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 more polished state before open-sourcing it, mainly just pointing out that for good/bad, Mozilla does happen to keep the entirety of the process very open.
It is open source, but there are different models of project development. In particular, there is a lot of nuance in your term "once they are finished".
If a company periodically dumps a large project tree online but continues the development and management behind closed doors, it makes it very difficult anyone else to make use of or build upon the source without forking it completely (and forking has its own risks).
This is why windlep is pointing out that Mozilla "develops in the open", as opposed to being merely open source.
Nitpick: I don't think there's anything wrong with a closed development model and open sourcing the result, but IMO it's not open source until the code is available. If you're starting a project with this intention, I don't think it's really Open Source until your first code dump is publicly accessible - at which point, go nuts with branding it Open Source.
I also don't think it's unfair to do code dumps, if the code is available then job done. Other projects provide additional hand holding, but in my opinion that's a feature that the original authors have the freedom to choose to not implement.
I'm really pleased that Mozilla have chosen an open development model.
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.
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.
Personally, I just want a way to sort bookmarks by date, a grep-like search of titles, and a similar grep-like search of the page contents. And then perhaps a more intelligent search.
Sorry, but what the FUD is this? Chromium has never done anything of the sort. It's developed completely in the open and has a huge number of non-Google contributors committing code every day.
Chromium proper is indeed developed in the open, but the Chromium browser as a whole is not, perhaps that's what was intended above, so there might be a confusion of terminology here.
For example, v8 - a very important part of Chromium - is not developed fully openly: major features are developed secretly and land as surprises, like CrankShaft and TurboFan, and also daily development consists of patches landing with little or no public discussion behind them.
Fair enough that v8 is an odd case, but it's an external dependency that predates Chrome/Chromium with its own core team, development processes, third-party obligations, and ecosystem. And accepting that, v8 does have third-party contributors (see their policy here: https://code.google.com/p/v8-wiki/wiki/Contributing). Plus, do you really take issue with the occasional quietly developed code drop, because isn't that pretty much how your team introduced asm.js support in Firefox?
Beyond JS engines, you must appreciate that dependencies and business relationships can get very odd when shipping something as big and complicated as a browser. Chrome/Chromium absolutely experiences this, but so does Mozilla. Take HTML EME, where Adobe's technical requirements have pretty much forced Mozilla to break Andreas' and Brendan's original promises on how much the closed-source CDM will be sandboxed. Then there's the h.264 situation, which is an odd multi-step dance to deliver binaries from Cisco, and is significantly more convoluted than Chrome's use of ffmpeg.
Regardless, I don't believe you're really trying to make the argument that Chromium is not a publicly developed open source project with a huge pool of non-Google contributors. Because you know that to simply be an indisputable fact, even if there is additional complexity around certain dependencies and platforms.
Of course I agree that the chromium project itself, as opposed to the chromium browser, is developed openly and in a nice way. There is no argument between us on that - it's a clear fact. And I agree that in a large project like a browser, compromises can be necessary when you must work with partners, as in the examples that you made. Good points.
But I strongly disagree on two things you mention:
Regarding asm.js, that is not how it was developed. It was from day 1 done on an open github repo,
There was never anything secret about it. (What would we have even gained by being secretive about it? Nothing.)
Also, in v8 the issue is not just CrankShaft and TurboFan, but as I mentioned, daily development. I file bugs when I find v8 failing on an emscripten output, and so I follow v8 commits. There is almost no public discussion on them - just patches, plus perhaps a review comment or two. No public bug with background, explanations, motivation, etc. The code is open, but development is clearly not.
I think it's obvious v8 is a major part of chromium, and it's completely unnecessarily developed in a non-open manner. So I think it's fair to say the chromium browser as a whole - as opposed to the chromium project itself - is not developed fully openly.
Another example is Dart. Dart is not yet part of chromium, but the plans to integrate it are public. Dart was developed secretly for a while, and in fact only became known unintentionally in a leaked email. It's not clear when it would have become public if not for that leaked email. Again, like with v8, this is unnecessarily closed development - there are no legal issues or partners that must be compromised with. It was just decided that v8 and Dart would be developed non-openly (for reasons I can't understand).
