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Firefox Hello

mozilla.org

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191–200 of 239 posts

Re: Firefox Hello

#191

Post by amelius »

72deluxe wrote: post #180
gcb0 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had contributed to chromium for weeks, and then google come with it's monthly dump and overwritten everything you and others did in the open, you would have a different opinion.

Has that happened to you? I noticed a new fancy Bookmark management system in Chromium and then it suddenly disappeared again.

Well, offtopic, but imho bookmarks need serious work in Chromium. I'm constantly looking for my bookmarks, and not finding them. Perhaps a search+time filter could help here. Also, when clicking on "Other bookmarks", I currently get a dropdown of about a thousand elements :)

I hope a UX person can have a good look at this sometime.

Re: Firefox Hello

#192

Post by tormeh »

kogepathic wrote: post #171
tormeh wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O2 in Germany sucks, though. You actually have to snail-mail them your resignation letter, there are frequent brief outages in the night and they are often slow at setting up your service. I mean, they do deliver decent internet, but their customer service is awful.

>You actually have to snail-mail them your resignation letter So? You have to send written notice to cancel any contract in Germany. This is totally standard.

Just because it's common doesn't mean it's acceptable. There's no reason why signing up should be easier than canceling. It's just a trick to be able to charge the customer one last time.

Re: Firefox Hello

#193

Post by toolz »

mkal_tsr wrote: post #148
toolz wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize this is just a fancy bookmark, right? Lynx has bookmarks, too.

Can Lynx activate this feature at all? Lynx may have bookmarks, but as far as I can tell, Lynx does not have WebRTC support, which means it can not be exploited to share private LAN IP addresses, nor can it access web cams. Firefox, like Chrome, is going overboard with non-web-browsing features. Some less technical users surely will appreciate that, but at some point it becomes less of a browser and more of a pseudo-…

Then your argument is against webRTC, not Hello.

Re: Firefox Hello

#194

Post by fulafel »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #11

Do they have the specs anywhere on their encryption?

Apparently not. The fact that they use WebRTC gives you some properties of the system (assuming you are familiar with per browser implementation details of WebRTC, not just the standard) but not enough to tell what kind of security properties the application provides.

Re: Firefox Hello

#195

Post by rakoo »

zanny wrote: post #98
windlep wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

> I think the biggest problem is the lack of accounts, chat, logging, and persistence in webrtc.

WebRTC is not a messaging technology, it is a raw data communication technology. It is just here to move bytes from one client to another. The features you are talking about are managed by said clients, meaning that it has to be handled by Firefox/Chrome itself.

Re: Firefox Hello

#196

Post by reubenmorais »

tkubacki wrote: post #159
windlep wrote: post #97

Since 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.

It's definitely a more difficult model. Open source projects tend to attract very opinionated people, and a project's infancy is when it's most fragile. Usually the objections come from the outside, but at Mozilla the critics are the core volunteers who (publicly) question weather project decisions are aligned with the manifesto [0] all the time. It's also seen as inappropriate when someone tries to develop something in private and then release it expecting it to be shielded from criticism because it's more polished than a prototype.

All of this means you can't get away with shady stuff, or cool stuff that doesn't align with the project. But products need to evolve to stay competitive, and the downside is that the added friction from having to respond to people who are not in the payroll about what to develop and what to release means Firefox doesn't have the capacity to move as fast as Chrome does, for example.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/

Re: Firefox Hello

#197

Post by drdaeman »

olefoo wrote: post #142
tobico wrote: post #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.

Let's see where this stands three years from now. Mozilla is working on some pretty neat stuff; and is paying attention to the rest of the world, not just the American/European/Japanese market. Also since they are a foundation owned corporation with a public benefit mission https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ they can take a longer-term view than some of the other big players. Having played with one of the…

The underlying problem and a source of debate is this "public benefit" part, as perceived by some engineers vs others.

The problem is simple to describe, but nearly impossible to solve.

On the one hand, ask anyone whenever they want to have video conferencing without having to download additional software and based on open standards blah blah — and you're likely to hear "yeah, that's cool, where do I get it?" before you finish the questions. Because, without going in much detail this all sounds awfully good.

On the other hand, a few engineers have issues with this. Questions like "why this is bundled in giant monolithic browser blob" are perfectly valid. Especially those who value classic UNIXes' approach to do things, may be well dissatisfied with this kind of stuff being done in the name "public benefit", considering this as yet another case of "dancing bunnies" problem, with masses being ignorant of the issues.

Re: Firefox Hello

#198

Post by slight »

BSousa wrote: 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've had Movistar (TF are using Movistar branding for home services as well as mobile now) fibre in Barcelona for over a year now and I can't remember a single outage. Don't get me wrong as with any large incumbent they suck in many ways but I've personally had no problems with them as an internet provider. Dealing with the for fixed lines for ADSL provided by other companies was more of a pain though.

Re: Firefox Hello

#200

Post by dagingaa »

windlep wrote: post #92
cjensen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing Firefox Hello with WebRTC. Let me explain by analogy with a video codec: For video, Firefox contains a video codec. Surfing to YouTube lets the YouTube web page play video. Firefox does not contain a "Youtube Player". That's exactly the opposite of what they have done here. They have added basically added a "Telefonica WebRTC Player". That's wrong. They should have added WebRTC generically so that yo…

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…

Working for a major player in the WebRTC space certainly gives me a bias, but "noone cares" is pretty far from the truth. There are millions of WebRTC users already, hell, we might even be approaching the billion now if you count Snapchat and Hangouts as WebRTC services. (Yes, Snapchat uses WebRTC for their video chat features)

Check out: - https://appear.in/ - https://talky.io/ - https://screenhero.com/ - https://github.com/feross/webtorrent - https://peercdn.com/ - https://sharefest.me/ - ...and lots, lots more. Sorry to the ones I forgot to mention/don't know about.

For some pure WebRTC experiences. http://simplewebrtc.com/ if you want to build something yourself.

The thing is, you don't know that the service you're using uses WebRTC, quite frankly because the technology doesn't matter, the user experience does. Also, the sheer fact that we seem to have standardised a very good (and very secure) way of doing peer to peer transfers, and that's getting implemented in browsers, with client libraries for iOS and Android is HUGE.

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