platform onto all the world's primary information terminals, via a backdoor that Facebook and others pioneered.     I.e.  Teams is meant to achieve what Windows somewhat-unexpectedly failed to do.   The Electron app is an opaque monolith, demanding vast permissions.  It grabs a whopping 700MB of cache on my mobile devices, within minutes of installation, even though I haven't accessed any content beyond text and small images.   And so does the Teams website!

Teams more befits the Microsoft of the 1990s-2000s than of today;
In the last 10 years, Microsoft has been steadily embracing open source and non-Windows platforms.
MS Azure is majority Linux.
WSL(the Windows Subsystem for Linux) generally works well.
Microsoft .NET led the way by becoming truly free, portable, and lighter weight than the classic version.   (How ironic that the Java world went the opposite way on all 3 points!)

Teams is an aberration that hasn't yet gotten the pushback that it deserves from both technical and social considerations.
Microsoft _is_ quite receptive to customer concerns (unlike, say, Apple), so Teams users, please speak up! 

[#3]

I can't agree with this more. Teams is a truly awful piece of software and, like many things Microsoft, appears to be taking the world by storm through monopolistic business practices rather than merit.

"Sorry, something went wrong!" is just patronising, if nothing else.