Do you really think a code drop from an obscurely named github repo qualifies as open development? Because it can just as easily be interpreted as hiding in the noise, particularly when the eventual asm.js unveiling was done as a giant PR blitz. Of course, you can argue that the secrecy was unintentional, but you can't really argue that it wasn't taken advantage of.
To your argument that Chromium is not developed fully openly, you must understand that Blink and Chromium contributors dwarf the v8 team by orders of magnitude, right (even the security team is a bigger)? And you understand that the difference in code size is even larger, right? I get that you're focused on JS because it's your area, but in the grand scheme it's only one of many, many important pieces. And if we're going to dig into it like this, do you really believe every part of Firefox would hold up to the same level of scrutiny? after all, Richard Stallman has made similar arguments about Firefox not being truly free.
Now for Dart. I just don't see Chromium approaching Dart the same way Mozilla approached asm.js. On the contrary, I strongly expect that dart.js will need to prove the viability and popularity of the language before Chromium includes any specific optimizations or support for it. As for the "leaks," I suggest you read the doc people are referencing and consider the timelines involved. Because, the content paints a very different picture, and the timelines don't at all align with what you're claiming.
As for why the Dart team follows their particular development practice, I don't know. They spun out of the original v8 team and aren't a part of Chrome team. However, I do know both Dart and v8 have some non-negligible testing and workflows tied to Google infrastructure. So, it may just be hard for them to switch, or maybe no one has ever made the case to do so. Honestly, have you tried just asking nicely rather than making accusations? I mean, you say you can't understand it, but your behavior seems to assume and voice the worst motivations for anything related to Google.
Well, asm.js was a research project for a few months. During those, it was open on github, it was discussed openly on IRC (e.g. #emscripten, for example when experimental commits came in to emit asm.js-like stuff), etc. During that time, we didn't know if it would work or just be a waste of time. So no blogposts were written, because what would we write? Most research projects fail, and are not worth making an effort to mention. One just develops them in the open and sees how things go.
What are you saying we should have done differently during the early research period of asm.js? (Honest question, this situation happens all the time with new research projects - I'd love to do better next time.)
And how exactly was the non-prominence "taken advantage of"? What benefit did we get from it?
I completely agree with you about chromium (the project) being open, and yes, clearly it is far larger than v8. Also, very likely I consider v8 to be more important than the average person, since JS is my area, that is a fair point.
Still, I don't want to go all the way to saying something like "v8 is negligible". It's not. JS is the only standardized programming language available for web pages. The JS writing community is huge. People writing websites use HTML, JS and CSS, with JS being pivotal. So JS does matter quite a lot, even if v8's size is small in comparison to the rest of chromium.
Hence, v8 not being developed openly is a black mark against the openness of the chromium browser. That seems an unavoidable conclusion. But it is open to debate on the amount - is v8 more or less important - of course.
I'm not sure what you think I'm claiming about Dart, if you think the timeline in the Dart document doesn't align with anything I said?
I apologize if it seems like I'm assuming the worst about Google's motivations regarding anything. I think I was pretty careful in not talking about motivations, because I don't know them. The facts are that v8 development is not fully open. And, it is a fact that I don't understand that. Not sure how that shows I think Google is being evil or anything like that? Not is anything I said an "accusation" about Google's motivations, as again, I tried to focus on the observable facts. (Or, did you make that statement referring to something else I said - if so, what?)
I have talked to v8 people, and I have asked questions about openness and development procedures and so forth. I also file bugs regularly and interact with them on the tracker. I admire the v8 developers - they are doing an amazing job! So I'm not someone from afar that is assuming the worst. I'm someone that likes the v8 project, tries to help out, and interacts with it, while at the same time is kind of puzzled and disappointed that it isn't developed openly. And I feel that reflects poorly on chromium. That's all.
go find all the 3 (last time i counted) ways to enable "disable referrer header" that was present in the community version for months and removed by google in their 'big code blob release'
Your response is utter nonsense. If you had any legitimate argument to make here you'd be citing something to support these wild accusations, but you have nothing of the sort.
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.
Open source is better than not, but there's some great insights in Eric Raymon's paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar[0] with regards to how release early, release often is better for the author, community, and (open source) project both in the near and long term. Releasing it, bugs and all, early on can build a real community in ways that dumping a finished project can never do.
