Support for Hello discontinued in Firefox 49 | Hacker News Reader

Support for Hello discontinued in Firefox 49

support.mozilla.org

216 pointsgerty175 comments

I'd rather my browser focused on being a browser.

And I think that's better for the long term health of Mozilla, and Firefox, too.

Where would you draw the line? A PDF reader is very useful, but not a core browser component. Or Chrome tying in with all the Google services, that's not browser functionality but Google service promotion. Why does Firefox get shit for this every time?

A PDF viewer only renders content of a file, and it's okay and good. A browser is not merely an HTML viewer, it should also render other files like plain text, images, videos etc. Hello is a service for video-conferencing, has nothing to do with rendering content. Pocket is another wart that I hate in Firefox (though it's a useful service, I was a paid user for a while). Pocket is no content rendering and it's external service, so is Hello. Many use Chromium instead of Chrome because the Google Services.

Modern browsers are platforms for modern apps and especially for communication apps, because the Internet is primarily about communications and browsers haven't been about rendering content for a long time now.

Consider: Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Hangouts, Google Inbox, Fastmail, web.whatsapp.com and web.skype.com.

You can make an argument that Firefox should stay neutral. But I don't believe that many use Chromium instead of Chrome. For one because you can't find decent builds, unless you're on Linux, but also because people that don't want Chrome because of Google's services probably use Firefox, because Chromium is still integrated with Google (Web Store, Sync), while providing a poor experience (no PDF viewer, no Flash, no DRM, or any other proprietary bits).

Good thing that PDF.js, the PDF viewer from Firefox, ended up on Chrome's Web Store, so you can add it to Chromium. Which is the main difference between Mozilla and its competition: when Mozilla improves Firefox, it tends to benefit everybody.

> Good thing that PDF.js, the PDF viewer from Firefox, ended up on Chrome's Web Store, so you can add it to Chromium. Which is the main difference between Mozilla and its competition: when Mozilla improves Firefox, it tends to benefit everybody.

Humorously, this wasn't the best choice of examples for your point. Chromium displays PDFs just fine because they open sourced their PDF viewer over two years ago :)

https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/

Ah, didn't know about it, nice.

> Modern browsers are platforms for modern apps

I'm completely fine with this (although I don't like JS webapps myself, if they're anything more than a thin client), just that I don't want my platform to come with unremovable third party stuff. Further more, while being a "platform for apps", browsers are still content viewers where sometimes content happens to be an interactive application software.

> But I don't believe that many use Chromium instead of Chrome.

I said many as in "a multitude of people", not to mean "most". My version of Chromium has a PDF viewer, and I didn't install it (Chromium 52.0.2743.116, from FreeBSD pkg).

Another commenter informed me that the PDF viewer is now open-source. It wasn't last time I tried Chromium, but it must have been 2-3 years since then.

Providing a simple front-end for WebRTC, which is a core browser component, makes enough sense from a conceptual standpoint. Of course we now all know how it turned out, but I think the non-constructive criticism that many give is a bit misplaced.

I think that Firefox's move to include Pocket was a sensible idea, I just wish they baked their own solution like Safari did. Safari's read-it-later / readability features make sense for the subset of users who browse for prose content and want the text nicely formatted for reading.

I think the primary nuisance of Pocket was in making users have another relationship to a 3rd party. Credentials and another service to think about.

I believe Pocket was included for money. Otherwise it's trivial to implement a similar app, given many OSS libs for content extraction exist:

- goose (scala)

- python-goose (python port of the above)

- apache tika (java)

- boilerpipe (java)

- boilerpipy (python, not a port of the above)

- libextract (python)

- beautiful soup (python)

I would prefer the PDF reader, like the flash player, to be a plug-in that I can disable or even uninstall if I wish.

In fact, in my chrome setup I have disabled the PDF viewer because I prefer to download and open them in mupdf.

For PDF viewing especially, it wouldn't be impossible to hav an offering of various competing plug-ins, some perhaps offering extra features like annotations and others offering just the bare minimum.

I think firefox is held to a higher standard because "firefox user" is correlated positively with "aware of privacy issues". Those that just want something fast and easy to use might have used to use firefox instead of IE, but most of them have now moved to chrome.

