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Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android.

Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" :-) He also said that there are whole parts of the codebase that he was not allowed to see, all indications pointing to stuff related to routing the traffic through servers of "the man" ;-)

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Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress.

Social everything means we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains. Phones are doing the same as they're mini-tablets that suck at actual phone calls. Operating systems have taken on mobile centric (and the hideous flatten everything) design that is broken paradigm for a 15" laptop or 24" desktop screen. Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did. All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc.

Nothing at all is user centric any more, it's all about how much lovely data can be sent back to hundreds of places.

The web is a lot prettier these days to be fair, but I don't call that progress if it's at a cost of a 1TB page load.

I could go on, but you get the idea.. :)

> we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains

NoScript really brings this into visibility. I don't mind the domain running scripts. But the 10+ other domains that needs to run a script - sigh. My wife keeps asking my why I put up with it - it's quite simple; I decide if the page I'm about to visit is worth all the extra crap running and tracking me.

NoScript does not show everything. RequestPolicy opens up a lot more.

Personally I prefer uMatrix - it lets you enable specific things across domains instead of a binary allow/deny, and allows global versus per-domain or per-subdomain rules; e.g. I might be fine with one site collecting metrics but not globally.

>Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did.

Sorry, I don't think Pocket and Hello surpasses the junk bundled with Communicator, which came with a custom mail client. Mozilla's mail client is not only not installed with Firefox, but it's also pretty much dead now, in fact.

Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.

Mozilla has terminated development IIRC. This is probably what was meant.

Thanks. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic although it surely looks like it when I read it now. I was genuinely interested to find out about it since it's a program I rely on and if it won't be developed further, I'll have to look for alternatives.

I used Thunderbird daily for the better part of a decade until about 3 months ago. It's nothing personal against the project, which is currently the best serious desktop mail client available afaik. It's simply that Mozilla doesn't care about it anymore since everyone uses webmail now. Thunderbird is doing feature releases about once a year now [0], and Mozilla has pulled most (all?) of its full-time developers [1]. A few months ago, Mitchell Baker sent a message that said they were looking to detach Mozilla from the project completely, partially because it didn't have enough industry-wide impact to be worth Mozilla's resources [2].

The sad fact is that desktop mail clients are going away, and even the big projects like Thunderbird are barely limping along, which I guess is slightly nicer terminology than "pretty much dead"?

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/

[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from...

Call me a dinosaur, but I'll keep using it as long as it is available. Web email clients SUCK.

And there's about 10 million users that evidently have a reason to keep using it:

https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/12/thunderbird-act...

This sounds like my words.:D

So I completely agree. I cringe every time I am forced to use webmail for some reason.

What makes an email client so difficult to write? I don't mean this to sound insulting, I just really don't understand where the complexity is. It seems like you should be able to get to a point where it is feature complete and all development efforts shift to maintenance mode. Or maybe I don't understand what's been going on with Thunderbird and perhaps it's been "done" for years now.

It is basically done. There could be UI refinements and updates to the occasional protocol/security change, but yeah, there's not been much innovation in email standards for a while.

Although, to be honest, email standards are a complete mess in some regards and I suppose this make such an endeavour not as trivial as it looks on first sight.

Just an example: try to create (and use) an IDN-based email address with non-ASCII characters in the local part. You will be amazed how incompatible on so many layers this actually is. I can hardly imagine there weren't dozens of similarly tricky situations where the developers of this, or any other email client for that matter, were forced to make quite serious design choices because of either ambiguity in standards, or widespread lack of support thereof.

You should try Nylas N1

I don't like the fact that it uses an external API. I don't like a third party (other than my mail host) to have access to my email password and messages.

Email was the only other useful part. Thunderbird is not exactly dead, just forgotten. I still run it, since I de-googled, though sadly it's also turning into bloatware.

Netscape had a chat thing, html publisher, and I think something else.

WebRTC, pocket, the webIDE, even things like the dom inspector, style editor etc and pdf are bloat for most mortals. Perfect for some "official" plugins. They managed it for the FF OS simulator.

It's all optional crap that increases bloat and attack surface, except it's not optional.

Why is WebRTC bloat? A lot of people us it for video calls nowadays. Pocket is a neat solution for avoiding having lots of tabs eating your memory, which in turn ends up causing page swapping and messing with your experience.

"pdf are bloat for most mortals"

That's alright, it means in 99% cases it's just a very small javascript file on your disk. No harm done.

Bloat is relative and subjective. I've never used WebRTC, Pocket, or Loop/Hello, so I'd consider them bloat. On the other hand, I need to deal with PDFs fairly frequently, so it's convenient to have a browser that supports them. Someone else is going to have different requirements. I don't have a problem with that, but I'd prefer to have an option to disable or remove the features that I don't need or want.

