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Firefox Hello

mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Hello

#201

Post by ZeroGravitas »

TheDong wrote: post #72
mattmanser wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

Random vaguely relevent historical asides:

1. The Walkman was born after a Sony exec had started using a Sony Pressman tape-recorder intended for transcribing meetings/interviews to listen to audio tapes while on planes. They took out the recording functionality and speaker (while adding stereo to the headphones) to make it smaller/cheaper/more portable.

2. Firefox was born after some Mozilla devs took the full featured Mozilla suit and simply hid a lot of the features (email, HTML editor, NNTP newsreader). They later on actually did the work to remove unused code, but at first it was merely cosmetic, though everyone likes to believe there was a mystical time in the past when Firefox was a lean, mean, codebase rather than a minimilist reskin on top of a lot of bloat.

Not sure how that relates to WebRTC, just thought the parallel was amusing.

Re: Firefox Hello

#202

Post by nly »

pekk wrote: post #116
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…

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.

There are several problems with the code and dump scenario:

* Open source contributors have to approach the codebase from a much more advanced, and often more burdened or rigid, state

* The mainline developers, who worked on the code before release, aren't necessarily used to, or open to, accepting contributions as if the project had been developed in the open from a much more primitive state.

* Sometimes the dump literally just means "here's the code", and isn't an indication that the project is looking for significant or lasting contributions at all.

* Sometimes when companies open source their stuff what they're really doing is putting it out to pasture... but this isn't always apparent upon release.

* Often the project isn't hosted on a neutral platform, like Github or the company still works on v2 in a private fork.

Re: Firefox Hello

#203

Post by espadrine »

pgl wrote: post #170
Sir_Substance wrote: post #107

It 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"

You do need Firefox to start the conversation. I believe it is used to authenticate the user[0].

Then the link you get can be used on any browser.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to know how to start a conversation from a different browser.

[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Loop/Architecture

Re: Firefox Hello

#205

Post by jason46 »

jason46 wrote: post #204

So this link is useful for new users. I had no idea how to open it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/where-firefox-hello-but... Next issue, I'm using a docked laptop and it defaulted to the cam in the folded laptop instead of the cam pointed at me..

Anybody see a way to change the camera?

Re: Firefox Hello

#206

Post by longlivegnu »

MichaelGG wrote: post #183
jonchang wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What led you to believe that the linked page was targeted towards technical users?

Not saying it was. Just that FF has a lot of sensitive, technical, users, so Mozilla has to deal with this insanity it looks like. Thus, they might consider having a "how it works" or "why" section to calm such users.

Can't they just look at the source code?

Re: Firefox Hello

#208

Post by mkal_tsr »

toolz wrote: post #193
mkal_tsr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am also against webRTC, I don't think it's mutually exclusive. Mozilla is signalling with this that they're looking to push applications that leverage their feature-set.

Re: Firefox Hello

#209

Post by mkal_tsr »

drdaeman wrote: post #197
olefoo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree.

I'm very against the style of discussion about these topics, it's very "you agree with this feature 100% or any criticism is seen as an attack" rather than an attempt to debate the merits of features / implementations.

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