Google Hangouts 4.0: now simpler, faster, more beautiful | Hacker News Reader

Google Hangouts 4.0: now simpler, faster, more beautiful

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136 pointsrey12rey105 comments

Of course, I still have to run Chrome just for a slow and terrible browser interface on the desktop. Which was a major annoyance (especially since for some reason using Safari extends battery life for a huge amount) that caused me to switch to Telegram.

I ache for the old GTalk windows application. Tiny, lightweight, standalone, and simple. Very Unix, really.

I ache for the old GTalk Android application too. Also very Unix, then Google had to go and be all walled-garden. I hate how I have to have three separate IM clients, each with its own half-baked implementation on at least one platform, just so I can talk to all my friends.

Too bad corporate interests are against openness. I really would have liked it if all services were interoperable with one another.

Their Android application still didn't support federated contacts even when it was based on XMPP.

> Their Android application still didn't support federated contacts even when it was based on XMPP

If I remember correctly, it did, and then they removed the feature.

They claim it was due to spam, but really, there are a number of ways to solve that problem without removing the feature entirely (ranging from better spam-prevention heuristics to requiring an explicit opt-in).

Hangouts is in all ways inferior to Google Talk. It's really a shame.

it was probably the best ui google has done with the exception of their home page.

Oh yes, the old GTalk was a really good software. I think the best messenger app I used, ever.

Why not use Pidgin or Adium?

The convenience of being able to use several devices (laptop, tablet, phone) to seamlessly continue conversations is pretty much the main reason I like these services.

Pidgin and Adium do not support (transferrable) chat history and do not show messages when I'm offline, which is a huge usability hit. Especially when people talking on the other side expect that the messages are visible to you even if you're not immediately online.

FWIW, conversations originated from Pidgin do show up in chat history in the Hangouts interface. Or at least that's been my experience. I agree that sync in the other direction (to Pidgin), and support for offline messages, would be really useful.

I did see a reverse-engineered Hangouts client at some point; does anyone know if this works well enough?

> Pidgin and Adium do not support (transferrable) chat history and do not show messages when I'm offline, which is a huge usability hit.

This times a million. GChat (now "hangouts"), though their XMPP interface, attempts to send new messages only to the "active" client, which means that if you try to use Pidgin or Adium (I used both myself for a number of years; they're fantastic applications) or any other XMPP client, you'll lose messages in Adium/Pidgin for a few minutes whenever you move the mouse cursor in gmail or peek at messages in the hangouts phone app. You'll never see those messages in Adium/Pidgin, and there's no way (afaik) to tell that you're not getting messages, either; it's like they don't exist.

Google, however, sends all the messages to its own clients; you never miss messages there. And so, to me, this smells like a clever (and intentional) strategy to cripple third-party clients.

Whoa! Thank you for this. I stopped using pidgin because of this and couldn't sort out what was causing me to miss IMs.

It's happening less frequently recently, but I occasionally miss messages even in hangouts. Technically they get sent but no notification is ever shown. It's happened to both my fiance and me. I am not sure if our accounts are bugged or what. I did see a google group thread where other people were complaining about the same issue.

This happens to me as well. I've found the workaround is to always make hit "home" after finishing with the app before turning off the screen again. I've tested it, and if I leave hangouts as the on screen app when I turn off the screen it doesn't notify me of new messages.

> Google, however, sends all the messages to its own clients; you never miss messages there. And so, to me, this smells like a clever (and intentional) strategy to cripple third-party clients.

They miss notifications and occasionally messages on their own clients too, but I guess it isn't as consistently repeatable.

I've been using Trillian Pro for this for many years, and it's worth every penny. My history is always in sync between my Windows, OSX, and iOS devices, and Trillian's desktop interface is so much better than Gmail's chat interface.

Do you use Trillian in conjunction with the google-native clients? I seem to recall trying Trillian -- years ago, though -- and finding that it had the same issues as Pidgin and Adium, losing messages whenever you were active in another client.

I have seen weirdness from time to time, but mostly no. I just asked someone to send me a test message while the Gmail window was focused, and it came to both locations. Oddly, when I send a reply from Trillian, the chat window closes in Gmail.

Pidgin/Adium also no longer support group conversations for Hangouts chats, at least as of a few months ago.

