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FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

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Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#151

Post by asherkin »

birthdaydog wrote: post #137
southerntofu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why we use Jitsi, Conversations, Jami... that is pieces of software that were designed to interoperate, not just work in a very specific set of circumstances on particular hardware, with a certain OS version and when the weather is right.

I use both Firefox and Jitsi, but I gotta say, Jitsi has horribly buggy Firefox support.

Firefox is/was really lacking in WebRTC support for non-P2P use cases - bandwidth estimation support was sub-standard until recently, there is no support for simulcast (multiple video quality encodings) when using H.264, and no E2E encryption support (which is very new to the spec). There has been a lot of back and forth on the Firefox / Jitsi situation but it does seem that most of the time the ball has been sitting in Firefox's court.

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#152

Post by 9dev »

iakov wrote: post #148
kerng wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What correlation does CEO salary and open source have? Maybe the comment thinks about "not for profit" org - but even then it seems normal to pay people a competitive salary.

There is an interesting inverse correlation of Mozilla CEO salary and amount of users Firefox has. I think it's normal to pay competitive salary too, but the salary should reflect one's impact on the company. Looking at the current state of Firefox, I can't imagine why their CEO is compensated as they are.

Firefox isn’t, and never was, Mozilla’s revenue source.

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#153

Post by 015a »

EveYoung wrote: post #145
015a wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While at first glance it would be strange to expect Apple to make these changes; I don't feel its unreasonable from any perspective. Apple should hold a long-term interest in keeping the web diverse; Safari will never reasonably hold a majority/plurality marketshare, so their second highest priority from a revenue/ux perspective should be "sticking to the standards" and helping toward ensuring web developers don't ta…

Doesn't Safari has the biggest marketshare on mobile (at least in the US)? So I don't think any major site could simply ignore that.

A significant number of websites ignore Safari on mobile; not because its Safari, but because its mobile. Not necessarily with a big banner that says "Please use a desktop", but rather a half-assed layout.

Within the US, Safari and Chrome mobile have roughly equivalent marketshare, recently with an edge to Safari. Globally, Chrome mobile is significantly larger than Safari mobile.

None of that actually matters though; Firefox, Safari, and Edge all deploy advanced analytics blocking features which distort their marketshare. In many instances, these blockers self-report their browser as Chrome, as a "blend in with the crowd" strategy.

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#154

Post by dkonofalski »

px43 wrote: post #82
tyrion wrote: post #49

It may seem an advantage to use the latest cutting edge features of a single platform, instead of using well established standards which are compatible with every browser. Sure, you are going to leave out some small minority of users, but you gain access to many new features. However, you are helping push the web become an increasingly centralized place, controlled by just a few entities, with interests which are ver…

This is Apple, the inventor of walled garden tech for consumers. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had some proprietary extensions in Safari that made it so Safari was the only browser that could do it.

You're literally replying to an article about Apple opening up their technology to other users who aren't in their ecosystem...

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#155

Post by sfink »

moron4hire wrote: post #87
tyrion wrote: post #49

It may seem an advantage to use the latest cutting edge features of a single platform, instead of using well established standards which are compatible with every browser. Sure, you are going to leave out some small minority of users, but you gain access to many new features. However, you are helping push the web become an increasingly centralized place, controlled by just a few entities, with interests which are ver…

>> instead of using well established standards which are compatible with every browser That's the problem. Firefox isn't keeping up with standards.

Firefox is doing quite well with the standards. Chrome is implementing things beyond the agreed-upon standards. Which to some extent has to happen in order to advance standards, but that only works if the changes are agreed upon or at least not disagreed upon by other implementations. These days Chrome is forging ahead even in the face of disagreements (usually on grounds of privacy or security).

And to be clear, Firefox is behind on the relevant standard here. Though even then, it's more nuanced than that: Mozilla is ok with prototyping it even though they would prefer for it to use a more secure mechanism -- see https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webrtc-insert...

From what I can tell, Mozilla is in the place of playing catch-up because the other players chose to forge ahead without resolving their objections.

[Ok, "our objections". I work for Mozilla. Not in a relevant area until recently, but it looks like I will be doing some very relevant work starting as soon as I close this damn tab.]

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#156

Post by sfink »

sharken wrote: post #42
alimbada wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, your comment is ambiguous; "should be" as in "needs to be fixed" or as in "has been fixed"?

