I suspect it's less about solving problems and more about breaking out of that web browser sandbox to siphon up more of that juicy, juicy data.

Apologies, my computer mouse malfunctioned and I downvoted you while swapping between windows, and I felt so bad about doing so I feel compelled to comment :(

And I actually agree with you...

Well, I did not intent to vote that post, but now I upvoted it just to undo your mistake.

He agreed with him so I just upvoted his post to give him back the upvote he meant.

Replying to a comment removes your vote on it, so you've given an extra upvote :)

I have always found it surprising that someone may honestly think that upvoting and downvoting can be used to express agreement or disagreement. If you strongly agree or disagree, just reply with a post of your own; up/downvoting is there so you could express your opinion on the quality of the post rather than whether you think that what it is saying is true or false.

Paul Graham, who started HN, is one of those people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 . Generally, HN strongly discourages "me too" or "i agree" type comments. We prefer to just upvote comments in order to keep discussion threads interesting and on-topic.

It's pretty much upvote to agree, downvote if it doesn't contribute.

Of course the next highest child is then always the next most agreed upon counter argument since they should reply instead of downvote, which can make HN feel a bit contrary but full of good discourse

Isn't that the recipe for an echo chamber?

More likely it's about getting more immediate attention from push notifications.

If you only ever use chat in the browser, you only see messages when you actively check it. With the app installed, you get a giant bubble that you can't ignore for every message. FB wants to be the messenger that people respond to immediately.

For me, I actually like the messenger bubble UI, and love that it's not built as a gateway to the massive time sink of the rest of Facebook. But I think it's clear that omnipresence is the goal here, and we have no reason to believe that it won't become a funnel to the rest of Facebook in the future.

Not for much longer

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...

Text messaging is enormous and it is going to get a lot bigger as companies monetize it with service and retail chatbots. The competition is fierce and although Facebook has the best position, it is not written anywhere that it will remain in that position forever. It's crucial to get the experience right, and you do yourself no favors by distributing your user base and developer resources across multiple platforms.

Sadly, yes. I'd (somewhat) happily run the Messenger app if its permissions were saner. What does it really need? Internet, for sure. Storage, ok. Camera and Location are fairly reasonable. Microphone only because it goes along with Camera.

But it also has Identity, Contacts, SMS, Phone, and a host of others. Do not want.

Yep. Thank god for runtime permissions, at least.

Like those controlled in the iOS Privacy Setting page?

Yeah we now finally have them on android too in marshmallow

Heard of messenger.com ?

Facebook blocks Messenger.com for mobile browser user agents; you need to spoof your UA if you want to use it on mobile. (Some of the Facebook app wrappers can do this for you.)

If you spoof the UA, you can also use the main Facebook website on mobile. Messenger.com might be less cluttered though.

Btw: that works with mobile Firefox. (I originally used it instead of chrome, mostly because it supports ad blocking on unrooted devices.)

Interesting, Asana does that too. And I would rather not use their app...

Which ones? Tinfoil doesn't seem to at the moment.

I believe "Metal" does on the Android side, not sure about iOS.

venmo.com does the same thing.

"Users were messaging via the web frontend, so we fixed the glitch."

And we were doing it because Facebook was pushing their messenger app, when the normal Facebook app handled it just fine.

They just simply decided one day, oh hey let's redirect the messages page on the Facebook app to a static page saying "download messenger" and not give any access to the messages, including view-access. Even when you get a notification on your phone about a new message.

You can actually view messages on the mobile web app (or you could earlier today, anyway). On my phone, clicking on messages tells me to download messenger. If I ignore that and hit all messages, it nags again, but eventually does it.

FWIW, I discovered this because Messenger would not show me a group chat that I was added to by co-workers (who I'm not friends with on FB).

Edit: just realized you were referring to the app, not the site. My mistake.

I actually liked that I could use a messenger app without all the rest of the stuff that I never used. But I think they split it back then because they wanted to have something more similar to whatsapp (which wasn't theirs yet) - They apparently let you use a phone number to log to messenger too.

I really wish I could fix all bugs at my workplace like that.

It will just work itself out naturally.

I'm not a FB fanboy or anything, but sometimes it is a good choice to free yourself from legacy tech burden and build for the future. The web (html documents fetched via http requests) were not built with mobile devices in mind, especially websockets. In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications which must go through the device vendor (APNS or GCM), and trying to support the legacy tech in this landscape is just not worth it.

Yeah, first they threw out xmpp, so I couldn't use my preffered messaging app, then they kill messaging in the web view, forcing me to give up messaging or move to their messaging app, with intrusive permissions. This after they've soundly established that they don't respect users, with how they mangled addressbooks with an earlier version of the fb app.

