Google Hangouts now on Firefox without plugins via WebRTC | Hacker News Reader

Google Hangouts now on Firefox without plugins via WebRTC

twitter.com

66 pointsJoshTriplett14 comments

This is honestly the one thing keeping me from making Firefox my daily driver. But Hangouts still doesn't work for me, and I'm on FF Nightly.

Is anyone else able to get this to work?

I used it last night and it worked for me. I accidentally forgot to switch to Chrome to use Hangouts and was pleasantly surprised Firefox57 just worked.

Maybe you have an add-on that disables WebRTC?

Same here; tested on FirefoxDeveloperEdition for Mac. Maybe this is a slow roll-out on the Google side.

Slow roll-out is so much more likely.

WebRTC has been supported for a while in Firefox, and no nightly will make Google serve you with a proper version. It's entirely up to Google.

Works for me on Firefox 57. And not only does it work, the echo cancellation works quite a bit better.

Finally! I though they simply ignored firefox it used to say coming for firefix soon, these days it just says "please download chrome"

Thank God, about time. Any other major websites that still use browser-based proprietary extensions instead of open standards?

Zoom, and several other "meeting" sites.

there's no standard for a screenshare. i wish there was

Not quite standardized, but Firefox appears to allow extension-less screensharing as of FF 52

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Screensharing

https://mozilla.github.io/webrtc-landing/gum_test.html

This is all done with parameters specified to getUserMedia as opposed to Chrome's extension-only "chrome.desktopCapture.chooseDesktopMedia"

As far as I can tell, the reason why screen-sharing is not more widely accessible is because of a security UX issue rather than a technical limitation. Both Firefox and Chrome are can provide you with media stream ID's to use in WebRTC negotiation, they differ mostly in the boundaries required to authorize access.

Finally. The only reason why I ever had to open Chrome (besides testing).

Same!

Is this an incremental rollout?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com