
Remove Firefox Hello from FF49 - onli
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287827
======
lmedinas
I don't get why Firefox tends to add and remove feature so often. Even if it's
because of money, this is hurting the user base.

Firefox Hello was probably an atempt to fuel WebRTC or provide some
capabilities to Firefox OS. But it was included in the main distribution -
Firefox - spending resources for what ?

~~~
scrollaway
Not just that. Mozilla is completely losing focus. They used to stand for
"keeping the web open" and they've been doing a shit job of it lately.

* Messing up the marketing behind critical projects (Persona) and then shutting them down when their usage is too low for their taste.

* Axing Thunderbird, one of the last usable non-web-based email clients. I don't like nor use TB, but maintaining a decent email client cant be that hard for Mozilla, and it _is_ important for the web.

* Putting a ton of money into Firefox OS, an atrociously bad and slow OS that had the worst mobile UX I've ever experienced. Then putting even more money into the Flame so that they can have a bad OS on dedicatedly-bad hardware.

* Constantly messing up feature development on Firefox with Hello, Pocket and more, all pointing to Mozilla clearly not understanding the Firefox userbase.

* In the mean time, Firefox is still far slower than chrome. Scrolling especially. Gmail and irccloud are unusable for me on Firefox. My own project hits Firefox's performance issues (compare seeking on this player in Chrome/Firefox: [https://hsreplay.net/replay/vZEz7JoNnfgVo34HJUHhEF](https://hsreplay.net/replay/vZEz7JoNnfgVo34HJUHhEF) \- Firefox is a solid 10x slower).

So to recap: Axing critical projects in a market they understand, so that they
can spend the money on futile projects in a market they don't understand.
Introducing controversial new features in Firefox while the browser is still
far slower than Chrome, losing what's left of their market share. And this is
just the big stuff, I could go on for another 10 paragraphs.

Mozilla is heading into a mountain. They need to seriously rethink their
structure and priorities if they want to avoid a crash.

Edit/PS: Most of these issues are structural. Pocket's functionality is useful
in a web browser. A truly-free mobile OS/smartphone is also something we need.
And foss communications are extremely important to the web, which is currently
locked in to hangouts/messenger. But Mozilla is messing all these up at every
corner; underestimating costs, underestimating effort, misunderstanding (being
disconnected from) their userbase, not marketing anything properly and giving
up too easily.

~~~
boriskourt
I agree with many of your points. I just want to note that Firefox OS aligned
100% with keeping the web open. There is a vast group of users that only have
a mobile device and can only get online through their phone. Their entire
'web' experience is through this medium.

Firefox OS in its pre-shutdown iteration did not serve these people perfectly
yet, but it was well on its way to be a solid choice for them. A choice that
held their values first, not just the values of western consumers trimmed to
fit.

And now there are no 'open' choices for an open mobile internet device (below
50USD) The cheap knockoff Android phones that dominate that market are
preloaded with untrustworthy applications, and ship with unverifiable
firmware. The latter is almost never updateable to anything recent or patched
for security. This makes for a very exploitative, dangerous web, and it grows
more so as it grows more integral to peoples livelihood.

I applaud Mozilla for starting it, but I think the decision to shutter the
whole initiative was incredibly damaging. At the very least because now it,
falsely, appears to be a cautionary tale to anyone else that may wish to
attempt this initiative.

~~~
scrollaway
I agree; see the PS I just edited in.

Firefox OS (or more generally, a free phone&OS) is something I do believe is
needed but Mozilla had the _completely_ wrong approach towards it. They
severely underestimated how much effort is involved. I heard from several
mozillians the attitude was "we'll just do everything in HTML5 and gecko will
do just fine". (Sounds familiar? It was Jobs' vision for iOS. See how that
turned out.)

They didn't understand how much work is involved into making not just a
platform, but also an OS (with all the builtin apps, making them not suck is a
prerequisite) and the hardware itself. My Flame's only redeeming quality was
that the battery died after a week, which kept me from finding out more issues
with it.

I don't know that FxOs was ever a solid choice. It was barely ever even a
choice. I wish Mozilla would've just funded or partnered with one of several
existing players in that space, such as Jolla.

~~~
bobajeff
>I wish Mozilla would've just funded or partnered with one of several existing
players in that space, such as Jolla.

They did. They partnered with Meego (The Intel and Nokia lead platform.).
Remember Meego?

------
niftich
On this thread about 'reducing flash usage in Firefox' [1] a few days ago, I
articulated a point that I've been witnessing for a while: Mozilla products
have three distinct audiences, and their wants and needs are often
contradictory.

These audiences are, in increasing order of vocalness:

[a] the impressionable; the next-wave of web user who has recently gotten
online

[b] the alternative-seeker; the average web user who is uneasy with Google

[c] the idealist; the open web, open-source advocate

There is, of course, some amount of overlap between the audiences. But Chrome
(despite Chromium), Edge, and Safari are largely missing audience [c]
entirely; some of audience [b] will try to avoid any Chromium-derived product.

