9 ms·

Firefox Hello – Browse the Web with Friends

85 points by duck 11y ago

d33 11y ago
The problem is that it's firefox-only.
- goda90 11y ago
  I think it might be cross browser too. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/which-browsers-will-work-firefox-hello-video-chat https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/which-browsers-will-wor...
  - porkloin 11y ago
    It doesn't work on mobile though, which kinda sucks. But it does work cross-browser on desktop.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Why would you do browser-sharing on mobile? It's useless enough on the desktop, where it kind of makes sense...
    - excalibur 11y ago
      But it doesn't even connect if it can't find a camera and microphone. Because everyone has a camera on their desktop.
ktamura 11y ago
Firefox's problem is not lack of features. It's performance. To be sure, Firefox isn't the worst by many metrics, but it's no longer the stand-out that it was circa 2005-2008. That's why Firefox users left it for Chrome. And here we are in 2016, I feel that Firefox has a legitimate chance of fighting back if they get their act together. Chrome has become heavy on resource usage while Safari can be sluggish at times. Microsoft has done a great job with Edge but it's bound to Windows 10. This is the opportunity that Firefox should seize. Yet, they seem to be permanently confused about what they want to do. Chucking Firefox OS was a brave and laudable choice (I say this as a former user, not just an owner, of Firefox OS). But then they work on this? Seriously? Just keep your heads down and concentrate your resources on making Firefox faster and more efficient. Everything else will come with it.
- mdibaiee 11y ago
  They are working hard towards making Firefox (and every other web product) faster and more efficient, Servo. I'm pretty sure Firefox will be faster than any other browser once Servo is used inside Firefox instead of Gecko, check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11175258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11175258
  - tasnent 11y ago
    That was a great read. Thank you for linking it.
  - sp332 11y ago
    But there are no plans to put Servo in Firefox. Servo is a new embedable rendering engine that can be put in other apps. It's not aiming to replace Gecko in FF.
    - skrebbel 11y ago
      Browser vendor makes a browser engine, and you believe they don't plan to put it in the browser? If you do a risky project that might fail or not pay off, and you don't want to get bad PR, you can do only two things: Keep it entirely secret, or develop it in the open but make no promises whatsoever. For an open source company, the choice is pretty easy. I always thought it was a public secret that of course they're going to put it in the browser, but they don't dare promising that before they know it's going to work out. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if nextgen Firefox is just going to be Servo + browser.html.
      - the8472 11y ago
        And considering onging projects (webextensions, e10s) it should be fairly obvious that even if they started today it would still be a multi-year project just to get to a point where pain-tolerant users might be willing to use it.
      - sp332 11y ago
ape4 11y ago
It would be nice if you could get at Hello without adding it to your toolbar.
- sp332 11y ago
  You could add it to the drop-down panel under the menu on the right?
  - ape4 11y ago
    Right you are. That should be the default.
chris_wot 11y ago
Um. Wat? Is this some sort of screen sharing thing? Sharing web pages?!?
- callahad 11y ago
  Yep. Tab + voice + video sharing via WebRTC.
  - kardos 11y ago
    Does anybody want or use this? Does it share all of your tabs? How do you control what it shares? It seems like a privacy time bomb waiting to happen.
    - callahad 11y ago
      I've found it pretty handy, especially when doing remote code reviews or preliminary interviews. It only shares the currently visible tab in a single window, and while enabled, that window gets a big banner and overlay video window that make it very difficult to accidentally share the wrong thing. Plus, WebRTC is encrypted between peers, which would thwart passive eavesdroppers.
gkya 11y ago
Firefox bundles Pocket and this, and these are irremovable, without maintaining one's own builds. Actually, Chromium's default install is better at respecting my freedom than Firefox. This is incompatible with their mottos: > Committed to you, your privacy and an open Web. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/desktop https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/desktop > We make it Firefox. You make it your own. -- The features you love. The privacy you trust. Our most customizable Firefox for Android yet. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/
- sp332 11y ago
  How is this unprivate or uncustomizable?
