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Firefox Hello

mozilla.org

221–230 of 239 posts

Re: Firefox Hello

#221
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Snail-mailing a letter to O2 is likely easier than the cancellation process for Comcast...

Re: Firefox Hello

#222
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?

It's using WebRTC which is peer-to-peer for the actual audio/video streams, you just need some kind of intermediary to exchange SDPs to connect in the first place. (There are some examples of clever workarounds for this, like copying and pasting SDP strings over IM, but they're not a good user experience.)

Re: Firefox Hello

#223
I tried it. It works pretty well over the local lan, at least. What I really want to see is multi-user chats.

Re: Firefox Hello

#224
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would be extremely surprised to find out that was how it happened. More likely we (Mozilla) just have contacts at Telefonica from our Firefox OS work, and Telefonica happens to have this opentok software which provides a useful piece of making Firefox Hello work, so co-branding was a win/win.

Re: Firefox Hello

#225
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, because no other browser vendor ever does that. coughGooglecough.

Re: Firefox Hello

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, because no other browser vendor ever does that. cough Google cough .

You're implying that I don't care that Google and Opera are doing it too. That is false.

Re: Firefox Hello

#227
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a success story with that. I moved abroad and I have a chat with my parents using Skype from time to time. After the Microsoft acquisition Skype had to be upgraded and the old version stopped working. My parents aren't tech-savvy really and I failed to diagnose their problem remotely, so I tried https://talky.io/ (just because I watched Sam Dutton talk about WebRTC and he used that web for a demo). It worked (…

The problem I had doing something similar was getting the link to them. You need some other out-of-band communication method, whereas with skype you just agree to a time of the week when to sign on and call each other. Email sort-of works, but not as easily as the central logged-in lobby system.

Would be very easy to have a website that coordinated this. Even pastebin would do pretty easily.

Re: Firefox Hello

#228
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telefonica run O2 in the UK, which is a decent mobile network (and the only one which covers my house).

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.

Pretty standard. Try to find a "cancel my service" link anywhere on the Verizon or Comcast website. You have to call them, at minimum, and then as soon as your intentions are clear you will be transitioned to a "retention specialist" who will waste your time trying to talk you into keeping the service.

Re: Firefox Hello

#229
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this isn't "bundled with a monolithic browser blob"; it's enabled by supporting WebRTC, and it's compatible with other WebRTC implementations. That we're even discussing this goes to show the tragic decline of critical thinking and basic reading comprehension on this board.

I thought the topic quickly moved to be about A/V conferencing, WebRTC and other features in general, not Hello in particular. There isn't much to discuss about yet-another-WebRTC-site, so the topic had shifted. And then everything depends on how one views things. Firefox is a monolithic blob, and WebRTC is a fairly tightly integrated part of it. This is valid point to discuss. For one, I'm not sure if it's a good id…

It seems even with the separate efforts for once-browsers-now-OSes (Firefox OS/Chrome OS/etc), we're still getting feature-creep in the browser. I understand that webRTC is a spec from the W3C, but I'm not sure that's the ... best ... solution.

Maybe I'm a bit too old-school in this regard, but I view the WWW as an interactive document repository (sites/forums/rich-apps), whereas the Internet is the network that the WWW operates on. So for me, a browser is used to explore/use the WWW whereas individual applications and tools are used to explore/use the Internet.

I feel this is an important distinction because I would like at least one modern/popular web browser to retain this philosophy, which is difficult when each browser (and parent umbrella org) decide to push more desktop-app-like functionality to the browser.

10 years ago the internet was quite different (and 10 years prior to that too), I'm curious / worried / cautious how it'll be in another decade. At least it'll be an interesting ride :-P

Re: Firefox Hello

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the bookmarks need some attention. The new UX I saw for bookmarks presented them as a grid of large colourful squares but I wasn't sure that was easier to read or use than a list. Hopefully someone will come up with something (that will no doubt be hated by many).

I always thought the system for displaying the bookmarks bar was a bit daft because you could only see about 10 bookmarks before running out of horizontal room. On OSX at least we have a dedicated "Bookmarks" menu but using it under Linux and Windows was always painful due to this strange (IMHO) design.

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