I'd say the situation now is about the same as it was then. Only the context has changed. Communicator had a mail client and a news client. I used them both over dial-up, back in the day. If enough people still wanted newsreaders, you can bet Mozilla would write one.

> All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc.

They are working on making Pocket a (built-in) add-on. Apparently it's harder than it sounds, but there is some progress going on:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694

Edit: Apparently that bug is fixed and Pocket is a "system addon" in Firefox 46+

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ba655f6bc67

That makes me happier. Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully they did the same for hello.

They did, see my own reply :)

I found out more about "system" addons. There are different types of addons: app-profile, app-system-addons, app-system-defaults, app-global, app-system-local, app-system-share, app-system-user, app-temporary.

The "app-system-defaults" (in my case Pocket & Loop/Hello) don't seem to be shown to the user, but you can find them in the extensions.xpiState config.

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/file/5f2f4297e6bd...

> Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress.

Sigh. If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone? Did you prefer RealPlayer over HTML video? Was WAP better than LTE? Was Windows XP the pinnacle of OS design?

Yeah, sometimes progress is a double-edged sword that outdates some things we used to do. Yes, it's worth the price.

I will look you in the eye and say the Amiga and ST in 1986 were better than Windows or Ubuntu in 2016.

They might have been better at the small subset of things Windows and Ubuntu can do that the Amiga and ST were also capable of, but they are not "better".

A single screwdriver is better than a toolbox at being light and easy to carry. It is not better overall.

But they still make screwdrivers.

And I'll look you right back and call bullshit. I used an Amiga in the late eighties. It was a fantastic machine for its time, certainly more advanced than the contemporary 286 PCs, but Windows 95 was markedly superior (as it should have been, a decade later), let alone modern Windows or Linux.

Yes, sometimes things get screwed up and we get understandably frustrated, but that does not license revisionist history.

> If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone?

Bad example. I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack. I didn't need Yelp, or Google Maps, or even the entire name of the business I was looking for. "I need the number to the printing company on the east side" was enough to get me a name, an address, and the call routed, without paying monthly bandwidth fees or spending seven hundred dollars on a pocket supercomputer.

Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot (sans bandwidth issues).

Worth the price? Sure, but to quote Pulp Fictoin, let's not start beating each other off just yet. There is plenty of room for improvement, and we've lost a lot of ground.

I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.

Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?

> I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack.

OK, my example was simplistic. I want to find the best chicken tacos in San Francisco. I can't call directory enquiries for that - I have go find reviews. Then call to make a reservation at the place, then find driving directions of how to get there, somehow. In a paper road atlas? Am I having to advocate for the benefits of the internet on Hacker News?

> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot

Well of course it was, it only had to run on one platform. Compatibility is a lot easier when that's the case. Today we have HD video being played on mobile devices in your pocket. I can't remember the last time I ran into a compatibility problem with online video.

> I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.

That's a political decision, not a technical regression.

> Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?

No. Can I load, on demand, stunning satellite photography of planets orders of magnitude further away than the moon, on my phone, on the bus to work? You bet.

> That's a political decision, not a technical regression.

It's both. Private supersonic flights are no longer available, and it is more of a pain in the ass to get on the inferior flights that are available.

I could go on, but it's moot -- the only point I'm here to make is that progress always been paired with regression, and it's always going to be a personal decision as to whether the tradeoffs were good ones.

I call BS on the review side. Where is the 'best chicken tacos in San Francisco'?

I have no idea and Yelp is not going to help. So, the fallback is I can ask some friends for advice and directions or use some companies best of list. But, again the internet did almost nothing in this space.

PS: I also had the internet on my phone in 2006 and yes they had maps. EX: http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/08/phones-music-internet-tech-...

Sorry, but I'd be surprised if Google or Siri don't answer your question to "I need the number to the printing company on the east side", it's a pretty trivial thing to lookup. Also, Google and Siri bring you cost efficiency and scale, something you can't easily do with directory enquiries.

> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot.

So Vorbis/MP3 and WebM/H.264 is not good enough for compatibility over all the browsers?

Pining for RealPlayer? That's a new one.

Buffering....

Of course LTE and HTML video is better :p

Having so many apps constantly spitting unnecessary data out to trackers and heaven knows what isn't better. Neither is simple apps that can't cope when you go out of data coverage, which seems to be becoming more common.

