And I think that's better for the long term health of Mozilla, and Firefox, too.
In fact, in my chrome setup I have disabled the PDF viewer because I prefer to download and open them in mupdf.
For PDF viewing especially, it wouldn't be impossible to hav an offering of various competing plug-ins, some perhaps offering extra features like annotations and others offering just the bare minimum.
I think firefox is held to a higher standard because "firefox user" is correlated positively with "aware of privacy issues". Those that just want something fast and easy to use might have used to use firefox instead of IE, but most of them have now moved to chrome.
For the back-end: Everything that's required for correctly rendering or executing modern web content (i.e., everything that's mandated by the current snapshot of the HTML living standard plus non-HTML formats which are "de-facto" part of the web, like Flash and PDF).
For the UI: Stuff that can be expected to make the task of browsing web pages easier for the average user.
Neither Hello nor Pocket fit any of the above descriptions.
I think they're best to focus on the things that can only exist within that client.
Because any other party can start a 'Hello' like service online. Or write a PDF reader (or a program to open any other file format)
I don't think we should be comparing to Chrome here; which doesn't purport to have the 'noble' aims of the Mozilla foundation. A browser should not be part of an 'ecosystem' of online services; for me, having a strong web means that the two are decoupled.
This, in turn, started the dark age of the web.
Like the kernel is only one non-optional (?) part of an OS, HTML rendering is a part of a browser.
And for me Chrome/Chromium has just to many usability bugs, to be used productive. E.g. Tabbar doesn't scroll, not very good extensions available (e.g. regex search) and its more difficult to select head of tail of the url (in firefox just click in middle and drag down/up wards)
If anything they didn't push it enough. The only way to discover it right now is to go Hamburger->Customize->Drag-and-drop Hello to toolbar.
I wonder if people bitching about Firefox even use it.
To continue that analogy further, perhaps babies feel insulted too.
They still record and feed all your conversations in all forms to the highest bidder, but I was always worried about Skype's proprietary desktop program snooping my packets or reading my files or logging my keys.
99% of people are going to be in 192.168.1.0/24 or 10.1.1.0/24. so it only takes 508 guesses.... not to mention that everyone is 127.0.0.1.
EDIT: FF: about:config, media.peerconnection.enabled => false
edit: Now my ip is reported as "ifconfig | grep inet | grep -v inet6 | cut -d" " -f2 | tail -n1" which is amusing.
I think the problem with "Hello" is more of a marketing and publicity one. Nobody uses it because they aren't being made aware of it.
https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/rele...
Sounds like theyŕe killing the whole damn service rather than just removing the plugin, which seems like overkill.
That said, I use appear.in regularly in place of hello because it's easy to make links in my head, so hey.
Well, unless you're referring to the Hello-button, which isn't a plugin, it's just a fancy bookmark to a service which then utilizes WebRTC.
Source is here: https://github.com/linagora/hublin
I can visit the desktop version of Mozilla's add-ons site and see an extension which supposedly does this, but the 'add to Firefox' button is disabled if I visit the same link on my mobile. Bizarre.
If I share a URL from other apps, like Chrome, there's an "Add to Firefox" option available also.
Using Firefox 48.0 on Android, it auto updates so it should be the latest version.
Just one example, I would browse through my Twitter feed before going to sleep. Any interesting links from Twitter were sent to the desktop machine from the mobile. In the morning, I would start Firefox on the desktop and a bunch of new tabs would automatically pop open, which was great.
The moment they removed the contacts feature it was dead for me. Although, to be honest, it never really worked (sometimes no audio and stuff like that).
The idea, that I have to first email the chat URL and then I can make a conversation is like writing a letter first before doing a call. Fundamentally wrong conversation setup.
You can still use a site like https://talky.io/ with Firefox (and I expect there are other sites) if you're looking for Skype or Facebook alternatives. I don't know if there are WebRTC sites that have sane address books, but I would hope so. I've heard talky.io works well, but haven't used it.
I know I can email (where I have an adress book) the URL, but why use another communications channel for call setup.
* Where messages are de/encrypted readable for every device/endpoint of an account not just for the one with the active session.
Why?
Yes, that sucks from a user perspective. But they don't have to fix the goddamn network at 3am because Al the Alcoholic in Accounting can't quit sending pix of his pickled junk to Betty in Brazil.
So basically, Hello was deemed dead from the beginning?
But the concept of having cross-platform realtime audio, video, and screensharing is very appealing.
Glad to be rid of it.