For example, look at projects like the original Netscape/Mozilla or Libreoffice open source projects and how long they took to build communities (with the former, they really didn't exist with non-AOL communities until AFTER a complete rewrite - Firefox - was launched; same was true with StarOffice/OpenOffice/Libreoffice). Then look at the similarly sized projects of Linux distributions, KDE, GNOME, and many others.
Being able to get involved with a project early on, before it's too big to really jump into quickly and make a meaningful contribution, really helps build that initial core of developers who believe in and want/need the project.
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.
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.
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 when they click on it instead of the UI element.
I actually think it's really neat, and have replaced skype with it since it works so widely and doesn't require everyone to have an account to use it.
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 (to be completely fair, slightly worse than an average Skype session), and it kind of blew my mind. My parents weren't impressed though, when I explained them how amazing was that we were video conferencing using a website and open standards.
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.
This is exactly the sort of thing it is fantastic at. Being able to email or SMS people link and have it Just Work without passwords or accounts or port forwarding is actually really nifty, and exactly what you need to start a chat with grandma.
For the record, my experience has been that firefox hello is superior in quality to skype.
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.
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.
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.
Same here, if you ask anybody in South America if there is a something like Comcast in their country they will all answer Telefónica without thinking.
Telefónica bought pretty much every South American national phone monopoly when the country privatized it. I dealt with them while living in Chile and let me tell you: Comcast's customer service is top notch compared to them.
By putting that logo in there, Mozilla is pretty much shutting down any chance of adoption in South America. In my case, even Microsoft's logo would be easier to swallow.
I don't view Telefonica being good/bad at running a mobile network as too relevant to this offering. It's a different product running on very different infrastructure. I do think their involvement is a good reason to be cautious, though. Why are Mozilla not running it themselves, and what does Telefonica intend to get out of the service? (large telcos generally don't run free services out of the goodness of their heart)
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.
I would prefer to send them written notice about resignation rather than a call where they try and talk you out of it. I do the same with credit cards because you always get put through to the "please stay with us, keep your card, just don't use it" people who I don't wish to argue with.
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.
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.
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.
Actually my experience is entirely different. Extremely good service, even in remote locations. Whereas in the UK, most providers except very expensive ones are a nightmare.
True, they're technically ahead with the FTTH. But if you have their DSL and don't want them to do works in your house to install their FTTH cables and devices which aren't compatible with any other provider, so that if you are unhappy you have to do works again to change ISP, then you're stuck with at most 1 GB of data per month on mobile. FTTH customers have 2 GB but they won't give DSL customers the 2 GB, not even the option to pay for it, because you know, it's obvious that I need to install FTTH in my home if I want my mobile phone to be able to handle such a bandwidth! This tends to be their policy most of the time: if you don't buy their latest and greatest they screw you by not giving you any updates until they convince you to do so (with a long-term contract of course). Oh, and unacknowledge but obvious caps on various direct download websites, P2P, etc. which I guess would go away if I bought their latest and greatest too.
I'm currently with them because my preferred cable provider (R) didn't have coverage in my building a year ago, but now they do have coverage, so I'm probably saying bye-bye to Telefonica soon. Yes, the service is now technically good, even probably the best (FTTH), but who cares if all their policies (the above is just an example but there are lots more) are set to nickel-and-dime the customers, and to sell more and more and more. You can't even do a technical service call without them spamming you and trying to sell you stuff. R doesn't have FTTH but has a much, much better customer service (including automatic improvements in the bandwidth for time to time, without even asking).
Nope. Last year. Started their service Oct 2013 and left Oct 2014. It maybe area dependent (was in Andalucia) but I heard nothing but bad things about their service from the locals. Manilva (small town) was without internet for 2-3 days during the summer last year and no one in their customer service would even acknowledge it!
The Mayor of Manilva, Urieta Diego and director of the South Territory of Telefónica Spain, María Jesús Almazor, held a meeting to present the expansion plans the company has planned for the town. Thus, they have confirmed that it has begun the deployment of Fiber to the Home (FTTH) and that citizens already have 4G technology.
According highlighted the mayor, Manilva, later this year will be the first municipality in Andalusia to have installed fiber optic network in the hundred percent of the town.
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!