I'd rather have gnome 2 than 3, I'd rather have Win 7 than 10 or XP. I don't consider any of them the pinnacle of design, but I don't think they're currently moving in a helpful direction either. There's been precious little progress or innovation in the OS space for years.

I'd rather have google talk, which was small, light, minimal and crucially reliable over hangouts or current skype.

Just because software isn't moving in a way that you personally want doesn't mean it's wrong or that it was objectively "better" before.

We don't have apps that work offline? Maybe look around more. FFS half of the web apps i use work fine offline.

And claiming that there has been no innovation in the OS space for years is silly. There is plenty of innovation, it's just that people don't like change and will instantly reject something that isn't the same as what they are already using. FFS just look at stuff like the ip command or systemd in linux. People lament that it's the end of days because a command is different exactly because they want to innovate past the constraints of the old systems.

And if we are playing the "What i want is what is best" game...

I much prefer Windows 10 over linux now. It's gotten that nice and i'm tired of constantly fixing stuff on my workstation.

And I much prefer current hangouts to the old google talk plugin. "small", "light"? Did you ever use it. You needed to download and install 2 separate programs to get Google Talk video chat working. Sometimes you'd need to do some port forwarding bullshit just to get it to work.

Now i install chrome and sign in, and within a minute hangouts is installed and working.

Don't want to install chrome? Run it from a browser tab by going to https://hangouts.google.com/

Don't want to make a google account? You can video-chat with guests by sending them a unique link.

All of those things were impossible with the old google talk.

Windows 10 is a pretty good OS but has serious issues with drivers (it tries to be clever and breaks stuff). And the startup is sooooo slow and the UI crashes twice before I ever get the chance to give it input.

The Mail, Calendar and OneNote apps kept me hooked. But the lack of a decent terminal was killing me. Also, Skype didn't work properly half the time and the new "Video" and "Messaging" apps built on top of Skype were crashing 90% of the time.

> And the startup is sooooo slow and the UI crashes twice before I ever get the chance to give it input.

Then your installation is clearly broken. No, it's not good, but let's not pretend these issues didn't exist in the "good old days".

Windows 8 came preinstalled with the computer and then just updated to Windows 10 from it. If the main upgrade method is broken, I'm not sure what to believe anymore...

Don't be disingenuous. There isn't a consumer OS out there that can do 100% smooth seamless upgrades between major versions.

OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows all have pretty big issues when doing upgrades.

I haven't really had problems with OS X.

There's the occasional odd package under Linux which remains installed and you need to manually remove it, but nothing unfixable. But I guess that depends more on the underlying OS structure. I'm looking forward to see more widespread usage of Snappy Ubuntu.

Since that is the main way people migrate to Windows 10, I would've expected them to be more careful with it.

Many linux systems don't even support in-place upgrades between major versions. And I don't think i've ever had one work where nothing broke.

RHEL only started supporting it for the transition between 6 and 7 on a like 3 architectures on one edition.

And OSX has it's share of issues. For me personally, updating to El Capitan was the worst upgrade processes i've done in recent memory. From not running the installer but giving no issues, to not finding the harddrive during the install process, to corrupting the current install of yosemite, to bluetooth being broken after the upgrade, and i can't get wifi speeds over 1mbps.

A clean install solved all of that, but that's pretty normal with every single OS i've ever encountered.

It's not a question of being "more careful", it's that writing software in a way that it can be in-place upgraded to something you don't know will exist at the time is EXTREMELY HARD! I really feel it's one of the big "unsolved problems" in computer science and i don't see it being solved any time soon.

If Windows 8 came preinstalled, and you didn't wipe it and install from a clean ISO yourself, then you've got more crapware installed than you can shake a stick at, with hooks riddled all through your system. Doubtless, some of that vendor-supplied junkware is incompatible with Windows 10.

I agree with untog, you need to get your install fixed. I'm running on hardware from 2011(except the SSD) since launch and Windows 10 is extremely fast to boot and the UI hasn't crashed once. It even runs my security camera software that was last updated in 2008. I only recently re-installed Skype so I can't speak to that but it has problems all of it's own.

I'll grab an ISO at some point and do it... I didn't have any point of comparison, so I didn't know how it should be behaving.

> And I much prefer current hangouts to the old google talk plugin. "small", "light"? Did you ever use it. You needed to download and install 2 separate programs to get Google Talk video chat working. Sometimes you'd need to do some port forwarding bullshit just to get it to work.

I'm pretty sure the GP is referring to the native google talk client that gtalk was originally launched with. It was indeed a very simple jabber+sip client (by far the simplest of the major available clients) and had a tiny memory footprint. It did nothing but chat and voice calls.

It looked like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/Google_talk.g...

