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Comment by midgetjones | Hacker News Reader

Did it ever? I normally find with most Google services I have to open up Chrome, and figured it's probably just them trying to get me to switch browsers.

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Weirdly enough I find that Firefox works better than Chrome with Hangouts a lot of the time

Yeah Hangouts on Chrome forces webp, even if you have hardware h264 support, whereas Hangouts on Firefox / Safari will happily use your hardware h264 support.

This is also why Macs get scorchingly hot when using Hangouts on Chrome.

By "webp", you mean VP9?

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.

Or, you know, Apple could make available that VP9 hardware acceleration, that is present in the chips shipping in Macs.

Firefox is getting H.264 only because it doesn't support MSE for VP9.

Can you give us an example?

similar experiences here - safari on mac - hangouts just plain doesn't work about 30% of the time (over last 12-18 months). I'll click a link, then after a minute of futzing around remember "oh yeah, this really only works in the latest chrome" and have to switch...

I have wondered about this also, although I have found Chrome on my Mac to work poorly with Hangouts. Recently I had an issue during a Hangout and the people I was on with mentioned they also avoid Chrome for Hangouts. I had been using Firefox, but I guess now I'll have to rely on Safari. Or use Skype.

Same experience here. I wish they would just make Hangouts better rather than splitting efforts across Duo and Allo.

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.

That's been my experience with Hangouts but everything else I've used seems to work ok for the most part in FireFox.

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