Comment by chrismorgan
10 days ago
There was a genuine technical reason for that, a part of WebRTC that Firefox hadn’t implemented yet, where if even a single member of a group call lacked that feature, it had to fall back to something that used a lot more CPU for everyone. Can’t remember the details exactly, but it was approximately that.
If I remember correctly, the issue was related to newer APIs like MediaStreamTrackProcessor, offscreen surfaces, and WebRTC–WebCodecs interoperability, as well as the ability to run ML inference efficiently in the browser. At the time, Firefox hadn’t fully implemented some of these features, which impacted Google Meet’s ability to apply effects like background blur or leverage hardware-accelerated video processing.