  - gkya 11y ago
    I can't remove them as a user. I can't be sure that they won't add more of this third-party stuff. I can't trust their claims. This is like the case of online searches on Unity/Ubuntu. A non-essential, irremovable (non-destructively), annoying bit of software on my system.
    - aibara 11y ago
      You could always easily disable online searches in Ubuntu's Unity environment. And in 16.04 it's now off by default.
      - gkya 11y ago
        IIRC it was not easily disabled when it was first introduced, the control was added after community reaction. However, I just included as another example. Further, I don't know the situation now, but IIRC you can't remove (i.e. delete the code, not disable) zeitgeist and online searches, keeping Unity, those are hard dependencies, even though non-essential.
    - 21echoes 11y ago
      but the code does not execute unless you interact with it, as can be easily verified by inspecting source. move them out of your tab bar and never click them if it's a big deal to you.
bshimmin 11y ago
Is this actually a problem that's really crying out for a solution? I mean, I can't say I do collaborative remote planning of trips or shopping online very often at all, but on the rare occasions that I have, sending an email or an instant message of some sort with links in it really does mostly seem to do the trick ("Do you prefer <url> or <url>?" - "I like the first one" - "Great, I'll buy that, thanks").
- sdegutis 11y ago
  I feel like that's typical of most new apps/websites coming out. Trying to solve non-problems. That's why we never jumped onto using Slack at work. And now I'm feeling a bit validated about that decision, seeing as just a year later everyone's flocking away from it.
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    They are?! Whither do they flock?
    - educar 11y ago
      we use rocket.chat at work and it's quite good.
ssivark 11y ago
I consider the need to share a tab a BUG, rather than a feature. Here's the filing on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1249185 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1249185 As I state there, Firefox Hello's user experience (before this change) was significantly superior to both Skype and Google Hangouts. But they seem intent on shipping a barely needed feature instead of providing excellent and usable video chat (where no other platform comes close, IMHO). When I last used it a few weeks ago, the "feature" was a disaster -- every time you switch tabs the other person you're chatting with would see exactly the page you see. This should be an opt-in feature, not a possibly opt-out one! (they claim that in future versions there will be a way to disable tab-sharing... though I don't see it currently) </rant>
callahad 11y ago
If you want to try it out, I'll leave this session open while I prep for a talk next week. Hello only supports 1:1 chats, not group ones, so this may not work immediately for you. (Edit: Link removed. It was nice meeting those of you who dropped by!)
15charlimit 11y ago
>Browse the web with friends Why? Keep that garbage out of the browser. Everything is too "social" and integrated already. Just give me a "dumb" viewer - nothing more, nothing less.
mangeletti 11y ago
Imagine your Tesla Model S has an issue where it won't charge. You call your buddy who also has a Model S, and she's having the same issue with hers. So, you call Tesla and tell them, "I can't use my Model S because the battery won't charge!". They're like "no worries, send us the diagnostic information and we'll get it fixed in no time". In a sigh of relief, you quickly head to your garage and use 1 of the the remaining 3 percent of your battery charge to send diagnostic data to Tesla... 12 weeks later, you're frustrated because you've been driving a sub-standard rental car, and you call Tesla again. "Why haven't you fixed this, yet?!". They reply, "We have! We just finished the update you've been waiting for. Go have a look!". You run to the garage and plug the car in to the wall. You get in and look at the screen to see if it's charging. Your Model S's computer welcomes you with a message: Drive with your friends now with Tesla Hello! You can now see where your friends are while you drive! Now, your battery is at 0.5%. That's Firefox.