And you needed to install that client, then install the video and voice chat plugin if you wanted that, then sign in to your account (and if you had 2 factor auth you needed to jump through some other hoops).

It just seems like people will rewrite history. It was cumbersome, had strange scaling issues on many of my PCs at the time, didn't work on macs, you needed to just do it yourself on linux (and i'm not even sure if videochat worked on linux...).

I still think you're talking about a different, later thing. The client I'm talking about had no plugins and didn't support video, but did support voip directly. It was actually a selling point at the time over MSNM/AIM, iirc. You're right it didn't work on macs, or linux for that matter, because it was a native windows program and they never released a client for any other platform and there was no web interface to it at the time (but you could use any xmpp client with it, as you still can).

I'm pretty sure it was also before google even had TFA.

The ip command is a monstrosity. It is basically trying to emulate Cisco's IOS in a command to placate those that want to use Linux as their router firmware.

compare something simple as enabling a network card using ifconfig vs using ip, as you can easily tell the difference. You end up 3 layers deep before you can even enter the card id you want to do anything with!

When seasoned kernel devs don't want to touch a tool, warning lights should come on.

But that's exactly my point!

When it's not something you want, it's to "Placate people". But if it was something you wanted, i'm sure it would be a welcome feature!

And it's not that complicated, just different.

Want a "traditional" list of interfaces? `ip addr`

Want to list running interfaces? `ip link ls up`

Want to set a device up/down? `ip link set dev {DEVICE} {up|down}`

Quick question! How do you set the MTU length in a legacy REHL system? Because with ip it's just `ip link set mtu 9000 dev eth0`!

Yeah, its new and will require some learning, but it's not inherently bad...

And talking about seasoned kernel devs, name one time that there wasn't a minority of kernel devs bitching about a new feature! Every change is going to make some people worse off.

"just". Ifconfig gets the job done, unless RH has been odd selves again...

As for devs, Torvalds didn't have much love for the ip command last time i looked into things. And a year or so back i ran into a Ts'o posting about his dislike for polkit (a close cousin of systemd).

> There is plenty of innovation, it's just that people don't like change and will instantly reject something that isn't the same as what they are already using.

It's not change that people don't like, it's the mountains of randomly missing features, settings and control remotely subverted away from the system owner, tons of software no longer working, a terrible UI nobody asked for. Who wants 10 steps of innovation forward if it comes bundled with 1,000 undocumented steps backward?

Yeah, everything was better ten years ago. Like this ten year old youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw (240p?).

Web pages have become bloated, but they load faster on my phone now than they did on the desktop that I had in 2005.

There are many frustrating things occuring with development now, but it is crazy to say that ten years ago was objectively better.

>Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress.

Not everything; cars today are a big improvement over cars 10 years ago, and especially cars 20 years ago. Just in the last 10 years, cars have made huge improvements in fuel economy alone. Cars have gotten really good for the most part. Some article I recently read on an auto blog, about the "10 worst" cars, even complained that modern cars are so great now that their picks were really just about which ones were the worst values relative to their competition, and that, unlike in past ages, they couldn't point to any true stinkers.

Also, I think mobile phone software is generally better now than 10 years ago. 10 years ago the iPhone was brand new, and most people still used crappy feature phones running things like BREW. They just didn't give you the capabilities that modern phones do. Some people complain that newer phones have poorer call quality than old flip-phones, but personally talking on the phone is one of the least-used features. I spend a lot more time using it for texting, photos, voice mail, and various apps (taking notes, calculator, playing games, Tinder, etc.).

However, in the software world, I will readily agree that most PC-based software was far, far better 10 years ago than today. PC-based software in the last 5 years has really, really gone down the toilet. Windows 8/10 are a prime example here, but even Linux distros really aren't doing that great either. The web is a horror show, with every site full of dozens of JavaScript scripts running, mainly for spying/tracking purposes. I don't even agree that the web is prettier; too many sites are mobile-centric, and look stupid on a regular PC screen.

I like my car's automatic seatbelts (91 Saturn)

I can't find a replacement "modern" car.

Are you kidding? Automatic seatbelts are incredibly stupid, and are provably bad. The only reason they were invented was because the federal government required cars to have "passive safety devices" installed, and they were aiming for airbags. But lots of shitty car companies like Saturn were too cheap to install airbags so they installed mousebelts instead.

The whole problem with them is that they're dangerous as hell, and offer zero benefit, and only drawbacks.

They're dangerous because they encourage people, by supposedly being "automatic", to not buckle up. They're not effective if you don't buckle the lap belt, but during that time lots of people didn't, because they thought it wasn't necessary. After all, what's the point of an "automatic seatbelt" if you still have to manually buckle part of it?

