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A comment on Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features. Parent comment

Re:Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatib... by brianacton on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @11:51AM (#18230331)
When Jan and I evaluated XMPP in 2009, we found that it was not very mobile friendly. To provide a couple of examples -- (1) The login path required an inordinate number of round trips (I think it was 4+). This slowed down login quite considerably. (2) XMPP is byte verbose and expensive on mobile networks.

We came to the conclusion that XMPP was built for desktop computers connected to strong internet via LAN connections not for mobile networks. We went on to invent our own protocol which was byte efficient and minimized roundtrips.

Now take all of this with a grain of salt. It is now 2018 and things have changed considerably.

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Re:Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatib... by seba_dos1 on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @11:56AM (#18230385)
> that XMPP was built for desktop computers connected to strong internet via LAN connections not for mobile networks

Oh it definitely was. However, extending it to work well on mobile devices without throwing the whole protocol away turned out to be feasible.

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Re:Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatib... by AceJohnny2 on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @08:43PM (#18234581)
Yeah, I remember 10 years ago (or more), they were looking into ways to make it more mobile friendly, including Roster Versioning (so you wouldn't need the whole series of transactions to get your roster on initial connection), session keepalive (the basic protocol expects one long TCP session, which is of course impractical on mobile), and stream compression.

Sadly, those weren't really enough at the time, and the new protocol Babel happened.

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Re:Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatib... by rdtsc on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @10:37PM (#18235668)
> We went on to invent our own protocol which was byte efficient and minimized roundtrips.

Completely understandable. And well, looking back it was the right decision. You definitely have solid proof.

Yeah as much as XMPP looks good on paper I don't think it will ever take over the messaging world. Even if the devices and the network capacity could handle the larger messages I feel developers don't really want to deal with XML standards. There were a lot of cool things in the 90's but XML wasn't one of them.

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