Exactly. Firefox doesn't include "Firefox Hello" anymore than it includes "Gmail". Instead, Firefox (and other web browsers) include XMLHttpRequest and WebRTC, which can be used to implement whatever you want.

I'm getting pretty tired of hearing this trope ("teh bloat!") anytime a browser announces new functionality. Browsers are among the most successful pieces of consumer software in existence, so let's maybe admit they've done something right? But moreover, you have the ability -- really, unprecedented for software so complex and in such wide use -- to fork not one but two excellent open-source browsers, plus an excellent rendering engine. If you think you know better than Mozilla and/or Google, go for it. It's not lost on anyone at Mozilla that this is how Firefox originated.

</rant>

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Your parents sound cool ;-)

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.

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.

For video, Firefox contains a video codec. Surfing to YouTube lets the YouTube web page play video. Firefox does not contain a "Youtube Player".

That's exactly the opposite of what they have done here. They have added basically added a "Telefonica WebRTC Player". That's wrong. They should have added WebRTC generically so that you go to a web page at Telefonica to use it. Or better yet, use it with a server you trust.

Of course, with it being added generically, tons of websites immediately started using it..... nope. Ok, well, lets go back before that blog post... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-c...

Ah ha, isn't that neat. WebRTC in Firefox and Chrome and a demo of it! Wait, still pretty much zero use in the wild of WebRTC...

This is why Google/Mozilla are adding features utilizing these new specs to the browser, because they're cool and no one else is. In the case of WebRTC, it's for a good reason, its a PITA to run TURN/STUN servers to ensure that people behind firewalls can establish a connection.

Check out: - https://appear.in/ - https://talky.io/ - https://screenhero.com/ - https://github.com/feross/webtorrent - https://peercdn.com/ - https://sharefest.me/ - ...and lots, lots more. Sorry to the ones I forgot to mention/don't know about.

For some pure WebRTC experiences. http://simplewebrtc.com/ if you want to build something yourself.

The thing is, you don't know that the service you're using uses WebRTC, quite frankly because the technology doesn't matter, the user experience does. Also, the sheer fact that we seem to have standardised a very good (and very secure) way of doing peer to peer transfers, and that's getting implemented in browsers, with client libraries for iOS and Android is HUGE.

I think the biggest problem is the lack of accounts, chat, logging, and persistence in webrtc. Thats what keeps it from being a p2p communication protocol in general whereas now its just a toy for video calls.

I mean, when you cannot share links during your video call easily, somethings wrong.

Sharing links, accounts, chat, logging and persistence are all irrelevant for my use, and they in any case don't belong in webrtc - webrtc is a component for people to use to build services like what you appear to want.

WebRTC is not a messaging technology, it is a raw data communication technology. It is just here to move bytes from one client to another. The features you are talking about are managed by said clients, meaning that it has to be handled by Firefox/Chrome itself.

All I have to do is right-click on the icon and click "Remove from toolbar", or "Customize" and remove it.

But wait, you say, it's not actually removed... well, for the sort of person that "about:config" is not a valid answer, it is removed.

If your actual complaint is about the functionality / bloat, well, it turns out WebRTC is required for firefox to be a browser and the delta from that to this is essentially nothing.

Chrome is automatically updated to be jam-packed full of browser-specific APIs and functionality.

Like when Chrome automatically updated and registered itself as a background service without permission.

Or when Chrome automatically installed a microphone listening service for always on "OK Google" hotword detection.

Or the fact that Chrome Apps are less and less "webpages" and more and more "applications that only support the Chrome API".

"To add insult to injury, there is no simple way of disabling the functionality"

I wish I got paid my hourly rate for the sheer amount of time I spend combing through Google Product Forums reading about what arcane chrome://flags or commandline ---arg is required to disable their new functions.

It's a shame what's happening to the web.

This time we don't have an all powerful Microsoft fighting the web, but Google seems very wiling to take their place. Last browser wars stopped the web evolution for about a decade, just because of a single party that didn't want to be nice.

We've apparently decided that we should use "the web" for everything, whether or not it's a good fit. So yeah, browsers are unavoidably going to accumulate features that used to be the responsibility of apps or the OS. And there will be lots of browser-specific functionality unless you're willing to wait 5 years for W3C or WHATWG or whoever to finalize a standard.

There used to be a time when most of the posts here on HN were "something native IMPLEMENTED IN JavaScript in a BROWSER" but thankfully those times have passed to the most part.

The Internet was heralded as solving cross-platform problems (hurray for XML?) but it seems that writing a native app actually involves less testing. You now have to test in 3 or 4 browsers per platform, not including mobile devices and changes between different versions. The relentless shoving of features into browsers is no different to what they've been doing for years but I can see why people would not enjoy it, particularly with the repeat of "only works in IE" that you see ("only works in Chrome").

This is a very valid discussion. Software engineers would naturally have concerns when a browser built to render web pages gets turned into a pseudo operating system. The risk here is that without focus it won't be a good browser nor a good OS.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-0...

It's possible your argument could be against adding WebRTC itself, instead of Hello, but the topic here is Hello.

A thread about Firefox is also a thread to discuss web browsers in general, the web, html, etc.

http://www.tokbox.com/blog/firefox-hello-mozilla-enhances-op...

But taking it a bit deeper, this is all part of Telefonica's strategic partnership with Mozilla to market phones running Firefox OS.

http://blog.digital.telefonica.com/tag/html5/

That is what Telefonica might be doing -- providing a default registration service.

Also because of funky routers and NAT rules, even after the initial session is set up data/audio might not be going through, so then you need STUN or TURN servers so Telefonica might be providing those as well.

Anyone doing WebRTC seriously will need to run a fallback centralized pairing service to get around the wacky real world network topology and setup a successful p2p connection. In some cases, you need a dumb centralized pipe to connect the peers.

And in other people's view, it is nonsense, and they liked their Mozilla with built-in mailer, Opera, etc.

And of course there's the huge ecosystem of browsers add-ons and plugins, that do exactly that: implement X functionalities outside of web pages.

>Firefox Hello is ludicrous.

Haven't seen any argument about it. Not being able to disable it and not wanting browsers to include X functionality doesn't translate to "ludicrous".

I don't really do lots of video, so... ::meh:: ... but I am fine with rebuilding the old Netscape system. :)

I'll agree if you amend "allow a web page to implement X" to "allow a web page or an extension to implement X."

Because Hello is built right into Firefox, you can rest easy knowing that your conversations and information will remain private and secure.

I'm not sure exactly why this is though.

Also, out of curiosity more than anything else, what's a decent web-site that implements the same functionality (i.e. set up a VOIP session, let people join by sending a link, ideally anonymously)? I could've sworn AOL had a service like this, but Google results return nothing.