I think you misunderstand the point of FOSS. It doesn't matter if government funds it (Tor) or if private interests fund it (entire GNU ecosystem). It's about freedom to distribute and modify the source as one sees fit.
Also, advertising and sponsorship don't have to be one-way streets.
For example, by funding Mozilla, Google helped to remove Microsoft's browser monopoly. Since Google's business relies on the Web, that made perfect sense. Now they have their own browser too, which makes things complicated :)
Likewise, Microsoft currently has a dominant influence in video chat, thanks to Skype. It makes sense for Telefonica to erode that dominance, since they have more business opportunities in an open, many <-> many ecosystem compared to a Skype-only one.
Too many companies base their business model on becoming a monopoly in their field ("the next Microsoft", "the next Google", "the next Facebook", "the next Twitter", etc.), rather than allowing interoperability and having to succeed on merit. When this inevitably fails, they leave behind nothing except useless, incompatible APIs. Hopefully this is different :)
My point is not that I see FOSS at risk but that they undermine the (important) idea behind Firefox: Providing a way for people to participate at the internet in an open fashion while protecting people's privacy.
In the past we could hope that Mozilla and Google had the best interest of their users in mind but now having such super-obvious product placement? This raises a lot of questions for me and will do even more so for the average user.
Take it easy. Remember Mozilla used to be sponsored by google for letting them be the default search engine? That is product placement if anything is. And you can argue it's sneaky: I didn't realize it until I'd used Firefox for a couple of years.
Actually, quite a few non-profits are sponsored by commercial interests and while sometimes this is a problem, often it is not.
Also: How would you like to fund development of Firefox?
I believe that the folks at Mozilla are capable and willing enough to not let an external company interfere with their product in any way that would harm their users. However, it is also a question of being able to communicate this to their users. Putting the logo of a company which is at least not famous for protecting its users right in front of everyone does not help getting this message across. Furthermore, I assume that Mozilla has likely not even received money but just services in-kind. Damaging the reputation of a product that is critical to the open web for a couple of servers?
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.)
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 I recognize the value of great companies like telefonica.
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.
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.
"Lack of service for hours every day", is that a personal experience?
Telefonica was providing services in villages and small towns with very difficult geography (mountains, roads, ...). Now there is a big competition in Spain, for example Jazztel is offering 200Gigabit/s up-down for 36 euros/moth and phone tax included. Our country is getting better in the IT sector and telefonica was the pioneer. It is easy to critique but in the old times there was no other option, and for many to have the opportunity to be connected is much better than to be out of the web.
"Lack of service for hours every day", is that a personal experience?
Yes, it's clear from the post that it is from personal experience. Why would you think otherwise?
Telefonica was providing services in villages and small towns with very difficult geography
Yes, back when it was a public company; that was just their responsibility.
It is easy to critique but in the old times there was no other option
Yes, but neither BSousa nor I were talking about dial-up times. Nor was the EU when they fined Telefonica for anti-trust violations, multiple times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefónica#Monopoly
BSousa is commenting in another post down that in Manilva (a town in Spain) the service went down for two days ? (that's all). I posted a link in which Manilva is going to be the first town in Andalusia with 100% optic fiber (only telefonica) and now has 4G. There is one comment in that page from one people living there, and he says: At last we are going out of the prehistoric time.
There is a headline: Peter Thiel: Google Is A Monopoly - Business Insider
Living in Spain, I haven't noticed much to differentiate ISP's on compared to the UK. Telefonica seem very average to me, and their service was pretty reliable when we had it.
I live in Barcelona, is it likely that bigger cities get better service than other places?
I hate being "that guy", but what about sites like https://appear.in/ that do this without (seemingly?) depending on browser support? Is this using some novel p2p technique that can't be implemented using just JS?
When you send a FF Hello invite to a Chrome user, it works fine.
Both Firefox Hello and appear.in use WebRTC which is a Javascript API provided by the browser for this sort of stuff. So appear.in does require browser support.
> Hello is super easy to use and your friends and family don’t even need Firefox to join your conversation. As long as they have a compatible browser, they’re good to go.
as far as i've read this is basically appear.in but with some native buttons in firefox, and optional firefox account integration.
A secure and easy to use solution for web chat is really needed. If it's easy to use but insecure, that simply raises the bar for competing secure solutions to meet, which is a shame.