I'm certain that you can disable pdf.js in about:config

Not even needed, just open the Preferences, select the Applications page and for PDF instead of using "Firefox preview" select any other application, or just "Ask each time". I use this to open PDF with an external PDF reader on Linux and Windows, works like a charm.

Indeed, set pdfjs.disabled to true. I always do it, because I don't use pdfjs, but there was a pdfjs vulnerability that exposed local files to third-party JS -- so you might as well disable complex stuff that you don't really use.

Because we hold Mozilla to a higher standard than Google.

If that "higher standard" means that a Free SW project is forbidden from implementing new functionality and experimenting in general (even if some of those experiments fail, as is the case here), that's not a very good standard at all.

In fact, it sounds more like a recipe for letting others innovate and being perpetually stuck chasing taillights.

Disagree. They added a new feature requiring an external service and gave it to everyone by default. Now, Mozilla has opt-in experiments of new features that can be tested and seen by the community before they are integrated by default.

> Where would you draw the line?

For the back-end: Everything that's required for correctly rendering or executing modern web content (i.e., everything that's mandated by the current snapshot of the HTML living standard plus non-HTML formats which are "de-facto" part of the web, like Flash and PDF).

For the UI: Stuff that can be expected to make the task of browsing web pages easier for the average user.

Neither Hello nor Pocket fit any of the above descriptions.

The people to whom this is important have already dropped all the browsers from for-profit software and/or online services companies for (among others) Firefox because of these concerns. So they don't complain about Chrome as much -- because its already dead to them. They complain about Firefox more because it still matters to them.

I don't even want a bookmark manager built-in. Address bar, tabs, viewport, dev tools. Done. Make it fast.

So to the average non-developer computer-neanderthal who checks weather, movie times and news, you think it's more important to have dev tools in the standard build than bookmarks?

I find this "Give me only what I want" attitude quite frustrating. Perhaps you could argue for a more modular system that disables any given feature, but I would challenge you 8 days a week that bookmarks are a useful tool for most.

And really, bookmarks? How is that a performance hit? Maybe one would say that the "awesome bar" takes cycles to auto-search bookmarks when typing a URL, but you can disable that already.

It was an extreme example to convey a point but now I realize I didn't take it far enough. My original point was that path keeping should be handle by a standalone program for several reasons: web pages aren't the only source of paths I want to keep; my primary browser isn't the only program I want to open paths in; there is often more data I want to associate with a path like a tags, notes, user names/passwords (often more than 1 pair), etc. We already have window managers so tabs are taken care of. URLs are just like file paths... Actually, my file manager looks exactly like my browser, I just don't have an HTML/JavaScript/CSS handler that doesn't also have it's own version of a file manager. The internet is just another file system and we already have file system browsers. You're right about dev tools, that should be separate, probably best to incorporate it into gdb. I think I'm on to something here.

I don't think he mean that, but this instead: "Give me these stuff. And also make it fast".

I agree, it would be nice if everything else (even the dev tools) was just an add-on, even if it was officially provided and supported by Mozilla and installed by default (or asked upon install when doing a custom install). That's not the way things are though, in no popular browser, and people complaining about Mozilla doing this bugs me a bit.

As an aside, I'm looking for this on Android (address bar, tabs and viewport). Habit Browser comes close but is not open source. Basically just a WebView with an address bar and tabs. If anyone has ideas, let me know.

Wait till someone points out that dev tools are not useful to the average user and should exist as a separate extension.

Where's the line?

The dev tools can be very useful to average users, even if they don't use them the same way that developers might.

For example, I know several non-technical users who use the built-in dev tools to remove the annoying overlays that some sites show, but that don't allow to be hidden without logging in or something dumb like that.

These users don't really know what the DOM is, but they do know that they can open the dev tools, click the node selection button, click on the overlay they want to get rid of, press the Delete key, and now they're able to use the site again.

Firefox's DevTools can render a whole web page as an image to disk (not just the visible viewport, like screenshot tools do). Quite a few non-developers have found that useful when I've showed this feature to them. No extensions or 3rd-party software required.

I don't know about that too, how can I do it?