So, if you're going to go to the trouble of buckling the lap belt to get full effectiveness, what exactly is the benefit over having a normal 3-point belt? There is none.

Finally, the belts were a total hindrance if you got in your car with anything in your hands, such as a briefcase or purse or bag. Anyone driving alone (as most of the population does most of the time) and carrying something frequently just jumps in the front seat holding the bag, and puts it in the passenger seat or floor. With the mousebelt in the way, this became a good way to get tangled up.

If you're still driving that piece of shit, do yourself a favor and get a newer car. That thing has no airbags and has terrible crashworthiness compared to anything newer than 25 years old. You're very likely to die in a crash in that car, which in a new car you would walk away from.

It's easier to buckle a lap belt then a 3 point belt, particularly if you have limited mobility.

As the responses in this thread demonstrate, there's plenty of cause for both pessimism and optimism. So let's all choose to be optimists, then get on with improving our own little piece of the world.

"Nothing at all is user-centric anymore..."

In my observation, this has certainly been the trend.

In my experience, in this climate you have to look harder to find it user-focused software, and to some extent you have to write some of it yourself.

This is because the software world has been flooded with "easy to use" programs that are either located on third party computers or must automatically connect to third party computers in order to be useful.

To be truthful, I'm not sure that many users of today, i.e., younger ones, really understand what we mean by user-centric and user-focused. They may think if something is made "easy" for them, then it's user-focused.

But where computer software is involved, we've seen it is precisely the opposite. If users want more control then they have to endure a little inconvenience, at least in the short term.

The easier and more "frictionless" the software, the more the user should understand that the software has not been written so much for their benefit as for someone else's.

True that. And you have no idea how much control is possible until you start switching gates yourself.

I agree with most of this, but I don't think flat designs have anything to do with it, or are negative in any way.

>Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity"

Being a developer, I read this and think, what developer thinks any existing codebase is NOT a mess. It's the number one developer complaint ever. They (we?) all think we know a better way.

I work on two systems at the moment, and they are in very good condition

As someone who has seen several LARGE commercial software projects, there is a definite gradation from "it's hard to comprehend these layers of abstraction, but after a few days I kind of understand how they interact" to

    // X - uncommented on 1.2.03 to fix bug
    // Y - commented again on 3.2.03 because it broke stuff
    // if (condition)
    {
       ... logic here, half of it commented out ...
    }

Of the same opinion, there is sort-of the architecture "mess" where it is complicated and you may just have to spend some time learning and/or see some hiccups because large projects are complicated and then there is the 15 year old code base where _everything_ feels hacked/tacked on.

I've worked on plenty of good codebases. I think the key is continuous improvement. The code from 5 years ago is always going to be worse than today's code, but as long as you're able to improve code as you work on it it doesn't get too bad.

Once when I was interviewing for a job, I was given and offer and I accepted it conditionally. I asked to sit with a senior developer for 30 minutes and browse the code. Turns out it was in great shape and the person that gave me the walkthrough was one of the greatest programmers I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

Do you do this for every job you apply to?

No. This company's main product (the one I would be working on) had been around for a long time so I was concerned about what kind of shape the code was in.

A lot of the codebase at Google is pretty darn good. Certainly nowhere close to approaching a technical debt singularity where further progress becomes impossible.

Yeah, I agree. It's a really common excuse and I think it somewhat diminishes the credibility of those who use it. I don't think anyone's opinion on what constitutes a "truly horrible codebase" should count until they've been a developer for at least 10 years, worked at several different employers, and contributed to several different large open-source projects (which usually have the luxury of rejecting code until they feel it's "right" despite the potential commercial consequences, not something that most other projects get to do). "This codebase is terrible" is a common whine from newer devs and/or people that are just too lazy to put in the time to learn someone else's code.

In the real world, production projects get messy because getting stuff done is more important than building a codebase that represents the paragon of academic excellence. That doesn't automatically make the project horrible.

Depending know how horrible it gets that starts to affect maintainability and development of new features.

You mean like SQL query strings sprinkled throughout and IF'd depending on the DB type? Yeah...

I think I know a better way because I run a 7 figure a year project and the codebase isn't a mess. :/

In my experience it mostly just boils down to having the right processes and being strongly motivated to do things right rather than push things out the door as quickly as possible. Assuming superiors have your back, this is doable. It's when they don't or when the developers lose or completely lack motivation that things start to fall apart.

Lack of motivation often means lack of process, lack of process often means lack of testing and maintenance, lack of testing and maintenance often means lack of quality. It's a vicious cycle too - once you start down the road it's harder and harder to get motivated about your product again.