The issue is open so it can only mean that it needs to be fixed.

If you read to the end, it looks like the expected underlying reason is now fixed, but it hasn't been confirmed yet whether it resolved the problem. If someone knows how to reproduce, they could try it out and comment there.

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#157

Post by willseth »

rchaud wrote: post #85
aseipp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Next time that your manager asks you if you can have that sweet feature, instead of saying "sure, we just need to drop support for Firefox", please consider trying to explain what are the consequences in the long term. If the future of the web relies on developers groveling at the feet of a manager, then there's no fight or discussion to be had, because the web has already unequivocally lost. The only thing that's…

> If the future of the web relies on developers groveling at the feet of a manager, I see a lot of this 'devs v suits' type language used on HN, with the implication being that the developers are principled stewards of technology suffering under the cosh of KPI-obsessed MBAs. What causes this? The majority of product managers I've met have technical backgrounds, and they have also had to cut corners to keep their pro…

Not only that, but developers have at least as much incentive to push to avoid cross platform implementations. More work, more complexity, bugs, maintenance, etc., and many (most?) do all of their dev and testing on Chrome anyway.

Web monoculture simply has a set of labor/$ incentives builtin. It's the default, and it's hard (and probably getting harder) to appreciate the long term system-wide risk that accumulates by allowing one company to control web standards.

I don't see it as a dev vs. suits issue at all. If anything, in my experience it's people who remember Internet Explorer and people who don't.

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#158

Post by marcosdumay »

neoberg wrote: post #124
syshum wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing Microsoft Overlord with Google Overlord does not seem like much of a win

This might come as a surprise but not everyone sees the world from a "freedom" perspective. In terms of practical/day to day experience we won something that works over something that didn't.

It's not a "freedom" perspective. Once you get an overlord, it's just a matter of time until it starts abusing you.

Or, in other words, it's just a matter of time until it's Chrome keeping you up at night eating all of your productivity to avoid some defect. It probably won't be a rendering bug, but there will be something there.

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#159

Post by giantrobot »

michaelt wrote: post #29
est wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't firefox invoke the system dll or libraries for H.264 encode/decode? Like many video players do. Why must every browser ship its own codec or even Unicode collection is beyond me.

Because of a long tradition of the system libraries being fucked. All this stuff started in the days of Windows XP, which shipped with such a meagre selection of codecs you couldn't even play DVDs. And the codecs you could download? Either they cost money (i.e. most users wouldn't have them), or they were dodging license costs by some questionable means, or they had bigger aspirations than just providing a mere codec…

There was a lot of back and forth [0] over this back when Firefox added support for system libraries. The FOSS purists only wanted to support codecs they could include in Gecko (long before OpenH264) while the pragmatists wanted to make a useful web browser.

Support for system libraries first appeared on mobile platforms because it was essential. At the time (ca 2011/12) the likes of YouTube and Vimeo were only delivering MP4 to mobile clients.

The purists seemed to think that somehow if Firefox held the line on (likely but not guaranteed) unencumbered formats/codecs that every content producer would see the light and go with those objectively worse codecs with no hardware acceleration for video content.

This completely ignored the fact that Flash was common on desktops and supported encumbered codecs just fine. It was in fact the primary delivery vehicle for them. The NPAPI content hole let the purists be intransigent while actually using content on the web. They were also ignoring the design of the HTML5 video tag that encouraged inclusion of multiple source formats and some sort of fallback including object embeds.

As for Microsoft they were still pushing the various Windows Media codecs as the One True Way in the Windows XP and Vista eras. They had to support MP4 with Windows 7 because every smartphone and most stand alone cameras were capturing video in MPEG-4 codecs if not file formats.

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/-xTei5rYT...

Re: FaceTime on the web requires Chrome or Edge, no mention of Firefox

#160

Post by marcosdumay »

gbromios wrote: post #119
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox users constitute I configure FF to use a different user agent, as a security measure. It's a short hop from browsing the Internet with FF to disabiling browser identification.

Are you suggesting that ff traffic would be substantially higher if I were to account for users that were obfuscating their user agent header?

And blocking your tracking data (that FF does out of the box)?

Well, maybe. I don't know the usage patterns of your site. And from that interaction, I'm not sure you know either.

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