Press Shift-F2 and at the prompt type "screenshot --clipboard --fullpage" to copy the current page to the clipboard.

> The dev tools can be very useful to average users

I think you missed the GP's point. Bookmarks can also be very useful to average users. One man's trash is another man's dev tools or whatever.

Drawing a clear line between what's essential for a browser and what's bloat probably isn't possible for any decent sized group of users.

The built-in dev tools are also a social-engineering attack vector. Try opening the dev tools on facebook.com and you'll see a huge warning to users that have been told to copy/paste malicious JavaScript into their dev tools. So one could make a reasonable argument that built-in dev tools are a bad thing.

Funnily enough, Facebook is one of the sites where I've seen these non-technical users have to use the dev tools to make the site usable again!

I think it was a login prompt overlay shown on business profile pages. These users didn't want to log in to Facebook, yet needed to view the business' Facebook page. The overlay would cover a significant portion of the page, without any good way to get rid of it. So the users would use the dev tools to clean up the page, essentially, even if they didn't really know what they were doing.

Why not Address bar and viewport. Dev tools are only useful to devs. Tabs should be handled by the window manager.

Removing tabs would be awful for an overwhelming majority of users who use platforms that are incapable of managing dozens of windows.

And, as an (occasional) i3 user, I would not want this, because two browser windows seem to use up far more resources than one window with two tabs. Browsers are almost unusable once a certain number of tabs are open; I can only imagine how badly my computer would operate were the 100+ tabs I have open each consuming the resources required by a separate window.

OK in that case may I keep my bookmarks, history, password management, download manager etc.

One person's bloat is another person's feature.

Changed my mind, I agree with the window manager thing and that dev tools should be separate. However, ubiquitous dev tools are really nice when, as a developer, you're trying to figure out why a page doesn't work for that one user that has 20 extensions and 5 viruses and you don't have to ask them to install anything extra.

Actually, the better option here is: "viewport and plugin manager". Install dev tools - or bookmarks, or whatever - if you want them, ignore them otherwise.

Anyway, you can already use uzbl[1] if you want something minimal.

[1] https://www.uzbl.org/

> I don't even want a bookmark manager built-in

No bookmarks? You mean one would have to type in every website address you want to go to?

It's so much easier to click on bookmark in the list, and with today's wide monitors, horizontal space is wasted anyway so I keep the bookmark sidebar open all the time.

I haven't used built-in bookmarks for years. If I really want to bookmark something, it goes in Pocket or Pinboard.

Browser history search via the address bar is much faster than searching through bookmark folders for a particular page. Even nicer with Vimium where I can just hit "o" and search for what I want. For everything else, I just Google.

> Browser history search via the address bar is much faster than searching through bookmark folders for a particular page.

History wasn't part of kgwxd's specification (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442292), though, which just brings back to the central point: when you try to build a browser with the absolute minimum set of features required, you'll find that everyone's minimum set of features is different.

Browsers used to just embed OS X's built-in PDF reader, which is excellent and incredibly fast and smooth. At some point, they decided to write their own (in JavaScript, I guess), which scroll and perform terribly.

In the very specific case of pdfjs, it's justified by the greater good of avoiding the defect-ridden Adobe Reader.

Except that around 90% or more of the time I find myself having to open PDFs using a real native PDF reader because pdf.js is too slow, or it improperly renders the PDF, or it won't allow me to fill out forms the way I want, or some other issue like that.

So even with pdf.js present, I end up using a proprietary reader most of the time. The added hassle or reopening PDFs in a separate reader most of the time exceeds the supposed convenience of the reader being built in.

I guess it's the type of PDFs one views. I find pdf.js quite adequate for my needs. It's even rendered brochure-type PDFs quite well -- e.g. this 32 page brochure that was a top hit for [filetype:pdf brochure]: https://www.mbusa.com/vcm/MB/DigitalAssets/pdfmb/brochures/M...

Mozilla are in a unique position with control over the client-side software.

I think they're best to focus on the things that can only exist within that client.

