
Firefox Hello - ajankovic
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/hello/
======
windlep
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](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.

~~~
pekk
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.

~~~
gcb0
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.

~~~
justinschuh
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.

~~~
azakai
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.

~~~
justinschuh
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](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.

~~~
azakai
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,

[https://github.com/dherman/asm.js/](https://github.com/dherman/asm.js/)

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).

~~~
justinschuh
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.

~~~
azakai
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.

------
Sir_Substance
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.

~~~
reidrac
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/](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.

EDIT: typos

~~~
rquirk
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.

~~~
ams6110
Would be very easy to have a website that coordinated this. Even pastebin
would do pretty easily.

------
BSousa
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.

~~~
pnathan
I am bummed - I was hoping it was just straight up peer to peer video. Why do
we need an intermediary?

~~~
johntb86
Computers behind some types of NATs can't use peer-to-peer video:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_N...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_NAT)

------
nothrabannosir
I hate being "that guy", but what about sites like
[https://appear.in/](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.

I.o.w.: why is this not just a website?

~~~
UberMouse
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.

Firefox Hello also is a website, it's just running inside the browser.
[http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/compon...](http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/components/loop/content/)

------
AdmiralAsshat
Do they have the specs anywhere on their encryption?

~~~
mbrubeck
Here's a good summary:

[http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/82/slides/rtcweb-13.pdf](http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/82/slides/rtcweb-13.pdf)

The peer-to-peer WebRTC connection uses DTLS+SRTP:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Transport_Layer_Secur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Transport_Layer_Security)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-
time_Transport_Pro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-
time_Transport_Protocol)

------
suyash
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?

~~~
72deluxe
I am not sure giving the browser permission to poll your entire screen via an
API is a good idea - think of the possible abuses.

------
cjensen
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.

[1] about:config is not a valid value of simple

~~~
criley2
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 "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.

It's a shame what's happening to the web.

~~~
nolok
This is a thread about firefox, when you make an answer entirely about chrome.
This is neither the place nor the time for your rant.

~~~
dmix
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.

[0] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-0...](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-07/)

~~~
azakai
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.

------
caractacus
Just what does the 'powered by Telefonica' bit mean?

~~~
aroch
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/10/16/mozilla-and-
telefon...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/10/16/mozilla-and-telefonica-
partner-to-simplify-voice-and-video-calls-on-the-web/)

Presumably offering routing servers and transit. Plus Telefonica bought
TokBox[1], whose tech powers the backend

[1] [https://tokbox.com/](https://tokbox.com/)

~~~
higherpurpose
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).

~~~
aroch
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.

WebRTC by itsself is not MITM resistant

------
ffn
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.

------
sehr
Built with React.js as well!

[http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/compon...](http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/components/loop/content/js/)

~~~
jbeja
Omg, I love react, but you fanboyism is just to far.

------
fiatpandas
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.

~~~
azakai
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _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.

~~~
tedmielczarek
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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?

------
nikolak
>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.

~~~
kleiba
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.

------
jason46
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...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/where-firefox-hello-button)

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..

~~~
jason46
Anybody see a way to change the camera?

------
aragot
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.

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/where-firefox-hello-
but...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/where-firefox-hello-button)

------
tn13
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.

~~~
nsm
It uses webrtc. The link you share will work on any browser that has webrtc.
The icon is only to make things easier if you use firefox.

------
dorfsmay
Is 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.

~~~
dkharrat
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).

------
Shivetya
and here I remember the day this all started because browsers had become
bloated.

~~~
maxerickson
Firefox was always about switching to a user oriented focus. Getting rid of
bloat happened to be a necessary early step on that path.

------
shmerl
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.

~~~
hox
Twilio Client ([https://www.twilio.com/webrtc](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.

~~~
shmerl
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.

------
samvj
Since they're doing it at the browser level, it would have been nice if they
provided screen sharing instead of this.

Google Hangouts-like screen sharing without the need for an account would be
awesome.

------
songco
Oh, when Mozilla add "Share Screen" feature to hello?

~~~
visarga
Use VNC, it's better anyway. I run vnc over a ssh tunnel to make it safer.

~~~
m_mueller
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.

------
skyshine
Does anyone know if they are planning on including an IM client with it. (I
know it doesn't have one yet). Without that it is pretty useless to me.

------
yxhuvud
So 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?

------
anon4
I tried it. It works pretty well over the local lan, at least. What I really
want to see is multi-user chats.

------
mgkimsal
Guess I'm the odd duck out... Crashes every time I try it - 35.0.1 on
Mavericks 10.9.4 :(

~~~
nsm
Please file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org, or you can email me the details
(email in profile) and I'll file it for you.

~~~
mgkimsal
filed (had to get home first)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1127178](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1127178)

Not sure this is necessarily enough info to go on, but it's reproducible on my
end for sure - it wasn't a one-off.

thanks.

------
e0m
Can this support multiple conversations at once? Group chat Sqwiggle / Hangout
style?

~~~
aragot
It doesn't seem so. I've tried with 3 windows (FF Dev, FF and Chrome) and it
says "There are already two people in this conversation."

------
teabee89
I was using vline.com (also using WebRTC) works like a charm.

------
blueskin_
Oh great, more bloat and potential vulns.

Anyone got a way to disable it yet?

------
mp3geek
Does it include IM rather than just video/audio chat?

~~~
nothrabannosir
no, unfortunately :(

~~~
m_mueller
well that's a real bummer. I was hoping for a decent Skype replacement.

------
minusSeven
All the negativity aside, anyone knows how this works ?

------
tobico
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.

~~~
olefoo
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/](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.

~~~
drdaeman
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.

~~~
olefoo
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.

~~~
drdaeman
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. ;)

~~~
mkal_tsr
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

------
dyeje
The logo reminds me of HipChat.

------
mikelbring
Is it available for Chrome?

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monsterix
Super! Looks great works great too!

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!

~~~
suyash
another problem with tools like Skype and Google Hangout is the number of
concurrent participants.

~~~
jrochkind1
How many does Firefox Hello support? I can't figure out from the page if it
supports more than 2 -- which makes me think it's probably 2.

------
Eleutheria
Sending a link is stupid.

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.

~~~
hardwaresofton
Mozilla != Google

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.

------
dionyziz
Why is this even a thing?

------
mkal_tsr
I've updated my user.js helper/repo to disable Hello/"codename Loop" \-
[https://github.com/m-kal/PrivatePanda](https://github.com/m-kal/PrivatePanda)

\-----

Dear Mozilla,

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 :-(

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

~~~
mkal_tsr
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.

~~~
toolz
Then your argument is against webRTC, not Hello.

~~~
mkal_tsr
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.

~~~
tedmielczarek
Yes, because no other browser vendor ever does that. _cough_ Google _cough_.

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

