Since they're doing it at the browser level, it would have been nice if they provided screen sharing instead of this.
Google Hangouts-like screen sharing without the need for an account would be awesome.
Firefox Hello
111–120 of 239 posts
Re: Firefox Hello
#112It's interesting, although struck me as weird to bundle/market it as part of the core Firefox experience, especially considering its closely tied to a third party. Seems more extension territory.
You can see it as a pre-bundled extension, I suppose. I think the point of pre-bundling it is to get more attention and in that way to promote WebRTC, which is a good goal. Size-wise, I didn't look at the code but this is likely a tiny extension, it's just a little UI over WebRTC.
>the point of pre-bundling it is to get more attention and in that way to promote WebRTC //
Presumably though instead of FF dev team making a Moz sponsored extension Telefonica came to them and said "we'll give you this barrel of cash if we can put our name on a new part of FF that gets default installed".
Indeed Moz could have just had Telefonica named as devs on an extension and shipped it as default - which would seem more natural. The way it is makes it more like a marketing move to hijack FF as a place to put an advert.
Appear.in seems to work fine and without messing with my browser chrome.
Re: Firefox Hello
#113A 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
Just call it the "Chrome-ification" of Firefox. Chrome is automatically updated to be jam-packed full of browser-specific APIs and functionality. Like when Chrome automatically updated and registered itself as a background service without permission. Or when Chrome automatically installed a microphone listening service for always on "OK Google" hotword detection. Or the fact that Chrome Apps are less and less "webpag…
It's a shame what's happening to the web.
We've apparently decided that we should use "the web" for everything, whether or not it's a good fit. So yeah, browsers are unavoidably going to accumulate features that used to be the responsibility of apps or the OS. And there will be lots of browser-specific functionality unless you're willing to wait 5 years for W3C or WHATWG or whoever to finalize a standard.
Re: Firefox Hello
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
WebRTC was "generically" added to Firefox in 2013, ie: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/06/webrtc-comes-to-firefox/ Of course, with it being added generically, tons of websites immediately started using it..... nope. Ok, well, lets go back before that blog post... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-c... Ah ha, isn't that neat. WebRTC in Firefox and Chrome and a demo of it! Wait, still pretty muc…
I've had good experiences with talky and I know hangouts uses webrtc. I think the biggest problem is the lack of accounts, chat, logging, and persistence in webrtc. Thats what keeps it from being a p2p communication protocol in general whereas now its just a toy for video calls. I mean, when you cannot share links during your video call easily, somethings wrong.
Hangouts still uses the Google Talk plugin, as far as I'm aware.
Re: Firefox Hello
#115It seems there is a lot of confusion going on here. Firefox hello is a website that implements webRTC based video conferencing in a browser agnostic way. The "firefox hello" button that has shown up in recent versions of the browser is a bit of UI magic over an API to this website. The video conferencing code is not implemented in the browser. If you send a firefox hello link to a chrome user, it opens the webpage wh…
This is a like a case study in how to [not] handle messaging towards technical users. There's no issue here, but it just appears like Firefox is now shipping apps or something, rather than essentially a bookmark.
Re: Firefox Hello
#116Since no one realizes that Mozilla actually develops stuff in the open (vs. code/project-dumps like Google after its 'done'), here's the Mozilla project page for Hello (previously called Loop): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Loop A bunch of the hypothetical questions here on HN could be answered easily by skimming over this page and some of the pages linked in. Edit: I'm not suggesting its bad or good to get a project to a…
I don't have any problem with people making open source projects and then publishing them once they are finished. It's still open source.
Re: Firefox Hello
#117Earlier 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.
I and most of my friends and family in Spain have at some point spent hours trying to solve problems with our Telefónica phone and internet connections. Popularly it's known as Timofónica (Scam-ofonica).
When I hear the company's president mumbling [1] about how Google owes them money because Telefónica provides the networks, but Google makes the money thanks to their networks, I wonder how has the company grown so large, and how can a director be so incapable of coherent expression.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTOAyZxOTy0
Edit: I leave this comment because I like Mozilla and enjoy Firefox, but I was dismayed to discover a few weeks ago that Telefónica was involved with Hello.
Re: Firefox Hello
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's a bad and misleading comparison here though. Your cassette player had to add the bulky recording feature to become a recorder, but did not need it to be a player. Firefox is a webbrowser, not a video conferencing software, but it had to add WebRTC to be a web-browser (the bulky bit), so adding in recording is trivial. A more honest analogy would be saying you had a cassette player that already had all the hard…
>but it had to add WebRTC to be a web-browser
Does this mean that we now get to claim that IE and Safari are not web browsers?
Re: Firefox Hello
#119[deleted]
Re: Firefox Hello
#120I 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'm actually shocked by seeing Telefonica being able to so obviously placing their brand inside Firefox. I think it will seriously undermine peoples' trust into what is supposed to be an "independent" browser. Yes, people on HN know that Mozilla is since many years dependent on the sponsorship of Google et al. but having such obvious advertising?? Come on, Mozilla!