Because any other party can start a 'Hello' like service online. Or write a PDF reader (or a program to open any other file format)

I don't think we should be comparing to Chrome here; which doesn't purport to have the 'noble' aims of the Mozilla foundation. A browser should not be part of an 'ecosystem' of online services; for me, having a strong web means that the two are decoupled.

Because people who don't like that gave up on chrome.

Because firefox's daddy, Netscape, had tons of crap in it and got bogged down to the point of being inferior to IE.

This, in turn, started the dark age of the web.

Netscape's demise was completely due to the mismanagement of the company, not the particular features they provided. In the middle of the browser war they decided to stop all maintenance and execute a complete rewrite. That would kill any company. They are one of the reasons why Joel Spolsky says "never rewrite from scratch".

And I'd suggest that "don't stop and rewrite" is not the important lesson. It's "don't let your code base get to the point where you have to stop and rewrite".

Netscape's rewrite was 1997-2000. In 1999, Martin Fowler published "Refactoring", which showed us how to continually improve the technical architecture of a system without trying to stop the world. JUnit, the first really popular testing framework came out about then as well; good unit testing makes it safe to refactor boldly. And the Internet itself gives us the ability to release early and often, encouraging us to do everything in smaller, more manageable chunks.

Giant rewrites were just what you did in the bad old days. But we never have to do it again if we make a point of keeping our technical debt low and our releases frequent.

Where things were before the Web 2.0 craziness.

I'd certainly draw the line before it gets to a PDF reader and Google services. Chrome doesn't get shit for it because is expected to be part of the business strategy of Google first, and a browser second. Firefox has no other purpose, so the choices that they make simply seem bizarre.

PDF viewer is over the line too, Evince and Sumatra are so much faster and render nicer.

I agree with PDF viewer being added. When browsers started adding full game rendering with 3d graphics libraries it crossed the line for me. They're using it as a delivery platform for anything and everything.

What Google services dies Cringe tie on to that you find inappropriate? The search integration for autocompletion as well as the cross device syncing seen very fitting for a browser to me since they help me getting to the content that the browser should enable me to view. Does it integrate with anything else Google I'm unaware of?

Cuz there's a reason I don't use chrome...

"What is and what isn't a part of an operating system?" is a similar difficult question as "What is and what isn't part of a browser?"

Like the kernel is only one non-optional (?) part of an OS, HTML rendering is a part of a browser.

Let's be honest here. There's nothing Mozilla can do to prolong the life of Firefox. Once you lose marketshare it's more expensive to gain it back. Just look at what Microsoft spent at getting IE/Edge to where they are today. And Mozilla is in a worse position than Microsoft.

Strange, from my perspective Firefox is very widely used.

And for me Chrome/Chromium has just to many usability bugs, to be used productive. E.g. Tabbar doesn't scroll, not very good extensions available (e.g. regex search) and its more difficult to select head of tail of the url (in firefox just click in middle and drag down/up wards)

In terms of marketshare Firefox is in the single digits now. Regardless of what is the better browser Firefox is, relative to Chrome and IE, not that widely used.

Hmm... The thing is, it doesn't matter that much how widely a piece of software is used, but by whom.

It matters to the search engines that pay Mozilla for that default search setting plus royalties for referrals. Which in turn funds all of their projects including Firefox.

It also matters to developers. Who even tests on Opera, which is ~1% of market share? Once people stop caring about whether your browser works, you lose all ability to lead how browsers work.

Market share is nice, but when many developers use Firefox, guess what gets developed even if they don't get money for it?

Except most of the devs use chrome / safari and if it works there, it's done. No one cares about ie / edge anymore either.

webcompat.com is a Mozilla initiative for users to report bugs for websites that don't work cross-browser. Mozilla staff and volunteers then reach out to the website's developers. It's disheartening that many web developers can't be bothered to test Firefox or Edge.

https://webcompat.com/about

Mozilla started from Netscape which had already lost a lot of market share before surging back. Browsers are free which makes it fairly easy to gain or lose marker share. All it takes is the current leader to stumble and people quickly jump ship. I suspect it's easer to catch up as you have some goal to target.

Mozilla isn't Netscape rather it's a spin-off. Also, Netscape at its highest was 100% marketshare. Netscape is gone. It never "surged" back.