Pretty much.

Honestly, the only reason the codebase isn't a mess is its a single project I've been able to tightly control and enforce things on [because its 100% my problem if something goes wrong].

The rest of our codebase is filled with drama. :/

There is a difference between bad code you write today and make better tomorrow and code so bad that it takes you days to even understand it properly that making changes become very difficult and usually always breaks existing functionality.

Google talk circa 2008 was a lot nicer than Hangouts is now, too.

The resource usage was lower, the UI was nicer and it was more responsive. It's really a shame they killed it.

They are trying hard now to brink Hangouts back from the brink.

Are they? What have the done recently that made Hangouts better?

The first step was disentangling it from G+.

I hope the next step is a sane API to let third-party clients integrate with it. It does not have to be XMPP, as long as it's something clear and well-supported.

They treat Hangouts like Yahoo would. Great product that they completely hosed by not caring about the userbase.

I wouldn't thrust Google for a second. They are not afraid to close down services with a short notice - so unless I can run my own "Hangouts" backbone it means nothing to me.

Sorry, not sure how much I can say in public. (There's lots of stuff that's public, but I can't just do a knowledge dump, because it's not clearly separated in my mind.)

you know, i stopped using hangouts not long ago. my mobile internet is sometimes really flaky and about 3 month ago messages didn't show up anymore after sending them. just nothing in the history for hours.

eventually (up to 8 hours later) they did show up, mostly at the correct time as well, but that wasnt good enough for me.

Yet Hangouts is much lower friction and generally easier to use than Skype!

What good alternatives are there to Hangouts? Preferably something that doesn't require flaky browser plugins.

I like Zoom (http://zoom.us/). I used to use Hangouts, but it consumed a lot of CPU. The free Zoom account allows you to have up to fifty people in a room for forty minutes, or an unlimited length call with just two participants.

What's it like on poor connections? What's the quality like?

I just encountered Zoom this week! I had a conference with a German (I'm in Vietnam at the moment) and she sent me a link to it. I'd never heard of it and was a bit frustrated to need to install another plugin.

But it was a great experience compared to Hangouts! The connection quality was on par with Skype and it was super light-weight for something based in the browser.

8.5/10, would use again.

I've used zoom.us quite a bit and was family impressed. There's also appear.in which is not as good, but doesn't have all the restrictions the free zoom.us tier has.

There's Firefox Hello: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/hello/

Is there any way to use it to start calls, except for being a Firefox user?

After using Hangouts for years now, I've become sick and tired of it, and have finally found an alternative. Unfortunately, this is only for the text/image chat functionality, but it's a very good replacement: https://telegram.org/

It was on the front page of Hacker News just a couple of days ago, and that's where I found out about it. Much nicer clients, open protocol (so you can even make your own clients), reliable, and many more features than Hangouts make this a much better alternative.

For voice and video, however, I haven't found a good alternative that is easily accessible to people that don't want to set things up on their computer. Hangouts will just randomly not work for me, depending entirely on random chance, and I still can't find anything more convenient than it.

There is Matrix (https://matrix.org) - we support messaging and VoIP via WebRTC. Currently we use Freeswitch for conferencing. Check out some clients here: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

The only thing I use Hangouts for is free calling to the US. As soon as that's gone, I'll never use it again.

Our Actor.im - we support good webrtc calls and we are nice unlike others.

I guess "Internet telephone" is still an unsolved problem silly smile

I've setup asterisk as a personal SIP/voip server and it works pretty good. You can even hook it up to a provider that lets you out on the telephone network. And SIP is built into many hardware phones already.

Every few years I make an attempt to get into SIP/voip, but so far my experience has always been the same: Wall-of-text like documentation that makes no sense, huge cryptic config files, tutorials that assume you already know everything or that just don't work, software that only works with such-and-such kernel, conflicting information scattered across the globe. It feels like trying to set up Slackware in the early 90s. After a few hours I get tired and drop it again.

Like most free software I had to find information here and there and do some trail and error. But it was a way better experience then for example compiling something (with deprecated dependencies). I really love apt-get!

Not to mention Google Talk was a chat system first and foremost.

Hangouts is a funnel to get you to use their browser (still don't understand why it ships as a plugin) and social network first, chat application second.

> still don't understand why it ships as a plugin

I always assumed it was because it would be cross-platform by default. Making native apps for Hangouts on Windows, OS X and Linux would be pretty time consuming.

Also not sure what you mean by "social network", it looks a lot like a chat app to me.

Or you can use open protocol and let community to do the work for free.

