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So Meet/Hangout does not work on Firefox at all? (In case the zero users who use Meet/Hangout see this)
Not sure about hangout, meet works fine just without some features. The main ones are sharing a specific tab and blurred/custom backgrounds but there might be some other minor stuff that I've never tried.
It works, though IIRC there are some features that only work in Chrome. I only use it once in a blue moon so I forget the details.
I suppose there might be features I'm missing from meets/Hangouts but 1) I don't know what they might be, and 2) I've used the services regularly and not had any trouble.
I feel like most of Vivaldi's target audience is knowledgeable enough to enable an extension that's disabled by default. Heck, just display a notification asking whether to enable the extension when a Google Meet site is opened.
These proprietary, bundled-by-default extensions are just a taste of what a browser engine monopoly looks like. Alternative frontends to the Chromium engine don't make a difference as these frontends will suck up whatever changes upstream. We only have 3 major/relevant engines left, Blink (Chromium), Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari, originated in Konqueror I think), with Blink being a fork of WebKit (although very diverged by now).
The web is so complex now that I don't really see more engines becoming actually usable. Even Microsoft bailed out and eventually switched Edge over to Chromium.
Vivaldi's target audience is people who don't mind proprietary blobs as long as they are "good" or make things "work better." Given that Vivaldi itself is essentially a proprietary blob combined with a Chromium backend this makes sense.
I feel like most of Vivaldi’s target audience is knowledgeable enough to enable an extension that’s disabled by default.
You could make the same argument in reverse. It's irrelevant if we're talking about knowledgeable people. The target market for significant growth is less knowledgeable people, so it makes more sense to cater defaults to that type of user.
Why not meet in the middle and make it a toast.
"Do you want Google Meets to be disabled?
Y/N
Sounds great! We've disabled settings for Google Meet, if you would like to re-enable it at any point, you can find it at..."
There. I even wrote most of it out for them.
Users will disable it and then a week later when they need it they've all forgotten about that dialog.
Seems like a simple check script for if at Google Meet then a red exclamation will appear saying you have it disabled and where to re-enable it.
A suggestion: disable it by default, and show a prompt and warning to Meet users asking if they want to enable this Meet extension, while warning them this would allow more tracking from Google.