Google Hangouts temporarily won’t support phone/video calls on Firefox
gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com
gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com
Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-la...
Or should I also have an Opera instance hot and ready to run, just in case?
If this is the case, "the open web" did not go extinct, it committed suicide.
Lots of other stuff is breaking because of this Firefox change too, and it's not a conspiracy.
Sort of. That's true in non-Chrome browsers. In Chrome, Hangouts uses WebRTC.
Though the Google Talk plugin that Hangouts uses in Firefox is (as I understand) used as a way of patching Firefox's WebRTC to make it behave more like Chrome's WebRTC.
How much leeway should be given when they had ample notification of such breakage and had workarounds available for their own browser? I'll agree that the parent's link is a bit uncharitable, but given the circumstances it seems a bit more poignant and dismissing it entirely seems a bit much.
Every time two systems need to integrate, the vendors always can and often do point the finger at each other. In this case, Google had since October 2015 to fix this, didn't do it, and now attributes the problem to Firefox.
Sorry, but I don't really believe in an internet where the default assumption is "you have to rewrite your application within two years, or if it's broken it is your fault"
Hangouts relied on browser support which worked. It's crufty, I get it, but it was supported.
If this was Microsoft pulling support for old Windows 98 API calls, everyone on HN would be appalled that their old-but-reliable software no longer worked on a new OS. But then for some reason, they give Mozilla a complete pass on the exact same behavior.
Finished webapps should not require a constant refactoring and fixing to keep them usable. We're only hearing about this because it is Hangouts and Google. Sure, Google _could_ throw a bunch of money at it and fix it, but there are thousands of other little sites which will just silently die forever, and I don't believe Google should _have_ to update this.
In a way I agree; the lack of stability is costly for users, especially in managed environments where changes needs to be planned and tested thoroughly before deployment. Frequent updates do seem to greatly improve quality, but the lack of support for old versions is painful. It's a way of shifting the cost of old versions from the vendor (who would have to maintain them) to the user (who has to deal with the updates).
On the other hand, Google does the same thing and it seems like the norm now for software, especially web and Internet-based applications. I've come across many web apps that will only support the latest (or two latest) versions of browsers. It's also far better for security.
Arguably nobody has less reason to complain than Google: It's their own practice, and possibly nobody has better resources for keeping up - money, personnel, talent, and expertise - they make browsers themselves.
Mozilla felt they had to jump on the bandwagon or come across at lethargic.
To me this is the web dev "push to prod" mentality encroaching on the desktop, and i am not really sure it belongs there.
It was an industry trend, not really a Firefox specific decision.
[1] At a faster pace than Firefox, as it happens: https://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown-for-np...
Hangouts would require fixes, but not quite a rewrite. When Mozilla announced in October 2015 that it would EOL NPAPI plugins over a year later, Hangouts had already switched from NPAPI to WebRTC in Chrome over a year before (July 2014):
https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3Pc...
But is it a conflict of interest?
Nestle formula wasn't let's kill babies in Africa. It was let's do PR damage control first, and if the PR cost gets too high, we'll eventually change our marketing strategy.
Unilever wasn't let's increase racism in India. It was skin lightening products are the largest personal care market segment, so let's advertise and develop the market.
Microsoft wasn't let's reduce the world's access to knowledge in books. It was what's bad for Google is good for us, so let's quietly fund stumbling blocks.
Why should I inconvenience my customers by fixing my implementations of your standards? Why should I delay giving features to my customers because of your standardization slowness? What part of your customers switching to be my customers should I prioritize as a problem?
Situations have associated incentives. Ethics can shape response. But incentives do matter. No conspiracy needed.
Not true: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plu...
Sucks though, Firefox probably could have make a longer exception for them if it mattered to them.
Can we get more people to "hijack 'open'"? Can "'open' hijackers" become the new "rockstar developers?"
E.g. in retrospect, I wish I never bought into the Google ecosystem as much as I did, convenient though as it was. There are parts of it that I dislike or outright hate now, but the inconvenience of switching away is greater (yes, I've tried), so now I mostly just grumble quietly.
Then I spent about a decade and a half trying to embrace alternatives and I concluded that software that handles general use cases is actually a hard, specialized-skillset problem, and there's a lot of benefit to the full-stack control (and large developer culture, and multi-decade legacy history of successful product) that a long-legacy monoculture provides. Most of the friction is in wanting to use something that isn't in your monoculture, and trying to solve that by building a more general solution really just adds another monoculture to be incompatible with your favorite one (see https://xkcd.com/927/). Virtualization has basically solved that rare problem in my use-case.