Mozilla was literally made from the original Netscape source code. I think you need to learn your history

Also Netscape never had "100% marketshare". According to http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-04-1996/gra... (sourced from Wikipedia) they had roughly 89%. Still significant, but not complete control

Mozilla was spun out from Netscape but it itself is not Netscape as Netscape was aquired by AOL. 89% is still a far cry from anything Firefox has managed.

Either way you look at it Netscape did not bounce back.

The first thing I do on any new Firefox install is remove Pocket and Hello off the toolbar. I'm pretty sure most people do the same. In fact, I'm struggling to remember what Hello actually is...

And disable WebRTC because of local IP address leakage. Check yours at http://net.ipcalf.com/ :-)

why is the local ip considered private information?

99% of people are going to be in 192.168.1.0/24 or 10.1.1.0/24. so it only takes 508 guesses.... not to mention that everyone is 127.0.0.1.

Local IP will remain consistent across sessions and so can be used to identify you as certain device at a given public IP.

They also see my IPv6 address and all of that make fingerprinting more accurate. Real world example https://webrtchacks.com/dear-ny-times/

A site can very reliably identify you (across browsers, even) if it knows your public and private IP addresses. Your public IP address identifies which organization or network you're in and your private IP address identifies which machine within that organization or network you are using.

90% of the time I use IPv6. where I just have a global IP on every device. Identifies me directly (until I grab a new ipv6 address)

Seriously?!? Incompetence... Thanks for writing this, disabled.

EDIT: FF: about:config, media.peerconnection.enabled => false

Thanks for this.

Oh, great. Ugh, thanks.

edit: Now my ip is reported as "ifconfig | grep inet | grep -v inet6 | cut -d" " -f2 | tail -n1" which is amusing.

Hmm... I think "Hello" doesn't even show per default, at least on my machine. Or I cannot remember removing it.

I think the problem with "Hello" is more of a marketing and publicity one. Nobody uses it because they aren't being made aware of it.

Nobody uses it because nobody asked for it.

Nobody asked for a telephone, they asked for faster horses.

> Nobody asked for an [automobile], they asked for faster horses.

FTFY, assuming you're looking for the Henry Ford reference. People actually DID ask for the telephone. It was a natural extension of the widely deployed telegraph system.

Maybe the OP was thinking of this?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express

That makes sense, I think you're right.

In my experience the problem with Hello is that it's too buggy. I found appear.in to be a lot more reliable.

It's a video-call service which utilizes WebRTC...

I was about to use it as a OS-independent alternative to Skype (I'm on Linux). And I wanted to use this, also instead of facebook chat and the likes.

The moment they removed the contacts feature it was dead for me. Although, to be honest, it never really worked (sometimes no audio and stuff like that).

The idea, that I have to first email the chat URL and then I can make a conversation is like writing a letter first before doing a call. Fundamentally wrong conversation setup.

The WebRTC functionality isn't being removed, just the built in video chat/sharing that was powered by Telefonica.

You can still use a site like https://talky.io/ with Firefox (and I expect there are other sites) if you're looking for Skype or Facebook alternatives. I don't know if there are WebRTC sites that have sane address books, but I would hope so. I've heard talky.io works well, but haven't used it.

Session setup is a real showstopper if there are no builtin contacts. If I have to paste the talky.io URL first with <some-other-chat-program>, why not use <some-other-chat-program> in the first place?

I know I can email (where I have an adress book) the URL, but why use another communications channel for call setup.

Because <another communications channel> is the channel that every user already has set up with the user they want to chat with. It varies for every person, so why not let them use what is most convenient for them?

Nothing's stopping anybody from writing a walled garden site that provides a nice ui for messaging contacts you stored in an address book on top of that.

Yes, I would rather see some more traditional FOSS video/audio/chat/screensharing solution. With an account, contact lists, account (not device) based E2E encryption* , easy to deploy server software and something that can be used from a browser (without any plugins) and native chat applications with an open standard.

* Where messages are de/encrypted readable for every device/endpoint of an account not just for the one with the active session.

All of what you asked for: https://vector.im/ (E2E has landed recently!)

Yes, thanks. Somebody mentioned it here before, looks good.

