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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

I see many of you complaining that this should not be built in to Firefox, that it should be a plugin or extension.

I disagree for the fundamental reason that there is no realistic way to depose Skype or hangouts with WebRTC unless your thing has absolutely massive adoption (network effect).

Now I can trivially video chat with someone who has Firefox, and they don't have to install anything extra.

This will push adoption and recognition of webrtc as a technology, and enable competitive WebRTC based platforms to succeed as well.

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> there is no realistic way to depose Skype or hangouts with WebRTC

Skype and Hangouts are both moving towards using WebRTC.

https://gigaom.com/2014/07/06/so-long-plug-ins-google-hangou...

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/559901/does-skype-web-...

EDIT: wow, relevant and factual information is downvote-worthy?

do they actually have any plans for interop?

that's the main benefit (in my opinion) of adopting a common standard.

if they're doing it for other reasons, that doesn't solve the problem of easily talking to any other person online.

> do they actually have any plans for interop?

Hell, no. This has a major risk of a user leak.

https://tokbox.com/pricing

"After your free trial, our base monthly fee is $50"

50 unbelievable dollars per month. That's 600 USD per year, for a lot of users more expensive than the computer they use. How can that "depose" Skype which is free? Am I missing something?

Tokbox provides a SaaS option for managing webRTC sessions. It is separate from Firefox including webRTC support in its browser. There's nothing stopping a company or site from implementing session handling on their own, and bypassing Tokbox. Lots of places do it, and there are other options in the service provider space anyway.

> Lots of places do it, and there are other options in the service provider space anyway.

Anybody knows what the current places and options actually are? Thanks.

That's not the price for Firefox users. Firefox Hello is free. What you are quoting is the price to develop apps that use OpenTok. Disclaimer: I work for Tokbox

It's still a bit annoying that Firefox is simultaneously pulling out advanced features and saying they should be left to extensions, and at the same thing adding things like this in core which seem a bit outside the browser purview.

They don't want to maintain esoteric user features they "feel" are marginal in mozilla central, but they really want WebRTC to capture a market, and they need it to be in your face for that to happen.

While I generally agree, note that you can already trivially video chat with anyone who has a WebRTC-capable browser, without having to install anything extra, by simply sending them a link to https://chatb.org (or any other similar service).

https://appear.in/ works really well! :)

Anyone with a WebRTC-capable browser (including Chrome users) can also chat with Firefox users using the link generated by Firefox Hello. The only thing that's built into Firefox (besides WebRTC support) is a convenient button to create a chat.

And the UI that's visible across tabs, so you can continue browsing while you chat.

I don't think you need to depose skype or hangouts to be successful. I'd be happy with a fraction of their users. I'm in the process of creating an addon right now (firertc.com) that has a few features that the others lack. Unique DIDs, call recording, caller-id manipuation, browser integration, etc.

For those who really don't want it, I'd recommend Pale Moon. It's an optimized Firefox fork, has x64 builds on Windows and such even. I've made the switch in the past week and it's the most comfortable I've felt with a browser in quite a while.

From the developer:

> WebRTC. Apart from opening up a whole can of worms security/privacy-wise, "Web Real Time Chat" (comparable with Skype video calls and the likes) is not considered useful or desired functionality for Pale Moon (both according to the developers and the users of the browser at large). This is best left to dedicated programs or at most a browser plug-in.

http://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml

It's worth noting that Pale Moon is actually slower than Firefox stable: http://portableapps.com/node/39509

It's also incompatible with many extensions.

Not to mention it adds another party you have to trust not to insert unwanted/malicious code into your browser.

When I get binaries from Mozilla, I only have to trust Mozilla. When I get binaries from my distro's repositories, I only have to trust Mozilla and my distro's maintainers. Both of those are entities I know and trust already, so I'm comfortable with that. But I don't know anything about Pale Moon.

My favourite ever comment about Pale Moon, for which I unfortunately can't remember the original source, is that it is "snake oil for users who are convinced that compiling with -O666 -funroll-all-loops will give them a better browser".

The fact that the developer isn't aware that WebRTC is Web Real-Time Communication and not Chat is worrying. The WebRTC protocol can be used for a whole lot of stuff other than real time video chat, so if they're disabling it then that's a shame for their users. For one, you can use it to transfer files between two users without having to upload to a server in the middle - that's a privacy plus, not a threat.

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