Posted by basemi 11/4/2025
"you can run, but you can not hide".
I've been writing the Teams plugin for Pidgin for the past few years and its great to be able to give users the kind of features or privacy options that you'd never get from official clients, while learning lots of fun ways (ab)using web tech to solve problems.
Like how in Teams, it does a "reverse webhook" to push presence notifications to a web client acting as a server over a websocket
Sadly bits fall off depending on which browser you use. Firefox seems to have fallen out of favour and can no longer share. Chromium efforts still seem to work OK. I have sometimes found that faking my browser agent helps with stability ... which is sad and possibly rather disingenuous.
I must get around to spinning up a Jitsi jobbie. BBB should be my favourite but is a non starter due to elderly software in the stack. I need to take another look at all this stuff.
Also lets forget the fact that some people actually like coding or wanted a fun weekend project.
But that is why I for work stuff use Chromium and I didn't really have issues with it. The things in this list:
System notifications - works with Chromium
System tray integration (badge support varies by desktop environment) - I don't have a system tray on Hyprland with waybar
Custom backgrounds & themes - ok, I never needed it but that is probably the only thing which is not working in Chromium
Screen sharing support - Always worked, as long as you allow it
Multiple account profiles - I'm doing that with different Chromium profiles, but yeah it kind of would be nice if it was possible in one window, so that seems also cool
But for those two features it seems it's more hassle to deal with a unofficial version.