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.
Now the question is can you enable 'Screen sharing' utility to it? It could then be a killer app for meetings and conferences getting rid of all the expensive external software applications?
When I say screen share, I mean not just the browser's screen but the whole computer screen?
A 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.
> A web browser should not include X functionality, but should allow a web page to implement X functionality.
Exactly. Firefox doesn't include "Firefox Hello" anymore than it includes "Gmail". Instead, Firefox (and other web browsers) include XMLHttpRequest and WebRTC, which can be used to implement whatever you want.
I'm getting pretty tired of hearing this trope ("teh bloat!") anytime a browser announces new functionality. Browsers are among the most successful pieces of consumer software in existence, so let's maybe admit they've done something right? But moreover, you have the ability -- really, unprecedented for software so complex and in such wide use -- to fork not one but two excellent open-source browsers, plus an excellent rendering engine. If you think you know better than Mozilla and/or Google, go for it. It's not lost on anyone at Mozilla that this is how Firefox originated.
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 hardware to record -- necessitated by it being able to play cassettes for some reason -- but didn't have a record button vs one having the button.
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.
Most people probably used the record feature on their cassette players and the cost of simply including it in every device may well have been lower than the cost of two production lines. Incidentally, for five years or so the Amiga was a great choice and any PC bought instead of an Amiga would have been horribly obsolete by the time the Amiga ecosystem collapsed.
Developers shouldn't be afraid to implementing new features just because they don't know if it's the best decision yet. And to drive innovation many times you will have to step into an unknown territory.
Moreover for someone who hasn't used anything but IE for his entire life, the video chat feature might be the only reason to sway towards FF.
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 you go to a web page at Telefonica to use it. Or better yet, use it with a server you trust.
Ah ha, isn't that neat. WebRTC in Firefox and Chrome and a demo of it! Wait, still pretty much zero use in the wild of WebRTC...
This is why Google/Mozilla are adding features utilizing these new specs to the browser, because they're cool and no one else is. In the case of WebRTC, it's for a good reason, its a PITA to run TURN/STUN servers to ensure that people behind firewalls can establish a connection.
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)
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.
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.
It may be "something wrong" for you, but for me it's exactly what I need to let my mother video chat with her grandson after Skype became useless (breaks more often with every passing release, it seems; we've given up on it).
Sharing links, accounts, chat, logging and persistence are all irrelevant for my use, and they in any case don't belong in webrtc - webrtc is a component for people to use to build services like what you appear to want.
> 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.
As for STUN/TURN being painful, Twilio recently released a STUN/TURN service platform: https://www.twilio.com/stun-turn. At least makes things somewhat simpler.
I have to mostly agree with this sentiment. But there is of course the question of revenue streams. I won't fault Mozilla for having a default WebRTC provider (like they do for search provider), but the provider needs to be configurable by the end user. I'm hopeful that the long-term goal is exactly this.
I can't help but think that this has something to do with their decision to drop google as the default search option. This is their monetary avenue going forward.
All I have to do is right-click on the icon and click "Remove from toolbar", or "Customize" and remove it.
But wait, you say, it's not actually removed... well, for the sort of person that "about:config" is not a valid answer, it is removed.
If your actual complaint is about the functionality / bloat, well, it turns out WebRTC is required for firefox to be a browser and the delta from that to this is essentially nothing.
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 "webpages" and more and more "applications that only support the Chrome API".
"To add insult to injury, there is no simple way of disabling the functionality"
I wish I got paid my hourly rate for the sheer amount of time I spend combing through Google Product Forums reading about what arcane chrome://flags or commandline ---arg is required to disable their new functions.
This time we don't have an all powerful Microsoft fighting the web, but Google seems very wiling to take their place. Last browser wars stopped the web evolution for about a decade, just because of a single party that didn't want to be nice.
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.
That's a good point. The net is great for shoving data backwards and forwards but for the web it doesn't necessarily mean that the browser should be expected to do EVERYTHING.
There used to be a time when most of the posts here on HN were "something native IMPLEMENTED IN JavaScript in a BROWSER" but thankfully those times have passed to the most part.