At least, since they're closing access from alternative sources, they're slowly succeeding in driving me off facebook. At least if I now have to move to an app, I'll pick one that supports end-to-end encryption (which facebook+xmpp+otr did fine, btw, until they killed it).

I wonder how quickly things will turn in the coming decades, as the incumbent network silos continue to screw users on the altar of data mining and ad revenue, and anyone can start a competing product for free (up to ~thousands of users at least, and at that point, maybe you can find a monetization strategy or get investment to keep going until your product becomes another "big thing").

As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over. We now know some things that other protocols were missing: easy serialization, sane hypermedia, sane extensions, sane push, sane presence, sane async and sync modes (mail and im w/server side archiving) end to end encryption, and some form of trust or other way to mitigate spam. I'm guessing it'll be json based with perhaps swappable transport. Probably should be encapsulated in message-level authenticated encryption. And it'll probably be another five years before we see it realized.

I still use XMPP to connect to google talk and converse with people who are using hangouts. I use "Conversations" on Android, which works well and also supports OMEMO (the XMPP version of the encryption behind Signal/Whatsapp/etc). I'm effectively doing the equivalent of your facebook+xmpp+otr setup today, but it's googlechat+xmpp+omemo.

The author of Conversations recently wrote up the state of XMPP in 2016: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html

So, though you may not be using it anymore, XMPP is far from a dead end.

I thought Google had killed off all XMPP access too. Thanks for the heads up. Of course, everyone I communicate with who doesn't just use email and/or sms/phone are on Facebook (and Snapchat) - but few if any use hangouts. But it's nice to know that if I go back to using XMPP, I can at least point people towards hangouts. Until Allo takes over anyway...

[ed: submitted that to hn, as I'm sure many people would be interested in an update on XMPP from someone that actually works with XMPP implementations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837466 ]

> how they mangled addressbooks with an earlier version of the fb app

Oh right, I didn't know they have my whole Android address book before. I recommend you to download the data Facebook has about you (they don't give all, but a fair amount) https://www.facebook.com/help/302796099745838

I was actually surprised at the sheer amount of my personal life contained in that file.

Please stop calling it google wave.

It is Apache wave. And nothing is dead if a community wants it to be alive.

Apologies, I remember it as Google Wave - but you are right it has evolved, and Apache Wave captures the idea that it is indeed an open platform. And while I agree that the technology isn't dead, I don't think it (the protocol) is likely to be what ~7 billion people (or how many now has a phone number) will use to communicate across network providers, carriers, device manufactures and content silos. I think it is dead as an alternative in that sense.

> As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over.

I really, really would like to see this happen, but if the past decade and a half is any indication, the ones taking over will be newer centralized, ad monetized systems. Most of the non-tech people don't care much about privacy or lock-in. I keep trying very often to explain to people why privacy is important and why platforms like FB/WhatsApp, etc., are not good. It's an uphill battle though, and most people don't get it or feel it's too much of a hassle to change their habits and that of the people in their networks.

The Facebook app on Android actually works fine without any special permissions. If you disable them all via the new methods in Marshmallow, it just continues trucking on. Of course they'll never stop asking for the extra permissions, but its functionality is pretty equivalent to the mobile site even with no intrusive permissions.

The Facebook app is a memory hog though, and was causing UI lag in other apps on my phone. I have very little idea how it was doing that, but when I removed it, the lag stopped.

I uninstalled the Facebook Messenger app about 3 months ago when I saw a news article about how it devoured battery on Android, because I was having battery life problems at the time.

I just removed Messenger in favor of the Facebook Lite app, which can be found on APK mirror sites if Google Play doesn't offer it. There does seem to be a significant improvement in idle battery drain.

Good to know. I've yet gotten around to trying this out (just recently upgraded to a Marshmellow phone), I feared it was install > grant permssions > optionally revoke permissions. And I wasn't ready to try that with an app that came out of fb, given their track record.

Maybe that's an idea for an open source Android demo app - one that requests a certain set of (or all possible) permissions, and then simply displays the status of those permissions (granted/blocked).

Chrome has perfectly acceptable push notification support.

I am an occasional user of Facebook Messenger, and using the mobile website was perfect: I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost (I'll see the messages eventually anyway). But there's no way I'm going to install a separate app for something I use maybe once a week, tops.

If it stops working from the mobile website, then I just wait until I'm back at my computer to read fb messenges.

> I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost

But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications.

It is often better to have no feature than a bad feature. I've never used the mobile web messenger, but if it is unreliable, only works in a few browsers, it makes sense to remove the product.

The mobile Facebook website worked fine with messages. You could see whether there were new messages and you could read them and reply to them. You could even chat a bit albeit not as conveniently as on a laptop or a messaging app such as Hangouts or Whatsapp. But it was just enough to keep you connected when needed.

