You Can Finally Join Zoom Calls in Firefox
The peculiarity of the Mozilla Firefox browser is that it allows you to join a Zoom call over the Internet, without having to download a separate application, but you cannot say anything on the call. Or at least we couldn’t until the last update.
Right. If you’ve recently tried to use your computer’s sound – in other words, its microphone – in a meeting you’ve joined through previous versions of Firefox, you’ll see this message:
I say “previous versions” because Mozilla fixed this issue in Firefox 76 with new support for audio workflows — “a useful way to run custom JavaScript audio processing code,” write Mozilla’s Chris Mills and Harald Kirchner . As Mozilla clarifies in the developer doc :
“When the Web Audio API was first introduced to browsers, it included the ability to use JavaScript code to create custom audio processors that would be called to perform real-time audio manipulation. The downside to ScriptProcessorNode was simple: it ran on the main thread, thereby blocking everything else until it finished executing. It was far from ideal, especially for something that can be as computationally expensive as audio processing. “
“Log into AudioWorklet. An audio context audio worklet is a Worklet that is launched from the main thread by executing the audio processing code added to it by calling the audioWorklet.addModule () method of the context. The addModule () call loads the specified JavaScript file, which must contain the audio processor implementation. By registering the processor, you can create a new AudioWorkletNode that passes audio through the processor code when this node is linked to the audio node chain along with any other audio nodes. “
Careful. For those not technically inclined, this implementation allows you to finally join Zoom calls over the internet and use your laptop’s microphone (or any microphone connected to your computer) as if you were using a regular Zoom desktop app. Install the latest version of Firefox (via the hamburger menu in the top right corner > Help> About Firefox ) and you will now see this when you join a Zoom meeting in your browser:
What if I can’t find the Zoom “join from your browser” option in Firefox?
Here’s a funny quirk. As I tested this all, I noticed that the usual Zoom invite links that I copied and pasted into Firefox kept telling me to “download and launch Zoom” to access my meeting. I haven’t seen an option to just join a meeting in Firefox.
There are two ways to solve this problem. First, the person hosting the meeting must make sure they have enabled the “join over the Internet” option in Zoom’s web settings. Yes, on the Zoom website; not his desktop app. Ask them to click here and find the “Show Join From Your Browser” radio button. They’ll want to turn it on.
If you still don’t see the option to join someone else’s Zoom meetings in your browser, you can try another trick: instead of clicking on the link the person sends you to join the meeting, open join.zoom.us in Firefox manually.
You will need to enter the meeting ID, which is the first long chunk of numbers after “/ j /” in the Zoom URL you provided, assuming you did not receive a standard invitation email. You will also need to enter the meeting password, the second block of characters after the “pwd =” portion of the URL.
Follow these two steps and you will see the option to join Zoom meeting directly in Firefox. Now that you’ve updated Firefox, you can actually say something while you’re there.