The Internet was heralded as solving cross-platform problems (hurray for XML?) but it seems that writing a native app actually involves less testing. You now have to test in 3 or 4 browsers per platform, not including mobile devices and changes between different versions. The relentless shoving of features into browsers is no different to what they've been doing for years but I can see why people would not enjoy it, particularly with the repeat of "only works in IE" that you see ("only works in Chrome").
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.
Pretty sure Google would love for the web to not suck so much. I think the strategy is to support some decent technology and hope the rest of the world will get their shit together. The W3C is just slooooooooowwwwww.
It is very relevant. Both Chrome and Firefox are getting extremely bloated and feature-creeped. Besides bloat/performance/quality, each new feature is a new security attack vector [0].
This is a very valid discussion. Software engineers would naturally have concerns when a browser built to render web pages gets turned into a pseudo operating system. The risk here is that without focus it won't be a good browser nor a good OS.
This, however, is just a little UI over WebRTC, an existing feature that is accessible to web content already. Hello doesn't add any significant area for new security attacks.
It's possible your argument could be against adding WebRTC itself, instead of Hello, but the topic here is Hello.
The underlying technology used to implement this is WebRTC, which is available to web pages. Implementing peer-to-peer real time video communication entirely in Javascript would be difficult, so it has to be provided to some extent by the browser itself.
You can't have complete peer-to-peer with browsers unless you properly implement multicast groups or something of that sort. So peer-to-peer needs help bootstrapping by providing some registration service (a meet-in-the middle if you wish).
That is what Telefonica might be doing -- providing a default registration service.
Also because of funky routers and NAT rules, even after the initial session is set up data/audio might not be going through, so then you need STUN or TURN servers so Telefonica might be providing those as well.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but to build on mccr8 and soapdog's answer:
Anyone doing WebRTC seriously will need to run a fallback centralized pairing service to get around the wacky real world network topology and setup a successful p2p connection. In some cases, you need a dumb centralized pipe to connect the peers.
>A 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...
And in other people's view, it is nonsense, and they liked their Mozilla with built-in mailer, Opera, etc.
And of course there's the huge ecosystem of browsers add-ons and plugins, that do exactly that: implement X functionalities outside of web pages.
>Firefox Hello is ludicrous.
Haven't seen any argument about it. Not being able to disable it and not wanting browsers to include X functionality doesn't translate to "ludicrous".
I agree in theory. In practice you have to be pragmatic enough to recognize that the situation is not that simple and that getting rid of closed solutions like skype can only be done if there is a massive initial population "forced" into the network.
Because Hello is built right into Firefox, you can rest easy knowing that your conversations and information will remain private and secure.
I'm not sure exactly why this is though.
Also, out of curiosity more than anything else, what's a decent web-site that implements the same functionality (i.e. set up a VOIP session, let people join by sending a link, ideally anonymously)? I could've sworn AOL had a service like this, but Google results return nothing.
What a browser should and should not do is the prerogative of the business or entity behind creating it. I don't understand where you get this idea of what 'should' and should not happen happen in a browser.
A mobile OS should not include X functionality, but should allow a mobile app to implement X functionality. But somehow due to competition for the platform, every company is more or less in the same race.
That's true. Their business model is essentially selling users to search engines. That said, they have always done it quite softly by selling users to the search engine that most of them want to use anyway, and making it very easy for users to opt-out of that arrangement.
Me too. I immediately removed the Hello icon when I read Telefonica. Apparently it's because of Tokbox but I won't trust one more telco then I have to.
WebRTC is encrypted end to end. afaik Telefonica is only providing a STUN/TURN server so NATed clients can discover each other. You don't have to worry about Telefonica or anyone else eavesdropping.
Does this affect the end to end encryption mechanism of WebRTC (at least for Internet users)?
In other words, can Telefonica make it easy to spy on all Firefox Hello talks, or only on the browser-to-phone ones? (which is to be expected, I guess).
From my understanding of the WebRTC spec, as long as your TURN/STUN server is trusted (which it is, the CA and relay are both run by Mozilla) it doesn't matter if the network is untrustworthy.
Telefonica is a global telecommunications company. (I've never seen them in the US, but they are very common in latin america) Not sure what they have to do with a web video chat system.
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.