Hangouts was a big part of Google+. I'm pretty sure Obama did a "hangout" on Google+ back in the day.

The plugin is not required if you use Chrome.

I agree. The app had fewer features and was pretty tight back then.

Skype used to be great, but started to downspiral fast as soon as it was acquired by MS. Before that, Skype was running on all my devices 24/7, but then (after MS acquisition) it started taking way too much resources and crashing constantly what resulted that I barely use Skype anymore, only turn it on when I have to make/receive an international call that was planned in advance. Not to mention forced updates (that resets all user settings and restore defaults from time to time), horrible UI that reminds more of an ancient Yahoo front page than a chat app and all this surveillance mess.

IMO Skype was pretty bad before MS but only in that the messages wouldn't always synchronize or get delivered between computers so conversations were very difficult but if the client was at least okay.

When MS bought it everything went to shit. Still had the problems with messaging/sync but if you had a surface pro it'd be impossible to send files or share contacts on the preinstalled metro app which IMO is a pretty fucking basic feature. Worse yet it prevented you from being able to install the regular desktop client and the Android version couldn't start group calls so I had to use two fucking computers just to use it like before.

And the stupid notifications will pull you out of a game too because for some reason they're still clickable when you're full screen.

still doesn't synchronize notifications well..

They can't even do IAP right. Yesterday I wanted to call my mum, so first I struggled to sign in since asking to reset my password they somehow cloned my account into some Microsoft/Live ID thing, and then when I bought the Skype credit they flagged it as fraud because... I have 2 Skype accounts, and refunded the money.

It is so bad that I literally cannot even give them my money.

In the past year, the Mac client has also become very fragile. If I quit the Skype App without signing out, next time login keeps failing unless I go to the library folder and delete my Skype user profile directory. Quite shameful for such a high profile software.

I do have my own suspicions that a certain company deliberately degrades the quality of any software they release for platforms other than their own.

It has got worse on their own platform too.

Strange, considering that Skype on OS X / iOS was (still is?) better - ie pasting links would generate a thumbnail in messaging, Windows got this only recently. Also OS X client didn't had that annoying 'unread' bug. So.

I do have my suspicions that no one really cares about Linux on desktop and 99% people would agree, that even having a Linux client is a waste of time, and posts like yours are nothing but linux zealotry - "boo M$ antitrust making me use Windblows"...

There is no mention of linux in the post you commented on.

Pretty fud reply I'm sorry to say, did you even read what I wrote before getting on the zealot bandwagon? I didn't even mention Linux?

Can you do group calls on mobile yet?

That was the biggest reason I quit.

It crashes on windows if you type too quickly.

Metro or desktop?

Desktop.

Considering the quality of the software they release on their own platforms, I suspect this may not be true.

I agree with you. This is textbook Microsoft. They're also implementing Windows-only features in Minecraft and it wouldn't surprise me if the desktop client begins to suddenly degrade on non-MS platforms at some point.

It is ironic considering the whole windows phone community is lamenting all the time against microsoft because all their apps are of far better quality on ios and android than on wp.

Err, if anything the OSX versions of MS software is more stable than the Windows versions. MS is big on eating its own dogfood so anything new is built on the newest technologies, so we get a lot of .NET stuff using the newest version of the framework that the devs don't have a lot of experience with just yet and other Microsoftisms that just end up causing issues (most recent libraries and APIs, integration with the registry, integration with AD/GPO, IE/Trident integration, random Windows Update patches get installed in the background, etc).

I just tried installing the Azure backup agent and after an hour of futzing with it, I just gave up. It installed like four different pre-requisites and forced Windows Update to run and install stuff without my permission. Still won't work and gives an ambigious error message that even google can't help. I never see this like this with MS on other platforms.

On other platforms the development is simpler and using more mature technology because there's no real benefit or pressure to dogfood.

0 problems for me...

I have a hard time believing that.

holy cow same happens in my windows and I use to think that somehow I forget the password everytime.

I've got this problem on Linux as well occasionally, but usually killing any lingering Skype processes fixes it.

The android client is also a bit random. Notifications pops when they feel like it. Some upgrades change for different kind of wrong.

Best feature is when the wifi drops out it gets unresponsive and you need to kill the app, re-log and redial to get back to were you were. Even WeChat handles that gracefully on my phone.

Curious why "even" WeChat. WeChat over the years has been one of the most reliable apps I use including for video/voice chat.

Well you are right, should not have used even. I agree with you WeChat is the most reliable app that I know of for voice and video chat.

Also it doesn't support logging in with Facebook accounts.

