All the negativity aside, anyone knows how this works ?
Firefox Hello
161–170 of 239 posts
Re: Firefox Hello
#162Is the connection peer to peer once established? Btw, I tried hello a couple of weeks ago and it felt like voice/video over the net 5 or 6 years ago, no proper echo cancelation, similar to the old video plugin in pidgin. Also, there is no text IM.
It's based on the WebRTC standard, so in general, yes it's peer-to-peer. However, in cases where the peer-to-peer connection cannot be established (e.g. a user behind symmetric NAT), then a third-party relay server is used (called a TURN server) which acts as the intermediary between the peers (sort of like a proxy).
Re: Firefox Hello
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that is scary, as I don't want to give all my personal data to some random company's server in Europe? Firefox is cool with me but Telefonica, not so much.
Your personal data isn't going anywhere. The server is only used for establishing the connection when clients are behind NATs (which in today's environment you usually always are). If I understand WebRTC correctly, once the link is established, all communication is peer to peer.
> If I understand WebRTC correctly, once the link is established, all communication is peer to peer.
In general, it's peer-to-peer, but for clients that can't communicate peer-to-peer for whatever reason (usually due to certain NATs), a relay server is used as an intermediary. To the user it's transparent, so they can't easily tell if it's peer-to-peer or not.
Re: Firefox Hello
#164It 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.
What led you to believe that the linked page was targeted towards technical users?
Re: Firefox Hello
#165So I imported some contacts. How the hell do I remove some of them? Why wasn't I given a choice of which contacts to import?
Re: Firefox Hello
#166Since 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…
AFAIK Chromium and Dart are developed in the open now. despite your edit - I'm felling you are suggestiong it's worse model.
Furthermore, Chromium's now spent the vast majority of its life developed in the open. You would probably find today's code unrecognizable if you traveled through time from 2008.
Re: Firefox Hello
#167>There’s no account or sign-in required and nothing extra to download. Just start a conversation, send your friend a link and ask them to click it.
I don't think this is such a great idea, at least in my case, if I'm sending someone link for them to open instantly then I'm probably already using a platform that supports video conversations - for example Skype, which also has IM and some other stuff that FF Hello doesn't.
Re: Firefox Hello
#168>There’s no account or sign-in required and nothing extra to download. Just start a conversation, send your friend a link and ask them to click it. I don't think this is such a great idea, at least in my case, if I'm sending someone link for them to open instantly then I'm probably already using a platform that supports video conversations - for example Skype, which also has IM and some other stuff that FF Hello does…
Different people's workflows differ, of course.
I can totally imagine this for the video conferences we have with external partners in our group. These are usually scheduled ahead of time, so we could just arrange that people check their inbox for the link. Email is what most people use in these projects, while IM'ing is very exotic and practically not used.
Re: Firefox Hello
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
imo the browser is just a better navigation model for a wide range of apps than typical OS GUI shells. so it's natural that either native apps get hosted in the browser (the plugin model) which has gone out of fashion, or APIs to do whatever an native app wants to do get added to the standard web API.
Re: Firefox Hello
#170It 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…
> Firefox hello is a website that implements webRTC based video conferencing in a browser agnostic way.
It's very misleading. The page is full of quotes like these:
"All you need is Firefox"
"Get Firefox to get started"
"Want to start using Hello? All you need is Firefox"
"Get Firefox and start your first conversation"