As an example of WebRTC this is pretty decent... but please work on getting navigator.getUserMedia to screen-capture into a stream more easily; right now, the browsers' screen-capturing apis are extremely wonky and difficult to build applications with.
It'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.
>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.
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.
Going with that line, was the inclusion of Hello such a complex thing that it needed to be bought in from outside of Mozilla - I'd assumed that using WebRTC as a video chat component made things [relatively] quite facile which is why there are so many implementations popping up.
What's the essential feature that Telefonica brings to the table that makes it worth Mozilla compromising their brand across 500 million installs [using Wikipedia figures there] - that's essentially saying that what Telefonica bought to the table is worth, what, > $5 million [assuming 10¢ per install for the brand placement]. Can you expand on the "win/win" part on the Mozilla, and their supporters, side?
>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.
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.
There's already an FAQ entry [1] on "Where is the Firefox Hello button?", and the answer is not an intuitive one. It would have been OK to display the button by default.
I am happy to see Firefox adding any sort of functionality as long as they dont break the web standards. For example it would be bad if Firefox Hello comes as "hello.firefox.com" but does not work in Chrome.
But if it comes as a Firefox only extension I am fine with it.
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).
I used it when it was named Firebird, and it was buggy. I remember being amazed when Google released Chrome, and Safari was available as a buggy mess on Windows.
I still miss Mozilla Composer and Microsoft Frontpage for writing abysmal HTML with <strong> everywhere.
When is anyone going to make a pure WebRTC service for calling phone lines that would work in the browser? All existing ones require some native code plugins. Not sure why no one made such service yet.
Twilio Client (https://www.twilio.com/webrtc) does this through just JavaScript and webrtc, using Twilio as the bridge. granted you need to wire up to the JavaScript, but it's fairly simple.
Do they have a WebRTC based service for users (not for developers) similar to Google Talk / Hagnouts phone calling which doesn't necessarily create a dedicated phone number for you, but allows calling other phones? I'm not interested in building my own service using their API, I want simply to use one like that without a need to debug weird issues in native plugins.
So, what's your workflow when you need to see someone's screen? Please note: You might talk to this someone for the first time and (s)he might not be an IT person.
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.
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 flame dev phones for FirefoxOS I wouldn't be too surprised if within the decade they are dominant in areas of the world that don't have an installed base ( rural india, sub-saharan africa outside of SA, etc. ).
Remember that more people are going to acquire mobile internet devices in the next 5 years than were on the internet in 1998.
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.
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.
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 idea to have WebRTC as a part of the browser and not as an fairly autonomous plugin/extension (bundled with browser default packaging, no problems here). Tight vs loose coupling.
You know, one thing I absolutely love about Flash is that I can completely remove or selectively disable it as I see fit. ;)
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
Lately I'd been bothered by poor quality experience and sometimes even spam requests on Skype. Hangouts was never my thing and Firefox Hello seems like a breath of fresh air just at the right time. Keep it up!
I want my browser to ring when there is an incoming call.
Firefox should have an open socket connection to Mozilla servers and deliver services thru that, just like android cloud messaging, like alerts, notifications, push apis, etc.
Funding such services is a big decision for them -- they're the ones that have to support it, keep it up, and pay for it (for the life of the service). As they make money in a distinctly different way from Google, they don't have the same positive feedback loop -- Google is happy to provide you free web services because you are the product.
Firefox Hello does have an open socket connection to Mozilla servers. This is why once you give out the link, Hello can ring the browser to indicate someone has joined the conversation.
Since Hello currently doesn't have a Friends list or a way to utilize existing social networks, passing a link to a friend is how you give them permission to ring your browser.
Firefox is a browser. Can you please stop with the feature creep? That'd be lovely. Remember, you're a browser, not an operating system. Oh, you'd like to be an operating system? Cool, then make an OS (o hai there Firefox OS) and keep that functionality there. Stop adding extra features that are not needed to browse the internet.
It seems only Lynx cares about an authentic node-to-node / client-to-server relationship without all the privacy concerns :-(
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-OS.
If people don't voice their opinion against this direction, then Mozilla will continue down this path. I don't think it's too much to ask a web browser to be a web browser and nothing more.
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.
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 more polished state before open-sourcing it, mainly just pointing out that for good/bad, Mozilla does happen to keep the entirety of the process very open.