I know this isn't ideal for most people, but you can run a low-power server (Rpi2!) at home with a Tmux session running and Finch/IRC open therein. You can catch up on your messages from any device.

I don't mind a Chrome App for a first iteration, but I completely mind when it's the excuse to neglect development on the desktop platform.

Another example could be Authy.

Are there any limitations I should be aware of before trying to switch to Telegram?

"Roll their own" encryption is the main one. Search Hackernews for older, but indepth reviews of it.

Just ignore any marketing claims they make about security. It's no more or less secure than any other platform like Hangouts.

It received a lot of heavy duty criticism when initially launched because security was at the time its primary selling point. It looks like they've at least partially pivoted away from that and now are focusing on making what appears to be a smoother, faster Hangouts.

Hmm... haven't seen anything standing (besides their security being on par with Hangouts).... I guess the lack of SMS integration on Android and the fact that the contacts are identified via phone number?

Its integrated into gmail, even in Firefox, with the gtalk plugin.

I use KTP for the hangouts chat part, and then my gmail tab rings when people call me on it. Its suboptimal, and a huge usability loss from 5 years ago when Google wasn't pushing proprietary bullshit but instead had jingle, but it at least barely works still.

Remove the Flash plugin from Chrome. That put its resources below Safari for me. Before I did that, Chrome would spin up my fans just by existing.

>especially since for some reason using Safari extends battery life for a huge amount

on a side note i see several people say this but using a 2015 mbp I don't really see this battery draining behavior. Can anyone point to benchmarks or has anyone actually done a real test on this assumption ?

The recent spike you've seen might trace back to http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-ener...

I make no claim about it's veracity, just saw the headline recently - probably on HN.

The BatteryBox folks did some tests and posted the results:

http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-ener...

>> TL;DR; If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of 1 hour of total battery life by using Chrome. Firefox is a little better, but Safari is the clear winner. You’ll want to use Safari if you want to get the most battery out of your laptop.

If you don't have Flash installed the power savings will go a long way towards making up for the difference between the two.

The Verge claims[0] 13 hours and 18 minutes for Safari, 9 hours and 45 minutes for Chrome on the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro 13".

[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8381447/chrome-macbook-bat...

There were a pile of power management fixes coming in Chrome 45 - see https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF

...currently out there in the beta update stream, shouldn't be far off now.

Seems likely to fall behind again when El Capitan is released and Safari begins using Metal.

That's odd, the renderers fix seems to be Mac only. Is it already fixed on other platforms or is that simply not a priority? Chrome seems to have a higher than IE battery drain on Windows also.

On Linux, I regularly observe Chrome continuously consuming one whole core. Typically anything with a nice CSS animation seems to be implemented game-loop style: while (true) { render(update(delta)); }. Disabling things like spinner animations on a web page causes CPU load to plummet.

At least a single core and most of your memory.

Hangouts is "okay" at best.

I continue to be amazed that companies like Microsoft and Google are so bad at instant messaging that upstarts like Slack can eat their lunch with essentially hosted IRC and a pretty client.

I for one wish Slack was the new standard messaging app for everything and everyone.

At $5/person/month I don't think so.

I just like the way it works, it doesn't have to be Slack specifically.

Defiantly not any better than Skype from 10 years ago or MSN messenger video calling. "Progress!"

Not so much an "upstart like Slack", more like "a giant pool of upstarts, the best of which happens to be Slack." When looking at it like this, it's easy to see why Microsoft and Google (or any big company for that matter) has trouble competing.

You continue to be amazed? Really?

Companies that specialize in one thing will always trump those who have to spread their efforts along many areas. It's the difference between depth and breadth.

And here I was excited thinking that they'd finally fixed the terrible performance and interface of the browser app.

I hear what you are saying. The android app has horrible bugs and atrocious performance as an SMS client and Google Voice client. I am hopeful this release addresses those items.

Most of my friends actually moved to Skype because of this.

Interesting, poor performance (and also chewing through battery) was why I moved from Skype.

Yeah, the browser addon for Hangouts is literally the worst thing Google has ever done, IMO. On the Mac it is even worse.

I would be seriously surprised if anyone at Google actually used this POS.

100% agreed. I use it because I have to not because I want to. It literally messes up the command tab/command tilde behavior. This in addition to being a terrible interface overall and the general nuisance of notifications not being synced up with Android

Does it support WebRTC phone calling from the browser?