Not sure if it can do video conferences with E2E encryption, because that could be very difficult (impossible?) or bandwidth intensive.

Now I just need to convince everyone to switch ;)

Oh, just one thing. Its apparently missing a desktop client, that isn't a web app.

I could convince more to switch if chat managers like gajim/pidgin etc. would support it out of the box.

It is not, check http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

Vector Desktop an Electron that wraps the webapp and matix clients without videoconference support.

It's a good start.

Tensor and Quaternion, actually.

Tensor and Quaternion has video conferencing support?

From what I read, they are only matrix clients, not vector clients.

Vector is a client for the Matrix communications platform (perhaps calling it a communications platform is wrong, it's more general than that).

Matrix itself is just a spec / API for sending and receiving messages. Tensor and Quaternion are two other clients that work with a given Matrix home-server. AFAIK all of these clients can utilize Matrix APIs to some degree, however I'm unsure about video conferencing as I only really use Vector. That said though, other clients' capabilities don't really depend on Vector at all, unless they're using https://vector.im as an identity server.

Would you pay for it? If yes build a list of competent developers, ask them if they would build it and lunch a funding campaign. Give all the money to them and donate yourself. Building software is hard, building what you asked for is even harder.

I'd rather do it the other way around. Find people with money to spend and let them pay me (and other developers) for implementing it.

Just implement it. It's not hard. All the libraries you need already exist and are relatively high quality. I have done it myself (non-free system) getting on to 10 years ago. It took me less than a year by myself and I even wrote my own SIP implementation. These days you could certainly do it faster.

There are a few problems, though. One is that NAT traversal will still probably mean that it will be unreliable unless you also set up a service to carry data. The other main problem is that nobody will pay you for it. There are literally hundreds of failed startups who realised how easy it is to build these things. They couldn't find a way to make money.

It should be easy because if people are forced to pay for a service to carry data in order to make it reliable, you should be able to make money. Right? The problem is that people won't pay for reliability because they think that the software is buggy (see comments above re: "I tried Hello, but it was buggy. No audio, etc." Classic).

Skype famously solved this problem by being evil and routing it's traffic through un-NATed users. Google solves this problem by having more bandwidth than god (and hangouts still sucks half the time).

But if you ignore the "there's no way to make money at this" problem, it's a pretty fun project to write.

THANK-YOU, finally got rid of that stupid thing. For a while there it seemed like every new Firefox version had another stupid non-browser-related plugin that I had to go find out how to kill off before deploying to the network.

> I had to go find out how to kill off before deploying to the network.

Why?

Because anything unexpected that is deployed to a network will (not may) eventually become a security and/or support nightmare for someone. Better to keep users to a minimum set of features necessary to do their job.

Yes, that sucks from a user perspective. But they don't have to fix the goddamn network at 3am because Al the Alcoholic in Accounting can't quit sending pix of his pickled junk to Betty in Brazil.

Slightly off-topic but does anyone know the status of the "Send Tab to Device" function? It is my favorite feature on Firefox for Android and it has disappeared. Not the first time this happened, either. Are they randomly adding and then removing support for this? I'm definitely not the only one affected: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1087138.

I can visit the desktop version of Mozilla's add-ons site and see an extension which supposedly does this, but the 'add to Firefox' button is disabled if I visit the same link on my mobile. Bizarre.

I have the same functionality under Menu button (the three dots) - Share - Send to other devices (with a Firefox icon). When I press that I get a list of devices connected using Firefox sync and can send the tab to my computer.

If I share a URL from other apps, like Chrome, there's an "Add to Firefox" option available also.

Using Firefox 48.0 on Android, it auto updates so it should be the latest version.

Can't you automatically get the same with Firefox Sync? And indeed, it seems to me the UI has changed recently. Anyway, if you have sync enabled on both desktop and device, you can see the other sync'd devices open tabs (if enabled, what you sync is configurable). From the desktop is from the hamburger menu, "Synced Tabs" icon. From Android, you now need to go to the history pane. The first line is "Synced Devices", press this to see other tabs and open any ones as needed. So instead of explicitly selecting to send a tab to a device, just wait or force a sync (on Android: from the Settings sync page) if in a rush.

