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.

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.

You're confusing Firefox Hello with WebRTC. Let me explain by analogy with a video codec:

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.

WebRTC was "generically" added to Firefox in 2013, ie: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/06/webrtc-comes-to-firefox/

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.

Working for a major player in the WebRTC space certainly gives me a bias, but "noone cares" is pretty far from the truth. There are millions of WebRTC users already, hell, we might even be approaching the billion now if you count Snapchat and Hangouts as WebRTC services. (Yes, Snapchat uses WebRTC for their video chat features)

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've had good experiences with talky and I know hangouts uses webrtc.

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.

Hangouts still uses the Google Talk plugin, as far as I'm aware.

It may be "something wrong" for you, but for me it's exactly what I need to let my mother video chat with her grandson after Skype became useless (breaks more often with every passing release, it seems; we've given up on it).

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.

> I think the biggest problem is the lack of accounts, chat, logging, and persistence in webrtc.

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.

Agreed, I believe Hello will be added text chat along with the video calls using WebRTC data channels in an upcoming release.

Facebook uses WebRTC for calls on the release versions of Firefox. That probably counts for something.

Cool, I didn't know that. It definitely counts for something.

As for STUN/TURN being painful, Twilio recently released a STUN/TURN service platform: https://www.twilio.com/stun-turn. At least makes things somewhat simpler.

I have to mostly agree with this sentiment. But there is of course the question of revenue streams. I won't fault Mozilla for having a default WebRTC provider (like they do for search provider), but the provider needs to be configurable by the end user. I'm hopeful that the long-term goal is exactly this.

I can't help but think that this has something to do with their decision to drop google as the default search option. This is their monetary avenue going forward.