More likely the chat team couldn't read your contacts through your web browser and decided to do something about it.

> But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications.

Sure, that's why they have the app. But it's not a reason to completely turn off messaging from the website. Heck, they could even turn off chrome notifications completely and the website would still be completely functional.

Safari doesn't though :/

I'll assume, by Chrome you mean desktop Chrome. This is irrelevant to my comment. I was specifically talking about realtime push notifications via mobile devices. Also remember that your preference is just your preference, many people would want to be able to make sure their messages get seen in realtime. And Facebook probably wants that for their users too. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying it's not an illogical decision. You are free to complain but it would be stupid for Facebook to keep going this way just so they can support the legacy technology.

Chrome on Android does support real-time push notifications. I know because I was notified of a friend's Facebook post I was mentioned in within 5 seconds of my friend posting it. I don't have Facebook installed on my phone, and he posted it from his phone while my phone was face up on the table between us and we both where surprised at how fast I was notified.

Con confirm. Worked with real time push notifications via Service Workers in Chrome myself.

Please read my other comments on this thread. Basically just because Android supports it doesn't mean it's all good since iOS doesn't. Also the "open web" you think you have on Chrome is not really that open as you think if you think about the entire mobile ecosystem landscape.

Android Chrome supports push notifications, even when the browser is not loaded.

I keep saying this in every comment I made on this thread, but I'm talking about the entire mobile ecosystem. Who cares if Android Chrome supports it, iOS doesn't. Which means it's not a 100% coverage. Just by letting this happen you are providing a low quality service to not just the iOS users but also the Android users, since there will be an assumption that the recipient doesn't always get the message in realtime. If you want to send that kind of messages, there is always email. Messaging apps are built on assumptions that people know the other person receives push immediately.

I call shenanigans for two reasons:

1) you can never assume a recipient ever has their phone on, with them and in a non-silent mode 2) users can disable push notifications for individual apps anyway

For some reason I feel like I have become some sort of FB defender, but I am not. Just to be clear, I am not a fan of FB. I even completely got rid of my FB account a year ago because I got sick of fake interactions on the site and have never looked back. I am happy with communicating with close people just via text and other special purpose communication apps.

That said, the reasons you mention are pretty edge cases. Instead of just hating on it, just stop and think about it for a moment without prejudice. When you email someone you don't expect them to read it immediately, but when you send a text you at least expect them to know they received something, no? (If you say no to this, I really have nothing else to say anymore, you would be just denying the reality) That's what Facebook wants to be. They're competing with SMS, not email.

Also, SMS is not guaranteed to reach the recipient in any reasonable timeframe.

Also, if they're supporting desktop clients I again call shenanigans on your argument.

Mobile web is an edge case, too.

Shenanigans!

Many of the (non-techie) people I know have Whatsapp push notifications disabled, because otherwise there are way too many of them.

Chrome and Firefox currently support push notifications with GCM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API and this is a standard API other vendors are free to implement

As far as I know it's not supported on iOS. Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook. You think Chrome is open web, but it's not. It's an app built by Google. If Facebook were to depend on Chrome push notification (which by the way doesn't even exist but for the sake of discussion let's say it does hypothetically), it would mean it's depending on Google on both Android and iOS which means when it comes to mobile Facebook MUST go through Google 100% of the time. You may say they can use Firefox, but for the same reason, why would they add one more layer of gatekeeper just to let their users communicate? You need to realize this "open web" concept is not really open anymore when it comes to mobile.

What you're saying is just factually incorrect. It is an open standard https://w3c.github.io/push-api/ currently supported by both Firefox and Chrome. Microsoft has also started implementing it in Edge https://twitter.com/jacobrossi/status/735153689501958144. Additionally, Facebook already uses it today.

Tell me what's factually incorrect about "Chrome doesn't support push on iOS". Want me to spell it out for you? Here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34588506/ios-web-notifica...

I am amazed how many people on this thread are attacking me saying "Android Chrome supports push notification" when I said "Chrome doesn't support push on iOS". Are you even listening to what I say?

Every browser on iOS is just Safari with different UI (by order of Apple). No one else even could implement push notifications into their browser because only Apple has that control.

It's not that we don't hear you, it's that the reason you're in your position is because you're using a locked down platform that's trailing all other vendors in web technologies intentionally.

Yes, the first sentence of your post was accurate. From there on it's completely false.

I'm not sure that's true; Facebook are keen users of serviceworkers and the Facebook web app provides push notifications on Chrome in Android using just that mechanism.

Why do people keep saying "Chrome supports push on Android" to criticize my comment which says "iOS chrome doesn't support push"? It feels like talking to a wall almost.

