Running Teams and such on Firefox

06 Mar, 2025

Since most "desktop" apps these days are just glorified web pages, I've been experimenting running them in the browser for a few days now. It's been a mixed bag, with some definite wins and some unfortunate drawbacks

The motivation

Despite the recent Firefox controversies (😣) it's still my main browser. I've customized it and gotten used to it, so I would like to make the most of it. Since I can't really control the apps to use at work, at least in a browser I have a bit of control on how I use them.

Here's some points that motivated me to try this:

• better sandboxing
  • the less apps I have installed on my PC, the smaller the attack surface
• control
  • custom CSS, blocking elements etc. etc.
• Tridactyl hotkeys
  • makes it much easier to navigate e.g. Teams and Outlook by keyboard - just press f and then every visible link is at most two buttons away

Here's how that navigation looks like - it's much more impressive with the screen full of stuff, but you'll understand me not sharing full screenshots of my chats. Is it ugly? Yes. Is it an absolute pleasure to use? YES. And of course, it's not ugly until I ask it to be.

As a generic tradeoff, managing a bunch of browser windows can be a bit more difficult than separate applications. Firefox is also a bit slow in responding to VPN changes, but ctrl-f5 takes care of that.

All in all, running these apps in a browser seems to be a good idea, if the experience is otherwise on even footing. Let's see about that.

Teams

Isn't it funny that Teams, Microsoft's blessed communication platform, does not respect the Do Not Disturb/Focus mode on Windows 11, Microsoft's blessed operating system? I think it's a great demonstration on how MS doesn't have to care about quality, when they can just bundle together crap that's just not bad enough. Oh well, you all know the score, so let's not waste more time fuming.

Pros:

• When used with Multi-Account-Containers I don't have to swap between organizations constantly in one window, but can rather keep every one active in separate tabs
• respects the Focus mode setting...

Cons:

• poorer sound quality (both directions) in meetings
  • I'm most often using the laptop speakers. Desktop app does not pick up anything from the other participants, while on browser it seems to happen frequently
    • could work around this by using a headset
• cannot have any video effects
  • turning even the basic blur on stretches the image in funny ways, where you can pretty much just see my nose
    • this forces me to keep my work room tidy, so... a win?

Despite the poor meeting experience, I'm loving the Tridactyl navigation so much that for now I'm opting to run meetings on desktop and keep everything else on the browser. Maybe I'll start using a headset more...

Outlook

Outlook is solid enough as a desktop app, but I tried it on the browser after having a nice® experience with Teams.

I enjoyed opening the calendar on a separate tab. Multi Account Containers can also work well for opening multiple mailboxes at once. Tridactyl work beautifully here as well. The only issue was that I didn't get good notifications for meetings.

Toggl Track

The web interface is a bit busier than the clean desktop view, but I believe I'll move completely to the web version unless I hit some issues.

UPD: this does not stop the tracking when I turn off the PC or react well to being idle. Desktop it is, at least for now.

Bonus - opening all this in one go

If you're using Windows, I hope you know about Powertoys. I recently learned about the Workspaces feature, which allows me to take a snapshot of the current windows, modify and store the configuration, and then restore the snapshot in one click. That works really well for this, since I always have my first virtual desktop with these three programs open.

To open the specific windows, you can use the --new-window <url> parameter. Here's how my config looks like:

So now when I start my day, I click on the hotkey for that workspace, and all three windows open where they should. I bet it saves at least 10 seconds of the important and super efficient morning time.

To browser or not to browser?

All in all, I feel like running these things inside the browser is a decent deal. I have not seen any performance issues in running these rather taxing apps in a browser, nor have there been any issues in functionality (besides the Teams audio stuff).

The absolute best thing for both Teams and Outlook is the keyboard navigation provided by Tridactyl, and on that alone, I think I'll keep going with this setup, until MS breaks the browser functionality or Mozilla finally throws in the towel completely. We'll see which happens first...

Thoughts, comments? Send me an email!

#firefox #outlook #teams #tech