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Introducing TogetherJS

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Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#51

Post by Mikeb85 »

inthewind wrote: post #34
r00fus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how the progress of time moves seemingly extreme positions into mainstream acceptance. If you told me 13 years ago that the US would elect a black president twice, I'd have laughed at you.

(I get annoyed when people cite Obama as being a black president! How about Grey? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/us_elections_2008/... )

That's what society sees him as. And what society thinks goes to a certain degree, because if society was advanced enough to see him otherwise, we wouldn't talk about ethnicity in general.

One of my favourite quotes, from a friend of mine (though I'm sure many others have said it), "We're all beige"

In the end, everyone is mixed, everyone is human.

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#52

Post by mindcrime »

alecsmart1 wrote: post #50
ldn_tech_exec1 wrote: post #8

There is a 363 point discussion on this 26 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6415210

Shouldn't HN automatically remove duplicate links? I was surprised to see this on front page again.

There's an age factor. If you submit a duplicate of something from, say, 2 days ago, your submission just turns into a vote for the other submission. But past some threshold (I don't know what it is, and I don't know that anyone other than pg does either), the system allows duplicates. I assume that's by design, as some stories are worth repeat discussions. Indeed, there are a handful of links that have been posted to, and discussed on, HN a half dozen times or more.

You can, AFAIK, also "cheat" the dupe detector by adding query string params, and trickery of that nature. I'm guessing substituting the http URL for the https URL (or vice versa) would also work, if they both exist, etc.

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#53

Post by ianb »

mikegioia wrote: post #3

This looks great but it seems they have no plans to support Internet Explorer ( https://togetherjs.com/docs/#browser-support ). That's a shame because most of our users who need this level of support all use IE :/

Speaking as the principal developer for TogetherJS:

In the past we have opted not to work on IE support because we had limited resources, and because we wanted to focus on what we thought were the hard problems: how should the tool act, how do we communicate changes between browsers, how do we integrate with apps, etc. Supporting Internet Explorer was always something we knew we could do, it wasn't a hard problem, but it still required some effort. As such it didn't feel like it was advancing the project. It was never meant as any slight towards IE, just an expedient way to save some time.

Also, while we do browser sniffing, we only use that to put up a warning for IE users to alert them that it's not going to work well. This was pointed out on Twitter as though we were actively blocking browsers, in part I think a knee-jerk reaction to browser sniffing, but what we've done still seems to me like a reasonable and responsible thing to do – better to admit you don't support a browser than just expose people to a crappy experience.

Of course times change, and as TogetherJS has become a more mature tool it's probably time to revisit our Internet Explorer support. But on the other hand this isn't a commercial tool, so I'm not entirely sure what resources we as a team will be able to invest in Internet Explorer support. But it's also open source, and we would welcome contributions to fix this. We'll be working on a slightly more structured plan soon. It might not even be much work, I really don't know.

Here's the bug to watch: https://github.com/mozilla/togetherjs/issues/867

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#54

Post by ianb »

nadee013 wrote: post #39

This is a really nice :) Firebase added firebase integration[0] to this, I hope that would be really cool. I'm not there could be an possible integration with Meteor too. [0] - https://github.com/firebase/togetherjs

I'm hoping we turn that Firebase fork into a pluggable interface for TogetherJS to exchange messages via other systems. Once that is in place I'm guessing Meteor would be simple too. Most of the Firebase support is in this one commit, and it's notably pretty small: https://github.com/firebase/togetherjs/commit/fdb11887c63342...

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#55

Post by hrjet »

What worries me, and I realized this only after trying TogetherJS, is that Websockets don't require a special permission in browsers! So any website with JS enabled is now going to be able to do peer-to-peer? Could this be a can of worms, security-wise?

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#56

Post by arunoda »

ianb wrote: post #54
nadee013 wrote: post #39

This is a really nice :) Firebase added firebase integration[0] to this, I hope that would be really cool. I'm not there could be an possible integration with Meteor too. [0] - https://github.com/firebase/togetherjs

I'm hoping we turn that Firebase fork into a pluggable interface for TogetherJS to exchange messages via other systems. Once that is in place I'm guessing Meteor would be simple too. Most of the Firebase support is in this one commit, and it's notably pretty small: https://github.com/firebase/togetherjs/commit/fdb11887c63342...

This is nice. I might give this a try around this weekend :)

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#57

Post by ericd »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #47
ericd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it might be in Mozilla's best interest to make it compatible with all the major browsers if they want this to see any sort of real adoption.

Why? Firefox + Chrome make up the majority. In mindshare, a vast majority. Mozilla's only interest is in advancing the web, and web technologies. Not catering to a competitor's old technology...

Because until IE reaches Opera levels of usage, there are a large number of sites that don't target programmers that won't be able to build on stuff like this, because they don't want to cut out a big chunk of their potential market.

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#58

Post by [deleted] »

ianb wrote: post #53
mikegioia wrote: post #3

This looks great but it seems they have no plans to support Internet Explorer ( https://togetherjs.com/docs/#browser-support ). That's a shame because most of our users who need this level of support all use IE :/

Speaking as the principal developer for TogetherJS: In the past we have opted not to work on IE support because we had limited resources, and because we wanted to focus on what we thought were the hard problems: how should the tool act, how do we communicate changes between browsers, how do we integrate with apps, etc. Supporting Internet Explorer was always something we knew we could do, it wasn't a hard problem, bu…

[deleted]

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#59

Post by r00fus »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #36
r00fus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how the progress of time moves seemingly extreme positions into mainstream acceptance. If you told me 13 years ago that the US would elect a black president twice, I'd have laughed at you.

Extreme position? Given that so much software requires installing the JVM, or CLR/Mono run-time, or widget toolkit, or even is specific to an operating system, is it really that much to ask that users install a certain browser which literally runs on any OS, is free and open-source, and can be installed in seconds/minutes? Why do we rail against people for using the wrong OS, make people dual-boot and run virtual mac…

> Given that so much software requires installing the JVM, or CLR/Mono run-time, or widget toolkit, or even is specific to an operating system, is it really that much to ask that users install a certain browser which literally runs on any OS, is free and open-source, and can be installed in seconds/minutes?

13 years ago this was not the case. That was my point. At that point, few alternative browsers existed, and Netscape had just released a bloated undesirable release.

Nowadays, the PC itself is a fortress under siege, and Windows only runs on 30-ish percent of all PC/tablets. Webkit is ascendant, and IE persists in being difficult for developers. Now is the time to code for Webkit or HTML5 compliance.

Re: Introducing TogetherJS

#60

Post by brokenparser »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #46
laureny wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is it really that much to ask that users install a certain browser which literally runs on any OS, is free and open-source, and can be installed in seconds/minutes? Yes, it can be. Can you think of certain situations where doing this is extremely costly (in money, time or both) or do I need to give you a few examples? In my experience, people displaying this kind of naïveté have never been in a situation of large l…

Of course it could be costly (in time mostly). But eventually, everything reaches end-of-life. Windows XP, IE6, IE10 will too... For years, organizations said switching to Linux is more costly than paying the MS tax. Recently, many large organizations rolled out Linux installs on a massive scale (European government institutions). Anyhow, installing Firefox on some workstations is relatively small compared to say, re…

And for those intranet sites which only work on old IE, you could use the IE tab add-on (see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab/ ).
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