Edit: why the downvotes? It's a feature finely supported on desktop clients, and it does not work on Android - so in order to use Android Skype, I'd have to create a "pure" Skype account (with its own password!), and re-import all my contacts.

For me, that's a bug that has seen no activity for over 3 years.

Usually updates fix the problem. But I loved how the last update failed with a very clear "Error $SomeNumber". I just love Microsoft's style.

...</sarcasm>

Android Skype presence colors are messed up.

I compared by running the client on OS X, Win10 and Android in the same time. OS X and Win10 clients seemed to pretty much agree on availability status and to be correct.

But on Android, contacts that are yellow (away) show often as green (available).

Worse, sometimes those who are present show as being offline.

Yeah, pretty random!

I feel like it has improved because it used to just lock up in the background with the indicator still claiming everything was fine and you're available. And then when you actually check in on it by opening the app it'd show you've been disconnected the entire time and quickly log on to be able to pretend nothing ever happened.

Nowadays while it's still occasionally disconnecting at random at least the indicator seems to be more honest about what's going on I would like to believe it locks up less frequently.

From what I remember, it might have to do with the fact that they had to refactor the whole thing to not rely on P2P, which was its original model, since the rise of smartphones and unstable mobile networking? I think it now runs similarly to Hangouts - out of datacenters.

Don't bring facts to the piss on Skype party... This is 100% true. I worked at a state university. If someone was running Skype, because of the algorithm for determining such things, our users all became supernodes on the Skype P2P network which pummeled the network.

They eventually banned Skype on any machine connected to the network with prejudice. This impacted international research projects as Skype had been saving a ton of international comm. money to that point.

And, as usual, those who have a gripe are loud. I use Skype every day and I am never able to feign like I don't get messages from people. It never drops and it hits three devices at once. My digital leash serves its masters just fine...

And when someone tries to innovate in this live group chat space, they get bought out[0]. I doubt we'll see the features of Talko in Skyp any time soon, and I expect whatever creative buzz they had going over at Talko will surely be killed by the forced reintegration into the Microsoft bureaucracy.

[0] http://www.talko.com/

They /let themselves be bought out/; big difference there. If their ideology was to create a proper Skype competitor, they wouldn't go for the 'quick buck' / become millionaires overnight.

You are quite right, I don't understand the HN/Reddit mentality that only the buyer is to blame when FOSS projects get bought.

After all they also took the money.

Fair point! However, I stand by my pessimistic view of how things will develop after the buy-out.

So all I need to do to become a millionaire is make a Skype clone and then let MS buy me out? Who wants to join me?

Let's do this

This was a bit of an "existential" question for me over the past years. I've been wondering if it was just me doing something I shouldn't be doing or if Skype was really going that bad, specially on Android. "It's not possible, they have a successful product. They wouldn't fuck it up. Has to be me...". I kind of kept creating excuses for it when it wasn't working: "Skype looks pretty heavy, I don't know if I should expect it to run smoothly on my phone..." or even blame the phones themselves (which have always been on the flagship side for the time).

But in this day and age, bad performance of apps are kind of "unacceptable". If it doesn't work right, something else will, and I'll have no problems abandoning the bad product. And guess what: Skype is shitty. I often get message notifications on my phone hours after they arrived on my desktop (that is, if I get a notification at all). It's slow and clunky and a pain to even start a call. I dread the thought of having to use it on my phone. I've asked to delay meetings so I could take them from my computer. Or even spend money on Google Voice and make that international call through the regular phone app. So, I abandoned it. I don't suggest Skype anymore to my contacts when I have a call. You know, "Ok, so I'll call you at 9am. Skype's good?". Not anymore. It's usually Hangouts.

This is not how these things are supposed to be.

Wholehearted agreement.

The only time Skype worked for me was on a Nokia N800. It actually worked so well that it delayed my mobile phone adoption for a year. It just worked. Enter this decade where I think I paid for a subscription for almost 4 years and maybe got one or two good calls on other devices during the whole stint.

Messaging systems seemed to work so much better last decade when they were still P2P. I maintained real relationships on them as opposed to no one ever being online on Skype and the shame that is Facebook.

Which is ironic, because the whole point of moving Skype from the un-interceptable P2P infrastructure to a centralized/interceptable one was to "make Skype work better".

Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said teams in Prague have nothing to do with desktop clients.

> Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time.

Yeah, I suspect it was originally written by people who knew what they were doing and now it has gone through years bottom-dollar maintenance to cut engineering costs.

They abandoned p2p, ostensibly to make mobile work better, and it's been downhill since then.

Who's "the man"?

I hope your friends name is not friendofnakedrobot2

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