To each their own, of course; I got bored with the game of making the computer architecture work over paying someone else to do that and then using the computer to make things.
Also, they recommend installing IE. So I'm assuming Edge isn't supported either? This is a horrible approach to browser security coming from Google.
https://www.cnet.com/news/in-chrome-googles-hangouts-plugin-...
[1] https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/1361676?hl=en
- But Chrome leaves few plugins, including Hangouts, and makes them builtin
- Now Hangouts does not work in Firefox, users think that Chrome is superior
Party like it's 1999.
https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/
In summary, they use weaker encryption than allowed by the spec, nonstandard ICE (firewall hole punching), nonstandard data channels, and an abandoned way to do multistream.
Meet the new boss, Google, same as the old boss, Microsoft.
Huh? No they didn't. The only plugins built-in to Chrome are Widevine DRM, PDF Viewer, Native Client, and Adobe Flash: chrome://plugins/
Also in source in Chromium: https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/webrtc/stable/tal...
It might be not npapi plugin but just something built in into source.
1. Google is swinging its market share around in the desktop browser market to further squeeze Firefox, a much smaller competitor
2. Google hasn't allocated any resources to porting Hangouts away from NPAPI plugins presumably because it has already put Hangouts for the desktop on life support, focusing resources on a similar initiative like Allo or whatever the flavor of the month is
3. Mozilla somehow dropped the ball on writing a sufficiently capable WebRTC implementation despite having implemented a Hangouts / Skype competitor in Firefox Hello
Any others?
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/google-quietly-launches-me...
Hangouts on Chrome uses NaCl (for video processing like hats) and non-standard features of WebRTC that are not available in other browsers:
Also, I'm not sure that switching from YouTube's provided client to a third party YouTube client counts as divorcing yourself from Google.
The problem with YouTube for me is that there's a lot of great content on there that's hard to get anywhere else. I spend a lot of my "free" time listening to lectures on various topics, and nothing can compare with YouTube in the sheer volume of monetarily-free intellectual content. NewPipe at least takes away the ad revenue from YouTube/Google/Alphabet and doesn't force me to eat up my 4G bandwidth with HD video I'd rather just listen to audio for. I support all my favorite content creators through Patreon.
I know it sounds kind of scummy to free-load, but I'd have little problem watching their ads if Google hadn't been behaving the way they have and if they weren't making their ads more pervasive. Somehow, cutting myself off from the smartest people in the world share their ideas with me, just because of a moral dilemma in supporting an internet giant, doesn't seem right to me. I'd happily switch to something like Vimeo if it could compare in content, but I don't think it ever will. Cutting off the revenue stream is the only way I can have a sort of vote without losing touch with the world. My tune will change if Google can decrease the level of uncertainty in their products and not be trying to impose its corporate vision of the web. Heck, my actions might change if they stopped having the worst technical support the world has ever seen.
Google has that. It costs $10/month.
I do understand that some google services work only on Chrome but certain systems need to be cross-browser / cross-platform to become successful. For example, in early days MS Word could save documents into WordPerfect format - not because MS liked WordPerfect but because that was the easiest path to conquer the world.
So as soon as a product starts dropping support for very popular platforms that can mean only two things: 1) the product rules the world in that segment or 2) company plans to sunset that product.
A unified Mobile+Desktop solution is highly required so I can take conversations from one, continue them on another, and then bring them back to the original...which is why most of us switched to WhatsApp.
This is also why Macs get scorchingly hot when using Hangouts on Chrome.
But yes, it's generally Google forcing their own products, just like what they're doing with YouTube, where you also get VP9 on Chrome and H.264 on Firefox.
Firefox is getting H.264 only because it doesn't support MSE for VP9.
Is it using a plugin in Chrome also?
which sites are you using webrtc on firefox?
There's no reason why hangouts can't work on Firefox. In my experience, firefox actually works better than Chrome, due to it having implemented the applyConstraints API.
This is just laziness or evil on Google's part.
[1] https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/210942 [2] http://caniuse.com/#search=webrtc
[1] https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/
https://www.cnet.com/news/in-chrome-googles-hangouts-plugin-...
I'd really love a video call tool the quality of Mumble; a few basic features, reasonable call quality, low-latency and fast reconnects. Skype and Hangouts never came close to that for me.
Realtime multi-directional video over the Internet is pretty high on the pyramid of software complexity. There are a lot of corner-case problems that can only be solved by rolling up one's sleeves and building one-off solutions for a variety of hardware, OS, and browser quirks.
To my knowledge, no open source project has attracted enough critical mass to have the army of supporters that can get in and solve those problems. It's boring, glory-free grunge work, so good luck finding people you aren't paying to get it done.