As far as I remember it uses WebRTC on Chrome, that's how it manages to be plugin free there. But there's subtle differences in browser implementations w.r.t WebRTC, it's one of those... standards. WebRTC is also incredibly hard to debug from browsers.
So is our WebRTC web conferencing platform. I just tested a firefox-to-chrome video call, and it works fine. Hangouts, however, wants me to install a plugin on firefox. WTF!?!
There's no reason why hangouts can't work on Firefox. In my experience, firefox actually works better than Chrome, due to it having implemented the applyConstraints API.
Hangouts switched to WebRTC and NaCl (for video processing like hats) in Chrome back in 2014, but still requires plugins (NPAPI or ActiveX) for any other browsers.
The WebRTC team has released a polyfill [0] for browser incompatibilities so that would not really be a excuse for them, especially given the fact they have some of the top web engineers around.
Your experience from years ago, in the age of rapid releases, is like ancient history. WebRTC is supported on firefox, and I've used it with no problems.
lol thanks man, I know I'm an old-man in Internet years, I'm sure that it works now but then why is the Google Hangouts team temporarily not supporting it?
I see "Extension: Google Hangouts" in Chrome Task Manager[1], but I don't see anything Hangouts-related in chrome://extensions/. Seems that it's good old npapi plugin, but built-in into chrome, like Flash and NaCl.
Most of the nonstandard features that Hangouts uses are built into Chromium and the JS APIs it exposes to Hangouts. In particular, SDES, google-ICE, RTP data channels, and plan B are all nonstandard features exposed that way. [1]
Safari still does not support WebRTC, and users must enable Flash on sites that require it. They've merged in a few commits [1], but their implementation is still lacking [2].
Is it using a plugin in Chrome also?