It's a bit of a crude workaround but that might work. My use-case is that I frequently browse to a site on my mobile and want to view it later on my desktop machine. I could do that with a couple clicks easily before. Now I will have to keep a bunch of tabs open on my mobile and remember to manually go and check for them when I'm back on the desktop.

Just one example, I would browse through my Twitter feed before going to sleep. Any interesting links from Twitter were sent to the desktop machine from the mobile. In the morning, I would start Firefox on the desktop and a bunch of new tabs would automatically pop open, which was great.

If you don't find it then consider Pushbullet, which has similar but improved functionality.

Just checked the Pushbullet site intending to see if they support Linux and to review their privacy policies. "Sign in with Google" or "Sign in with Facebook" are the only options on their sign in page. It does look like a cool service but not at all aligned with my privacy and open-source concerns. Thanks anyway.

Blergh, sorry. I could have sworn they had an e-mail option. Sign in with Google does allow mirror of alerts (texts, hangouts, etc) from your Android device to others but if that's not in your comfort zone so be it.

I worked on bringing this feature to desktop this summer and making it faster with the Push API. The desktop UI is still behind a nightly-only flag. I'll be happy to answer any question!

Probably referencing this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1297454

It seems to work on iOS...

Is it too much to hope that pocket will be next?

The free pocket is really useless. I am helpless now identifying an alternative which would give me the ability to search for more but one tag (as is the case with pocket)

I guess no. Because people actually uses Pocket, not like Hello.

This is great. Mozilla experimented with a new thing, it didn't take off, and they killed it. Bravo both for experimenting, and for killing it afterwards.

Wait it will be totally discontinued? Not even optional?

So basically, Hello was deemed dead from the beginning?

>So basically, Hello was deemed dead from the beginning?

As everyone predicted.

> As everyone predicted.

After seeing how everyone reacted to it, yeah, that makes it easy to "predict" people don't like it.

I think shoehorning something nobody asked for into a browser that has historically suffered from bloat and performance issues was a good indication of what the reaction would be.

So they should have not bothered trying because people were always going to conflate unrelated things?

So is Jitsi Meet the only FOSS alternative?

https://vector.im/

vector is using FreeSWITCH for it's audio and video conferencing afaik. FreeSWITCH also has another project called Verto Communicator built with all sort of Node.js goodness: https://freeswitch.org/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/Verto+C...

There is also hubl.in https://hubl.in/

Source is here: https://github.com/linagora/hublin

There is also https://spreed.me

There's also talky.io, which is FOSS and works well for me.

I looked for a bit but couldn't find the source for it.

Here you go: https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-source...

Some (most?) parts of it are open source

http://otalk.org/

https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-source...

chatb.org is also free software - https://chatb.org/

Good riddance. Firefox having default plugins like this is one of the reasons i stay in v38.0

Enjoy your vulnerabilities:

https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/rele...

Public vulnerabilities. It's not like 49 doesn't/won't have any.

Hello wasn't just a plugin though. It was a WebRTC enabled website. You could start a firefox hello session with the button in the top corner, but you could share it with someone using any modern browser.

Sounds like theyŕe killing the whole damn service rather than just removing the plugin, which seems like overkill.

That said, I use appear.in regularly in place of hello because it's easy to make links in my head, so hey.

ESR 38 is still updated? I think its end of life was a few months ago...

Nope. Firefox ESR is at version 45.3.0. Firefox 38.x is insecure and should absolutely not be used.

I think ESR never has Hello or Pocket anyway.

WebRTC is a web-standard. So, the WebRTC-plugin itself is actually something positive, as it gives users control to disable it. Other browsers just implemented WebRTC without giving users control over it.

Well, unless you're referring to the Hello-button, which isn't a plugin, it's just a fancy bookmark to a service which then utilizes WebRTC.

It's got a long, long way to go:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/WebRTC/Privacy

This is a shame it was the best chance to get people off Skype.

Skype is actively working on getting people to leave Skype. At least the Android client.

And the Linux client. Even many Windows users hate the UI I hear.