Hangouts annoys me for a number of reasons however. And the biggest one is the fact that Google used it as a pretense to kill their federated XMPP service. This literally cut more than a half of my contacts off (i.e. those who use Google), because they don't accept bugs for enabling server to server encryption anymore.

I don't remember being upset about Google messing up things more than that.

UDPATE: Nah, still no WebRTC. Hangouts - fail.

    Hangouts needs the Google Talk plugin to make calls.

Really? I'm 99% sure that it's been using WebRTC for about a year now.

It might be using it partially, but it still relies on that plugin blob. No idea why they can't use a pure WebRTC solution.

According to what I can find it doesn't use a blob under Chrome. Perhaps it's using a browser whitelist?

I'm using Firefox.

Hey there! So just to understand how you use your clients, you want something that can federate XMPP (so you can chat with everyone that you've chatted with beforehand), but also be able to escalate upwards to a WebRTC call?

No, I'm not using Google service for chatting. I used it only for phone calling. Those are unrelated issues and I just mentioned both in the same post (sorry if it was confusing).

For IM I use another XMPP server and client. However I had a lot of contacts who were Google Talk users. At some point, most XMPP servers made server to server encryption mandatory. Which essentially cut off all contacts who use Google Talk from me (since my server can't anymore federate with Google Talk which remained insecure and refused to accept any bug reports about it).

* It's about time. My wife complains about getting random SMS messages that turn out to be replies to group texts. She started giving out her direct cell number instead of her Google Voice number because of this problem. Hopefully with this she'll be able to use Voice exclusively.

I've been dogfooding this for a couple weeks, and I am very happy to be able to say that that feature (finally!) works, at least for me. Used to drive me nuts.

Downloaded the APK - won't let me create MMS when set to always send from my Google Voice, and when set to send from "Last number" group MMS is created with my actual #.

I'm praying that it's a server side flag and not a case of Google Apps Free users getting skewered somehow.

I use Google Apps Free for my personal account, so I doubt that's your issue.

But I don't think I've initiated any group MMSes, just received them (and subsequently replied, which worked). You might be hitting a bug that I didn't. :/

Google recently confirmed that it's a server-side switch, so I'm guessing for me it's just not enabled yet. They're waiting for the rollout to switch it on.

The only features I want are setting availability status and getting online notifications for contacts.

IMs have had those features for decades, and contrary to Google's narrow worldview not everybody is online and available 24/7.

This post is about the android app. How do you define "online" when you're on a phone with a data connection, an extremely common use case for this scenario? (Or rather, what makes someone "offline" here?)

Maybe it's better to track whether the user is busy or free-to-interrupt, which I think is what Google is already doing. (I believe there is also an option to broadcast if you're on your phone or your desktop, although I don't fully understand why it's that useful)

Edit: I looked up Google's documentation, and apparently they do indeed track Online/Offline in the hangouts app [1], but from what I understand, installing the android app with a data connection = online. I'm not sure what Offline means.

I guess the parent is asking for notifications about the Online/Offline change, which does not exist. (But again, if installing the app means you're always Online in hangouts, you won't get any notifications anyway)

[1] https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3111918?hl=en

Has the phone been sleeping / screen off / locked for a long time? Probably "offline" or something else describes this better.

Is user actively using their phone? "online"

It's simple. IM clients have figured this out years ago.

> Has the phone been sleeping / screen off / locked for a long time?

Mine has been sleeping for an hour, but I'm right next to it and would answer an IM if sent.

So no, not so simple.

That's why Hangouts has Online / Idle / Offline

> How do you define "online" when you're on a phone with a data connection, an extremely common use case for this scenario?

Perhaps that's why he asked for the ability to set such status manually, in the manner of desktop IM clients.

I'm only online abroad when I have a WiFi connection which is only a couple of times a day.

This continues to be an issue with this app.

Prior to TextSecure deprecating the encrypted SMS option, I used Voice+ (on Cyanogenmod) to send encrypted SMS over Google Voice.

Since that method has been deprecated, the trustworthiness of SMS is lacking, and Google's insistence on not providing a "native" SMS experience for Google Voice (for both Voice and Hangouts apps) is annoying.

I continue to be unable to use an alternative SMS app for ostensibly a SMS service (Google Voice), like I am able to with a hack like Voice+.

