The Edge team were pleased they did not have to cater for another dependency and their roadmap remained unchanged. So a separate plugin install it was, giving people zero incentive to use a Microsoft browser for a Microsoft product. We reasoned, pleaded, argued, steamed, shouted names and even used the 'C' argument ('but. We got nowhere with the Edge team, who wanted no dependencies and prioritised performance above anything like this - and also wanted to hit their own KPIs, which had nothing to do with Skype users preferring to use Edge. This was at the time of Steve Balmer’s Microsoft, where collaboration between different orgs was difficult and facing strong political headwind. Chrome already did exactly this with Hangouts back in the day and we saw it as them eating our lunch. We wanted Edge to ship the Skype plugin as default, making calls seamless for Edge users, not needing to install a plugin (we saw large drops in adoption due to this plugin). Not directly related story from building Skype for Web: a big internal battle those days was us vs the Edge team.

I can only speculate, but it’s likely due to not wanting to pay the maintenance cost of this product on an ongoing basis. I left Skype/Microsoft a long time ago and Microsoft announced in March they will drop support for Firefox.

There was a small maintenance cost per browser, which was a bigger one whenever changes to the plug-in were made. Already we had internal debates to support Opera, but the decision was to focus on the largest browsers.įor each browser, we had to add support in our standalone plugin, that was (and still is) required to install for audio/video calls. Back then we supported Chrome, IE 9+, Safari and Firefox.

I was part of the launch team who built the first version for this product in 2014.

Voip calls on skype for web on firefox