Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

blog.chromium.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 183 posts

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#71

Post by JoeAltmaier »

kyro wrote: post #66

Yes, please, please, please kill Skype. Kill it mercilessly. Using it has been the worst experience I've ever had with an application. I've been in a long distance relationship for a few years now and Skype has sadly been our main mode of video communication. The app crashes when I search chat history, can take upwards of 90+% of my CPU, literally forcing me to shut down every other application I have running. The fo…

I use Sococo's Teamspace, which I help write as my job. We're cognizant of cpu usage especially on laptops and pads. We're ok now, and our next release will use substantially less CPU.

Our codecs are WebRTC-derived, and its pretty stingy with memory and cpu so that's cool.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#72

Post by josh2600 »

kyro wrote: post #66

Yes, please, please, please kill Skype. Kill it mercilessly. Using it has been the worst experience I've ever had with an application. I've been in a long distance relationship for a few years now and Skype has sadly been our main mode of video communication. The app crashes when I search chat history, can take upwards of 90+% of my CPU, literally forcing me to shut down every other application I have running. The fo…

The one key element of a Skype Killer, which isn't present in WebRTC, is a prescribed infrastructure to support these communications. Skype is made up of users who actually are, usually, unaware that they are also routing calls for other users. Even more precarious (and absent from WebRTC) are the skype SuperNodes, which no one is going to redo for WebRTC.

The things which we love about skype, most notably the directory and ease of routing, are currently missing from WebRTC. Someone might come along and make them, but WebRTC is not inherently different from Skype's infrastructure, it's just new. Someone still has to build the supporting services to turn this into a Skype Killer.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#73

Post by esrauch »

lifeguard wrote: post #65
zanny wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with the article. Though, since I just love me some flame bait, Google will never take ad block out of Chrome because someone would just fork Chromium and keep it in.

You are saying google is irrelevant to chrome? I disagree.

Are you saying google is irrelevant to firefox?

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#74

Post by marcusf »

cousin_it wrote: post #51
TylerE wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't the Same Origin Policy limit the exposure via ajax?

They don't have to use ajax. They can load an image with an arbitrary url and pass the keypress data in the url parameters, or dynamically create a script tag, or create an iframe and submit a form in it, etc. The script tag method also lets them get data back from the remote endpoint, if the remote endpoint is kind enough to encode it as JSONP.

I think he's referring to a hostile script trying to bind to keydown -- usually you shove the banners in iframes to limit this possibility when you include external untrusted content. I assume the same holds true here, though.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#75

Post by dhx »

jstalin wrote: post #6

Well, it's encrypted, so that seems like a reasonable alternative to the potential of being spied upon when using Skype.

It may be encrypted -- but is it protected against traffic analysis?

The following papers are a good starting point:

[1] Guessing the URLs being browsed by users over an encrypted TLS session: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gdane/papers/...

[2] Guessing the co-ordinates of where a user is scrolling around on Google Maps over an encrypted TLS session: http://www.ioactive.com/pdfs/SSLTrafficAnalysisOnGoogleMaps....

[3] Guessing the content of encrypted VoIP conversations: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~amw/resources/hooktonfoniks.pdf

[4] Guessing communication paths on the Tor network with only a partial view of the network (not strictly related to encryption but the principles of traffic analysis are relevant): http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.p...

[5] Guessing passwords sent over the SSH protocol using keystroke timing analysis: http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~dawnsong/papers/ssh-timing.pdf

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#76

Post by riffraff »

untog wrote: post #2

Fantastic news. I feel like the basic videochat model we see in WebRTC demos is only the beginning of the possibilities here. When all browsers support WebGL and WebRTC I'll be fascinated to see what people more creative than myself can create.

Open Croquet 2.0? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#77

Post by jallmann »

kyro wrote: post #66

Yes, please, please, please kill Skype. Kill it mercilessly. Using it has been the worst experience I've ever had with an application. I've been in a long distance relationship for a few years now and Skype has sadly been our main mode of video communication. The app crashes when I search chat history, can take upwards of 90+% of my CPU, literally forcing me to shut down every other application I have running. The fo…

Not saying Skype is perfect (it isn't), but WebRTC by itself doesn't come close to being a Skype substitute.

While stability for particular client-side bits (media, transport, etc) will now now fall on the browser vendor, you're still going to depend on another service for all the niceties (media and signaling relay, contacts, presence, history, etc), and they could screw it up just as badly as Skype, or worse.

Skype could just use WebRTC as another transport -- there's no technical reason they can't.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#78

Post by cj »

dbaupp wrote: post #32
TylerE wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of security is in place - e.g. what's stopping a pop-up ad from logging keystrokes and sending them to a remote endpoint?

This is possible with current technology: $(document).keypress(sendKeypressInfo)

$(document).keypress won't pick up keystrokes from across tabs or windows. So unless the popup is the active window, you should be safe from something like this.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#79

Post by riffraff »

taeric wrote: post #58
Bjartr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a technical features level? Absolutely nothing. This provides nothing to an end user that they couldn't already get. The only thing this changes, from an end user perspective, is the number of steps it takes to do things. tl;dr: This is an evolution of browser standards, not a revolution in consumer software (from an average end-user POV) From a developer POV, this is pretty cool because now it is (or at least, is…

I think this is ultimately my confusion. I'm at the point now where I'm actually usually advising family members on devices that rely less on browsers. Why not show a chat from gmail/whatever in a browser to a regular app on an android/ipad device? Even better, include another app in there. Just to really drive home how "open" this is. Also, why is this stuff better than SIP related technology from a while back?

the "web" bit.

It's like how WebGL is very exciting, to people doing web stuff, even though it has nothing over other similarly named stacks.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#80

Post by STRML »

taeric wrote: post #58
Bjartr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a technical features level? Absolutely nothing. This provides nothing to an end user that they couldn't already get. The only thing this changes, from an end user perspective, is the number of steps it takes to do things. tl;dr: This is an evolution of browser standards, not a revolution in consumer software (from an average end-user POV) From a developer POV, this is pretty cool because now it is (or at least, is…

I think this is ultimately my confusion. I'm at the point now where I'm actually usually advising family members on devices that rely less on browsers. Why not show a chat from gmail/whatever in a browser to a regular app on an android/ipad device? Even better, include another app in there. Just to really drive home how "open" this is. Also, why is this stuff better than SIP related technology from a while back?

I believe gchat would do that, google hangouts might integrate with the ios/android app as well (I have not tried this).

The excitement here is that this is a non-flash solution, so technically it will work on any device that can run Chrome, regardless of whether or not it can / wants to run Flash. So in the near future this may make it into Chrome for Android and iOS.

WebRTC is a very necessary step in removing Flash's hooks into the modern internet; after this, there will be very few reasons to support it at all anymore. And that is a very good thing for speed, compatibility, and security.

Post reply on HN