These and other interactions create conflicting pressures between people who
want Firefox have close feature-parity with Chrome, and people who want
Firefox to stick closer to the mission of providing an open, elegant,
minimalist browser open to user customization.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691)

------
Brakenshire
Never really understood why people were strongly opposed to Firefox Hello. As
far as I understand, it's a minimal wrapper on WebRTC. Seems to be no argument
on bloat, perhaps a minimal argument on confusing the user? Or was there some
privacy implication I hadn't heard of?

~~~
favadi
It is just not useful for anything. You can't tell your friends to install
Firefox for a video call.

~~~
iamd3vil
You don't need Firefox for a video chat. It sends a link and you can open it
in any browser.

------
qwertyuiop924
Thank GOD. Hello wasn't a bad idea, but nobody used it, and it sure as heck
didn't belong in firefox's default distribution.

~~~
kirkdouglas
It seems that they will make Hello an add-on instead.

~~~
morganvachon
Which they should have done with Pocket as well. Yet it lives on, forcing
those who don't want it to go through the steps to disable it. It can't be
completely removed without gutting it from the codebase and rebuilding it
yourself.

I'm not saying a clipping service like Pocket is bad, or a WebRTC service like
Hello shouldn't exist, but it should never have been part of the base install.
One of the greatest strengths of browsers like Firefox and Chrome is the
ability to use plugins, yet Mozilla chose to forego that twice over.

~~~
sp332
Right-click -> remove from toolbar. Unless you count that as two "steps".

~~~
morganvachon
It's a little more complicated than that. Pocket is part of the application
itself, not a plugin, and you have to go into about:config to fully disable
it, else it will continue to have access to anything you type into the address
bar.

[http://www.howtogeek.com/228863/how-to-remove-firefox-
hello-...](http://www.howtogeek.com/228863/how-to-remove-firefox-hello-and-
pocket-from-firefox/)

~~~
sp332
Do you have a source for that last part?

~~~
morganvachon
Common sense. One has to assume that Pocket will take the path of least
resistance, seeking constant read access to the URL bar so it can perform a
one-click save. It may be possible for them to come up with a way to get the
URL without having read access, perhaps by having Firefox pass the URL only
when asked for by Pocket, but I saw nothing like that in the Firefox code when
this partnership was first announced. Granted, I haven't looked since, but why
would they change it? And since Pocket's code is proprietary and closed,
there's no way to audit what they do and how they do it.

So, one has to assume a lazy, insecure method on their part until they prove
otherwise. Assuming benevolence and diligence from a company that is blatantly
anti-open-source is foolish.

------
SlySherZ
My question to everyone is: What is the reason for a _browser_ to have an
integrated _chat client_?

In my opinion, it doesn't make any sense. We should keep separated tools that
do different jobs, and make each one general enough that it can be used in
every situation.

~~~
gpvos
I used to agree, but even I now sometimes use the camera of my phone.

~~~
adrusi
There's an important difference between hardware and software. Hardware takes
up space. It would probably be better to have a dedicated DSLR and a dedicated
radio communication device that have a standard method of interoperability, if
not for the fact that you'd have to carry them both around. You'd have better
quality photos, and could take both wide-angle and zoomed shots, and you could
swap out your camera to suit your needs, instead of always having the one
camera soldered onto your phone.

Software takes up no space.

~~~
gpvos
I agree and understand; I was being a bit facetious there. However, I actually
still don't quite understand why browsers can play video and audio. I much
rather play those in dedicated software, to the extent that I regularly view
the source of such pages to figure out the URL of the media to be played. I
guess this is because of ease of use for the average user, and occasionally
for DRM, but it annoys me to no end. Playing all video or audio in the same
software means a much better and consistent user interface for things like
rewind, pause, full screen, etc.

~~~
adrusi
Definitely agree. If you want a remedy for the specific problem of audio and
video, you could come up with some browser + youtube-dl integration. I've been
using such a setup for the past year, watching web audio and video in mpv.
It's great to have a consistent video player interface, as you said, but you
also get powerful features you don't often see in web players, like gamma
adjustment, playback speed control and an audio compressor.

------
amq
Next on the list: Pocket, closed-source EME, Flash.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Are you suggesting that Firefox should remove support for EME and legacy
plugins like Flash?

It seems like like that will achieve little more than pissing off their users.

~~~
amq
Firefox should at least ask users before enabling closed-source plugins, and
give a simple way to enable/disable them like any other plugin.

Or even better: distribute a clean browser and let users install things like
Flash and EME as plugins.

~~~
blowski
They do - if you don't like it, don't install it. Or even fork it. The default
distribution is trying to provide the best experience for the majority of
users and Flash is unfortunately necessary for that.

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GrayShade
I suspect they found some really bad security problems. The bug in cause is
listed as blocking two other private issues.

~~~
reubenmorais
The blocked bugs are not security problems.

~~~
davidgerard
If not security, what are the reasons for Mozilla bugs to go private?

~~~
ianbicking
Hello has been a partner project, and partners are not generally as
transparent as Mozilla so it requires somewhat more careful release of
information.