Using Hangouts forces me to use unencrypted messaging for Google chat, while also forcing me to be always online.

My current setup is Voice+ with Google Voice and TextSecure to provide encryption communications with other TextSecure users, along with SMS fallback for contacts who are not using TextSecure. I can continue to use TextSecure for Google Voice SMS, however, which is not possible in Lollipop or in any supported way via Google products on Android.

It is disappointing that the biggest reason that I cannot upgrade to Lollipop is due to Google locking users to either Voice or Hangouts for Google Voice SMS. (I really don't care to use multiple messengers for short messages if I can help it).

I'm also using Conversations for encrypted (OTR) messaging over Google chat -- who knows how long that will last. I could live with this if Google offered OTR (preferably) messaging natively from Google apps, but I am not comfortable talking in the clear, especially when it is so easy not to, by using non Google apps/platforms.

Perhaps this is all my fault for using Google Voice as my primary contact number - but that is specifically the use case sold to users - replace your public phone number (... so that we can harvest your conversations)!

Google doesn't make it easy to be private -- likely not a primary use case considered by Google here, but the result is wanting.

> IMs have had those features for decades

Yes, and 90% of my contacts have been “away” 100% of the time for just as long. Presence information is useless, I’ve been ignoring it for years.

What is the problem you want to avoid? People interrupting you. This is much better solved with a client side option that you control, without relying on the other user’s judgment.

I really like the Do Not Disturb feature in iOS and OS X: it works for the entire system instead of a single program and I fully control it, it doesn’t depend on you interpreting my signal that I’m “busy”.

Send me whatever messages you want any time you want, if I can respond I will, if I don’t want to be interrupted my phone won't make a bleep no matter how hard you push.

Preemptive rebuttal: “the system can turn off notifications when I set myself as away” then why set away in the first place? It has no meaning other than “do not disturb me”.

I CAN FINALLY GET MMS MESSAGES WITH MY GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER!

Sorry for the caps. But that's been mildly annoying for a long time, so its kind of exciting to finally have a complete messaging system on google voice.

But don't do it if you have Android :)

I guess that's yet another Google feature everyone outside the US can give a flying fuck about.

MMS for photos and videos have been in google voice (when used via hangouts) for about a year[1]. The (still very exiting) new feature is support for group texts which piggyback on MMS. Previously incoming group texts would appear as SMS messages from each individual recipient and it was not possible to send messages to the entire group.

[1] http://lifehacker.com/google-voice-gets-native-mms-support-b...

I just wish Hangouts would auto-archive Hangouts that I leave. The interface for "Archiving" all the hangouts that I left on the web, or via the browser extension is terrible, 4-5 clicks to archive each one. I keep the Android app installed only so that I can use it's multi-select and archive-all functionality.

I personally have moved on to Google Messenger for MMS. It's simpler and faster. I like the feature of being able to color-code my contacts in conversations too. It just makes it a lot easier to read through a group text that way.

Hangouts is cool and all, but I wish Google would just decide which app they are going to push and get on with it.

I don't think IMs and SMS/MMS texts should mix. Period. Leave the legacy stuff to its own apps, and we just move on to new stuff without having to support that legacy burden. It's exactly why I welcomed TextSecure killing the SMS integration (it was even more annoying that it was asking you for it by default, as Hangouts does, too).

The mix would be great if Google wouldn't halfass it and made it like iMessage. If user is on Hangouts and online, send Hangout message. If not online/not on Hangouts, send SMS/MMS.

How hard can it be?

Title could be updated to reflect that this only affects the Android app.

They should just concentrate on making it work properly on android

The amount of times it thinks I'm in a call and I'm not is far too many. Or it doesn't dial. Or doesn't ring. And if turn the video on there's a good chance it'll crash so hard I'll have to force stop it.

Which is a shame as I really like hangouts

Also the sms part should be better integrated, why can't I view/send sms on my phone from gmail?

For anybody else looking for the APK, here's the relevant Android Police article with a link to the APK.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/08/10/dreams-do-come-true-...

Can I actively control my visibility settings, as with every other IM client? Inability to control my own visibility makes Hangouts an absolute non-starter for me, and many other people that I talk to. Our only choice is to keep it turned off at all times. Which is a shame, because Google Chat used to be my go-to messaging client.

As long as it crashes less and makes their (woefully unstable) Chrome Boxes need to be re-imaged/restored less... I'll take it.