I do. Sometimes I use the Windows client in a VM for the features the Linux one doesn't have. The UI is horrible, much worse than the minimalistic one in Linux and the content to screen area ratio is very low. You have to keep scrolling to get back to past messages in a chat, and this is not the average 768p cheap notebook screen.

I'm sure it has a lot to do with how I use skype (strictly as a text-chat client...not my decision), but I actually really like the linux client. It's stripped down and doesn't have all that fluff the Windows client has. Plus, no ads.

Fair enough, as a chat client the Linux version isn't too bad. I used it for a while too (also not my decision). It wasn't meant to be a mere chat client, though.

If you want me to eat something, don't shove it in my mouth, put it on my plate and tell me how delicious it is.

Nobody forced you to use Hello and they barely promoted it in the auto update. Only reason I even know about is is people complaining about the bloat and supposed slowness that this bit of non-running code causes.

If anything they didn't push it enough. The only way to discover it right now is to go Hamburger->Customize->Drag-and-drop Hello to toolbar.

I wonder if people bitching about Firefox even use it.

No they just force-installed the unremovable add-on, then the next update put the removed button back on the toolbar*.

As it happens I did try Hello, just didn't find it useful for me not understand why that one webrtc tool was given so much precedence by Mozilla.

>If you want me to eat something, don't shove it in my mouth,

To continue that analogy further, perhaps babies feel insulted too.

Maybe.

The thing is the baby is incapable of reasoning. They're not capable of asking for food. They're not capable, often, of picking it up to eat it themselves. They need help but can't ask for it. They don't know what's good for them or the balance of foods to consume. They'll be hungry and throw the food on the floor .. they can't tell you "oh, sorry, I didn't mean to do that I was actually trying hard to eat it but, you know, 9 month old motor-control". Sometimes you have to just shove it in there, then watch them chew, swallow and smile and open their mouth for more.

A web browser user that wants to do video calling can use a search engine, or look up add-ons. They can respond to their browser maker putting a "we recommend SuperDoublePlusGood add-on for communicating with your friends" advert alongside the new release information. A browser add-on isn't essential to life, nor essential to using the browser.

When the baby is already eating I don't shove something else in their mouth because it's a different brand and I think that brand is better despite it doing the same thing.

Pushing analogies too far sucks.

The other extreme is, if you want what you want, go and make it yourself. Don't ask somebody else to do it for you.

In any case, defining "what something is" -- when the nature of the product is creative, as is the case with all of programming -- isn't helpful. Nobody has to "ask". A phone can also be a web browser, it can also be a GPS navigation system, it can also be a camera, it can also be a hand held video gaming console, it can be many other things along the continuum of personal electronic devices. Essentially, you're only disagreeing with where the equilibrium is.

Good luck with that line of thought, few people want to be treated like a baby.

The number of people that would like to be pampered is unknown. That is true.

At least Skype is getting less evil, on the client end, since you can now use it through its website version, so at least its isolated on Chromium.

They still record and feed all your conversations in all forms to the highest bidder, but I was always worried about Skype's proprietary desktop program snooping my packets or reading my files or logging my keys.

There is hope. Discord and Slack.

> There is hope. Discord and Slack.

Neither of those are FOSS, which Hello was.

Discord + Slack = Skype (+ video)

Glip offers slack + video out of the box, plus a lot of the slack pro features for free

Hello is essentially a tiny amount of javascript that connects to the existing WebRTC infrastructure. Other services will make use of this infrastructure to provide the same functionality.

But the concept of having cross-platform realtime audio, video, and screensharing is very appealing.

the idea was great, probably no one ever used Hello because is was substantially broken.

+1 for stripping out feature bloat!

I was going to try it out -- "one of these days".

I'm on 48 and don't have that feature????

I'm on 48.0.1 - right click your bookmarks toolbar or Customise it. Hello and Pocket will be options - you may well have removed them?

I have a Pocket List option but no hello option. Strange.

As a company, Mozilla is an open-source version of Yahoo.

Never used it. Didn't need it. Not sure how I would get anyone else to use it, either, as I think I'm the only one in my family/circle of friends still using Firefox.

Glad to be rid of it.

Yes! Thank you, The Mozilla Foundation.

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