It's a paragraph long post. One sentence accurately says iOS Chrome (which is really Safari outside of Google's control with Chrome UI due to iOS restrictions) doesn't currently support push. The rest talks about it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to implement this (they already did), a rant about this being Google specific technology (it is not), and not being an open standard (it is).

Maybe you should go back and read again.

> Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS

This is what I said. And this applies to rest of the paragraph. Also open standard has absolutely nothing to do with this, and that was exactly my point. You guys think just because it's open standard it's all open and good, but my point was it is not. The reality is Google and Apple are effectively duopoly when it comes to anything push notification related (GCM is the gatekeeper for Android, APNS is the gatekeeper for iOS). So it doesn't matter if a technology is open standard, it wouldn't even matter if it was completely open source. The reality is your push MUST go through either Apple or Google.

> Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook

Facebook has already implemented this. It is in use today on mobile web. If Safari on iOS (which powers "Chrome" on iOS) is updated to support the Push API tomorrow it will start working. Facebook has already implemented it.

As for the rest we're not even talking about web at all. Back to your original post:

> The web (html documents fetched via http requests) were not built with mobile devices in mind, especially websockets. In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications which must go through the device vendor (APNS or GCM), and trying to support the legacy tech in this landscape is just not worth it.

"Legacy tech" isn't necessary to support push notifications on web. Yes, Safari on iOS is woefully outdated for now (which again is what powers "Chrome" on iOS). But it is currently supported on Android (across multiple browsers), soon Windows, and it's possible Safari on iOS will add support in the future https://onesignal.com/blog/when-will-web-push-be-supported-i... Facebook is already using this today.

Sure. In my case that legacy burden is Facebook.

I work for a living and carry a work phone that is managed due to compliance requirements. I could pop on Facebook and check the occasional message. Facebook makes the mobile web experience as user hostile as possible, but it's sort of works. Now I'm stuck, as are about 20,000 of my coworkers.

It's really interesting to me how controversial contrarian opinions to Facebook actions are in this forum. The parent has bounced up and down vote wise quite a bit.

FB is a real lightning rod topic.

" In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications "

Says you. I'm perfectly happy not knowing about my FB messages until I go look for them. I DON'T WANT them pushed to me. If they want to send me something that needs to be read quickly, use email. Or gasp phone/text/whatsapp (I use the latter begrudgingly because whatsapp has pretty much replaced texting in lots of Europe).

I'd agree with you if this was a company that actually sheds legacy tech gracefully, but Xcode can't handle our scale.

True story.

Except native apps aren't the future :/

JavaScript and the DOM certainly aren't.

I have no qualms using WhatsApp. It is a very efficient and useful app. They should probably merge messenger and WhatsApp (or maybe not lest they end up making WhatsApp bad too)

WhatsApp would never accept that. Their brand is a ton better than Messenger's is, for good reason.

I hope the bigwigs at FB don't read your comment. Messenger and whatsapp should never be merged. Part of the reason why I'm glad that Messenger is doing so well (I don't use it myself) it's because I believe that gives them less incentive to mess with whatsapp too much. It's very likely that they will fuck it up eventually but the longer it stays usable the better.

from what I understand, WhatsApp works in China and Messenger doesn't. So I doubt they'll merge. But it'd be nice if you could message from one to another

If fixing a chat app poses a problem to a billion dollar company, then we have bigger problems to worry about.

What data can yhet get from having messenger as an app rather than a website? They already have my list of contacts, all the messages I've sent, they can store my message as I type it through their website. I just don't understand!

Your GPS location (if you have it turned on), your SMS messages, your call logs, your phone's storage, your camera, your mic... Just read the permissions: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.o...

I've never had a Facebook app on any of my phones and I will never install one.

Worth pointing out: Luckily, my phone came without Facebook apps preinstalled, so I had the choice of seeing what Facebook wants to access. Other people don't even have that chance since it comes preinstalled in most of the cases.

But they have that data through their regular Facebook app (I wonder if that's next).

Also I'm on iOS so I can deny access to Gps/location/camera/mic and there's no way to access my message history.

Thanks for the reply though!

That's exactly why many don't run the official Facebook either. There are third party apps using the web-interface meant to sandbox Facebook so they can't gather all information. Up until now those web-interfaces have also been able to use the chat though. And you can still do that with some quick apps made to work around this block by facebook.

And hopefully there will be more people who refuse to instal another messaging app.

Is there any source to confirm "Facebook as a company doesn't have high levels of consumer trust"? I even find hard to understand what consumer trust means in a precise way.

no.they need their users on messenger because they have big plans for that app. there are already businesses connecting with customers through messenger.

Well said