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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

My parents had an uncanny knack for always buying slightly the wrong thing when I was a kid. Betamax, Amigas, minidiscs.

I used to have a cassette player that had a tape recorder on it. It made it bigger and heavier, and probably more expensive and I never used the record feature.

Just because part of the product works well, doesn't mean the rest of it is good.

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That's a bad and misleading comparison here though. Your cassette player had to add the bulky recording feature to become a recorder, but did not need it to be a player.

Firefox is a webbrowser, not a video conferencing software, but it had to add WebRTC to be a web-browser (the bulky bit), so adding in recording is trivial.

A more honest analogy would be saying you had a cassette player that already had all the hardware to record -- necessitated by it being able to play cassettes for some reason -- but didn't have a record button vs one having the button.

Random vaguely relevent historical asides:

1. The Walkman was born after a Sony exec had started using a Sony Pressman tape-recorder intended for transcribing meetings/interviews to listen to audio tapes while on planes. They took out the recording functionality and speaker (while adding stereo to the headphones) to make it smaller/cheaper/more portable.

2. Firefox was born after some Mozilla devs took the full featured Mozilla suit and simply hid a lot of the features (email, HTML editor, NNTP newsreader). They later on actually did the work to remove unused code, but at first it was merely cosmetic, though everyone likes to believe there was a mystical time in the past when Firefox was a lean, mean, codebase rather than a minimilist reskin on top of a lot of bloat.

Not sure how that relates to WebRTC, just thought the parallel was amusing.

>but it had to add WebRTC to be a web-browser

Does this mean that we now get to claim that IE and Safari are not web browsers?

Not really at all.

They're going to have to add a whole load of features and new UI elements which will increase the cost of updating and progressing the browser.

Either it's going to be a half assed Skype tacked in behind a menu somewhere, or a browser cluttered with all the visual UI of a chat program.

To say they had to do most of it anyway is compete nonsense. The protocol is like 1/10th of a decent chat program.

I would not trade my Amiga experience for any other computer of the era. It's what set my high standards for what technology SHOULD be able to do.

> My parents had an uncanny knack for always buying slightly the wrong thing when I was a kid. Betamax, Amigas, minidiscs.

Ask them if they're speculating on Bitcoin, so I know if I should get out. =)

Most people probably used the record feature on their cassette players and the cost of simply including it in every device may well have been lower than the cost of two production lines. Incidentally, for five years or so the Amiga was a great choice and any PC bought instead of an Amiga would have been horribly obsolete by the time the Amiga ecosystem collapsed.

Your parents sound cool ;-)

An Amiga cast as the wrong thing to buy? Heaven forbid.

Developers shouldn't be afraid to implementing new features just because they don't know if it's the best decision yet. And to drive innovation many times you will have to step into an unknown territory.

Moreover for someone who hasn't used anything but IE for his entire life, the video chat feature might be the only reason to sway towards FF.

My parents had a Betamax too. Massive top-loading device. My dad's still got it in his loft along with his BBC A, B, B+, Master.....

Weirdly just the other month my brother bought a stash of minidiscs and players instead of just using a cheap MP3 player. I don't understand why.

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