Not to mention Google Talk was a chat system first and foremost.

Hangouts is a funnel to get you to use their browser (still don't understand why it ships as a plugin) and social network first, chat application second.

> still don't understand why it ships as a plugin

I always assumed it was because it would be cross-platform by default. Making native apps for Hangouts on Windows, OS X and Linux would be pretty time consuming.

Also not sure what you mean by "social network", it looks a lot like a chat app to me.

Hangouts was a big part of Google+. I'm pretty sure Obama did a "hangout" on Google+ back in the day.

Or you can use open protocol and let community to do the work for free.

The plugin is not required if you use Chrome.

I guess "Internet telephone" is still an unsolved problem silly smile

I've setup asterisk as a personal SIP/voip server and it works pretty good. You can even hook it up to a provider that lets you out on the telephone network. And SIP is built into many hardware phones already.

Every few years I make an attempt to get into SIP/voip, but so far my experience has always been the same: Wall-of-text like documentation that makes no sense, huge cryptic config files, tutorials that assume you already know everything or that just don't work, software that only works with such-and-such kernel, conflicting information scattered across the globe. It feels like trying to set up Slackware in the early 90s. After a few hours I get tired and drop it again.

Like most free software I had to find information here and there and do some trail and error. But it was a way better experience then for example compiling something (with deprecated dependencies). I really love apt-get!

Yet Hangouts is much lower friction and generally easier to use than Skype!

What good alternatives are there to Hangouts? Preferably something that doesn't require flaky browser plugins.

There is Matrix (https://matrix.org) - we support messaging and VoIP via WebRTC. Currently we use Freeswitch for conferencing. Check out some clients here: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

After using Hangouts for years now, I've become sick and tired of it, and have finally found an alternative. Unfortunately, this is only for the text/image chat functionality, but it's a very good replacement: https://telegram.org/

It was on the front page of Hacker News just a couple of days ago, and that's where I found out about it. Much nicer clients, open protocol (so you can even make your own clients), reliable, and many more features than Hangouts make this a much better alternative.

For voice and video, however, I haven't found a good alternative that is easily accessible to people that don't want to set things up on their computer. Hangouts will just randomly not work for me, depending entirely on random chance, and I still can't find anything more convenient than it.

I like Zoom (http://zoom.us/). I used to use Hangouts, but it consumed a lot of CPU. The free Zoom account allows you to have up to fifty people in a room for forty minutes, or an unlimited length call with just two participants.

I've used zoom.us quite a bit and was family impressed. There's also appear.in which is not as good, but doesn't have all the restrictions the free zoom.us tier has.

I just encountered Zoom this week! I had a conference with a German (I'm in Vietnam at the moment) and she sent me a link to it. I'd never heard of it and was a bit frustrated to need to install another plugin.

But it was a great experience compared to Hangouts! The connection quality was on par with Skype and it was super light-weight for something based in the browser.

8.5/10, would use again.

What's it like on poor connections? What's the quality like?

There's Firefox Hello: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/hello/

Is there any way to use it to start calls, except for being a Firefox user?

The only thing I use Hangouts for is free calling to the US. As soon as that's gone, I'll never use it again.

Our Actor.im - we support good webrtc calls and we are nice unlike others.

I agree. The app had fewer features and was pretty tight back then.

They are trying hard now to brink Hangouts back from the brink.

Are they? What have the done recently that made Hangouts better?

The first step was disentangling it from G+.

I hope the next step is a sane API to let third-party clients integrate with it. It does not have to be XMPP, as long as it's something clear and well-supported.

They treat Hangouts like Yahoo would. Great product that they completely hosed by not caring about the userbase.

I wouldn't thrust Google for a second. They are not afraid to close down services with a short notice - so unless I can run my own "Hangouts" backbone it means nothing to me.

Sorry, not sure how much I can say in public. (There's lots of stuff that's public, but I can't just do a knowledge dump, because it's not clearly separated in my mind.)

you know, i stopped using hangouts not long ago. my mobile internet is sometimes really flaky and about 3 month ago messages didn't show up anymore after sending them. just nothing in the history for hours.

eventually (up to 8 hours later) they did show up, mostly at the correct time as well, but that wasnt good enough for me.