Hangouts is nice when it works but it's become something of a swear word at my work - even if it makes setting up a conference in a meeting room a lot easier.

> (iOS users recently got many of the same updates).

How is it that Google is still "iOS first." I mean, I love my iPhone and am happy that Google feels the need to update iOS apps before Android. But why? That's like Microsoft being OSX First, it just doesn't make any sense.

Not necessarily. Google Hangouts is still a much integrated experience on Android. iOS also doesn't have the Dialer app for example.

I am not super familiar with the Android App, but the iOS App does have a Dialer that allows you to make phone calls. Are you talking about something else?

Hangouts team has significantly more Android engineers than iOS engineers, but features and bug fixes still take longer on Android. It's as simple as that.

and still backwards incompatible with XMPP? greeeat

I sincerely hope they are fixing the mms integration. The default messaging apps can handle mms from my carrier, hangouts has never worked properly with my carrier for mms

It looks like some of the user experience ideas from Google Messenger have made their way to Google Hangouts. How long does Google plan on supporting two Android SMS/MMS apps?

I've been using Messenger and it's pretty nice. I especially like the ability to search through my messages, something that the Hangouts v4 screenshot doesn't show.

Does anyone else find that, the awfully slow, Hangouts app (on Mac?) randomly open every minimized window? If it wasn't integrated with gmail and we didn't have everyone in the company already using it, Hangouts would be the first product I'd move away from.

I wish they'd stop guzzling battery on iOS. On my iPhone, the two top background activity apps are Facebook and Hangouts, neither of which (sadly) I can actually get rid of since I use the first for work (seriously...) and the second to be reachable to Android users.

XMPP continues to work for Google Chat, so there may be better iOS Google Chat clients. Sorry, I haven't used any, so I can't offer any recommendations.

ChatSecure seems to offer OTR compatibility, so that may be a decent option:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chatsecure-encrypted-secure/...

and should be compatible with OTR Jabber clients on Android like Conversations.

XMPP works for Google Chat in the sense that you can talk to other people who use Google Chat, but not Hangouts - at least not in my roster... So Hangouts is effectively a segregated quasi-XMPP thing that follows its own rules.

So far, there are no real alternatives to Hangouts if you want to talk to people using Hangouts, and that's it. And the XMPP third-party client "ecosystem" is pretty much fossilised...

As to ChatSecure and other alternatives, they all seem somewhat iffy. Before moving back to iOS, I wrote this: http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2014/11/13/0830

...and it's still all mostly valid.

Does anyone else think there is an opportunity for an easier to work with chat/text program?

Ideally it would have a semi open infrastructure like IRC. I would design it with less functionality than XMPP. The clients would be closed source. Or maybe this is Telegram already.

I could never figure out if it is possible to do tabbed chat on the chrome extension. All these windows makes me feel like I am using lync.

I typically don't care about naming too much but "Hangouts" is so awful.

Does it come with end-to-end encryption yet? It's a strange world we live in where I feel my data is safer in a Facebook app than in a Google one.

Is Google still the NSA's secret lap dog?

"Critics are quick to point out that if a user is not paying for a product, they are the product, and of course encrypting notifications from Facebook won't stop the social media behemoth from accessing all the data itself. The only way to protect one's data from Facebook is to stop using Facebook."

http://readwrite.com/2015/06/03/facebook-pgp-encryption

https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

Aral Balkan's talk is a highly effective explanation of this problem. Of course, it's not that popular here given how it exposes the "big data"/"free" malware that is popular in Silicon Valley. Just look at the apparatchik in this thread, talking about features when they should be talking about how to set up a proper federated (and encrypted) protocol.

Why else would Google disable many of the features of XMPP federation? Allowing federated XMPP servers wouldn't give them the surveillance data.

Given the context, mtgx is most likely referring to Facebook-owned WhatsApp's (somewhat opaque) support for end-to-end encryption.

thanks the gods.... hopefully it's better

> We’ve been obsessively fixing bugs and speeding up message delivery to make Hangouts faster and more reliable.

Well, that would be quite a feat if they managed to make it less reliable. The latest version I tried to use was ridiculously buggy, crashing, couldn't join a conversation etc. I was so boggled by how bad it was (Google's app, on Google's OS) I even forgot to be angry for a while

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