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Firefox Hello

mozilla.org

61–70 of 239 posts

Re: Firefox Hello

#61
Mozilla are clearly becoming desperate to find any distinguishing factors to market Firefox. Sadly, this feels like the beginning of the end for this browser.

Re: Firefox Hello

#62
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying technology used to implement this is WebRTC, which is available to web pages. Implementing peer-to-peer real time video communication entirely in Javascript would be difficult, so it has to be provided to some extent by the browser itself.

But, if this is peer-to-peer, what's Telefonica's role?

I'm a bit out of the loop, but to build on mccr8 and soapdog's answer:

Anyone doing WebRTC seriously will need to run a fallback centralized pairing service to get around the wacky real world network topology and setup a successful p2p connection. In some cases, you need a dumb centralized pipe to connect the peers.

Re: Firefox Hello

#63
post #31
post #10

A web browser should not include X functionality, but should allow a web page to implement X functionality. In my view, this is true for most values of X, including Skype, Mail, Word, Excel... To add insult to injury, there is no simple way of disabling the functionality[1]. Firefox Hello is ludicrous. [1] about:config is not a valid value of simple

> A web browser should not include X functionality, but should allow a web page to implement X functionality. Exactly. Firefox doesn't include "Firefox Hello" anymore than it includes "Gmail". Instead, Firefox (and other web browsers) include XMLHttpRequest and WebRTC, which can be used to implement whatever you want. I'm getting pretty tired of hearing this trope ("teh bloat!") anytime a browser announces new functi…

My parents had an uncanny knack for always buying slightly the wrong thing when I was a kid. Betamax, Amigas, minidiscs.

I used to have a cassette player that had a tape recorder on it. It made it bigger and heavier, and probably more expensive and I never used the record feature.

Just because part of the product works well, doesn't mean the rest of it is good.

Re: Firefox Hello

#64
post #22

Super! Looks great works great too! Lately I'd been bothered by poor quality experience and sometimes even spam requests on Skype. Hangouts was never my thing and Firefox Hello seems like a breath of fresh air just at the right time. Keep it up!

another problem with tools like Skype and Google Hangout is the number of concurrent participants.

How many does Firefox Hello support? I can't figure out from the page if it supports more than 2 -- which makes me think it's probably 2.

Re: Firefox Hello

#65
post #34
post #15

[deleted]

> I somehow hoped Mozilla would never employ these kind of business models where is user is the product. Then you must be naive, given that this has been Mozilla's main source of income for years.

That's true. Their business model is essentially selling users to search engines. That said, they have always done it quite softly by selling users to the search engine that most of them want to use anyway, and making it very easy for users to opt-out of that arrangement.

Re: Firefox Hello

#66

I hate being "that guy", but what about sites like https://appear.in/ that do this without (seemingly?) depending on browser support? Is this using some novel p2p technique that can't be implemented using just JS? When you send a FF Hello invite to a Chrome user, it works fine. I.o.w.: why is this not just a website?

Both Firefox Hello and appear.in use WebRTC which is a Javascript API provided by the browser for this sort of stuff. So appear.in does require browser support.

Firefox Hello also is a website, it's just running inside the browser. http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/compon...

Re: Firefox Hello

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears that my karma level don't allow me to downvote you (at 240 I only see the uparrow). I live in Spain and Telefonica is a very good company with an excellent service but a little expensive (you have to pay to have good quality). The appropriate word your post is FUD. I hope and wish that such a great company continues its expansion and growth. By the way, I am not affiliated with this company in any way but…

Personal experience is not FUD. I'm not a user, but all I've heard about Telefonica is complaints and grievances. They were also the ISP which forced a caching proxy on its ADSL users, breaking a lot of sites. Granted that was a few years ago.

"Lack of service for hours every day", is that a personal experience?

Telefonica was providing services in villages and small towns with very difficult geography (mountains, roads, ...). Now there is a big competition in Spain, for example Jazztel is offering 200Gigabit/s up-down for 36 euros/moth and phone tax included. Our country is getting better in the IT sector and telefonica was the pioneer. It is easy to critique but in the old times there was no other option, and for many to have the opportunity to be connected is much better than to be out of the web.

Re: Firefox Hello

#68
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying technology used to implement this is WebRTC, which is available to web pages. Implementing peer-to-peer real time video communication entirely in Javascript would be difficult, so it has to be provided to some extent by the browser itself.

But, if this is peer-to-peer, what's Telefonica's role?

It is Telefonica's OpenTok division that provides the webrtc service and javascript API upon which Firefox Hello runs.

http://www.tokbox.com/blog/firefox-hello-mozilla-enhances-op...

But taking it a bit deeper, this is all part of Telefonica's strategic partnership with Mozilla to market phones running Firefox OS.

http://blog.digital.telefonica.com/tag/html5/

Re: Firefox Hello

#69

and here I remember the day this all started because browsers had become bloated.

Firefox was always about switching to a user oriented focus. Getting rid of bloat happened to be a necessary early step on that path.

Re: Firefox Hello

#70
post #48
post #6

I saw the tag line, liked what I saw until "powered by Telefonica". Seriously, I've lived in more than half of the European countries for a while, and never ever EVER saw such a shitty internet service as in Spain over their network. Lack of service for hours every day, substandard speeds... It made me anticipate a move to Portugal by one year because of their shitty service.

I am bummed - I was hoping it was just straight up peer to peer video. Why do we need an intermediary?

To give the clients a simple way to initiate their peer-to-peer session?
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