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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- coldtea 11y ago
  You forgot their foray into motorcycle engines [1] and driver licences [2] ... [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/ [2] https://login.persona.org/ https://login.persona.org/
educar 11y ago
Daily firefox user checking in. Every mozilla feature gets me upset because firefox was the poster boy for the underdog. I got behind them completely during the browser wars and have written firefox extensions as well. But look at them today. Firefox OS. Ads on the initial browser page. Pocket. They were extremely slow to catch up with multi-process tabs. And firefox just freezes up arbitrarily periodically. So very sad. Performance issues aside, Firefox has not been big on my privacy issues either. Running sync server is so incredibly complicated and it doesn't need to be that way. All it's doing is stash bookmark/password data and the amount of configuration required to run this on your own is mind numbing :/ Just see the wiki pages and they all say the pages need work.
marpstar 11y ago
Does anyone else remember Excite.com's chat application from ~20 years ago, which has the ability for people who were all on the same web page could chat amongst each other. I'm pretty sure you could navigate across pages and bring people with you, too. Very early precursor to this. I thought it was a lot of fun back then, but I was 11 years old.
- dahdum 11y ago
  Yes - I definitely remember shared browsing some time back in the mid/late 90's but I couldn't remember the app that did it. Excite doesn't ring a bell though, maybe there were more? I thought it was pretty useless back then...
anexprogrammer 11y ago
I don't understand what happened to Firefox or how they so comprehensively lost their direction. The whole rationale of the browser was to be something small, tight and easily extensible and to get away from the unreliability of Netscape. Now we learn they're deprecating full themes, changing plugins to be more limited (but again becoming more like Chrome), and filling the browser with pointless at best features. I can't recall ever wanting to share browsing. Screens when coding or helping sure, but it's a solved problem, so keep it and the kitchen sink out of the browser. It's probably why its becoming so slow and flaky. The two key problems it was intended to fix.
- dmm 11y ago
  > It's probably why its becoming so slow and flaky. I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" What's going on? Do browsers get full of history/cookies/profiles/plugins and slow down. Is it just the act of switching that speeds things up? [1] http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-1685425815 http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-16854258...
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" I think it's simply that anecdotes are extremely unreliable when it comes to something as large and complex as a browser that's so sensitive to the specific content you browse. Firefox is slow from time to time for some people; Chrome is slow from time to time for some people.
  - anexprogrammer 11y ago
    Well I'm sure profiles are a part of it. It got bad enough that I completely removed all profile and plugin data, and clean reinstalled. Firefox remains the worst performing browser I have on this system by very large measure. Five amazon tabs are enough to basically grind it to a halt. Chrome, IE, Opera and Palemoon (a fork of an older firefox) don't do that. So I've reached a point where I can't do much more to make it usable without a debugger. I've no doubt others are fine, or find Chrome the slow one. If everyone had the issues I currently have it'd be the single highest priority bugfix in the project. I'd maybe migrate to palemoon but I don't trust it on a security front.
fpgaminer 11y ago
Lots of negativity in these comments surrounding Firefox and Mozilla's direction with it. I've been using Rust, a Mozilla product, quite a bit recently and have even contributed to the project. I am throughly impressed with Rust, the language, the ecosystem, and most importantly the way it's maintained by Mozilla. It's an incredible gift by Mozilla to the community at large, and for that they've earned a lot of respect from me. I agree that Firefox's performance is quite bad these days, but Mozilla is already working on that (with Servo). Pouring more devs into it is not likely to make progress on that front faster (too many cooks). They could have taken a more gradual approach to the problem, by slowly evolving the existing codebase, chipping away at performance. But they've been trying that for a long time. Servo is, in my opinion, the better plan. And with it also comes a massive security hardening. It's a long road, but one worth waiting for. So, Mozilla has already dedicated the necessary resources to handle performance. What are they to do with the rest of their company's resources, and most importantly, what can they do to grow the company? Firefox Hello and other projects like it are part of that effort. We may not agree that Firefox Hello is a good idea. Personally I don't have a use for it either. But bless them for trying and experimenting. And let's not forget that Firefox is a "free" product. I can't imagine Mozilla is swimming in money. They don't have the resources that Google or Microsoft have, and yet they still have a solid chance at leap-frogging their competition with Servo. Personally, I continue to use Firefox as my daily driver, because it appears to respect my privacy more than Chrome, despite its performance issues.
- deleted 11y ago
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- panic 11y ago
  So, Mozilla has already dedicated the necessary resources to handle performance. What are they to do with the rest of their company's resources, and most importantly, what can they do to grow the company? Mozilla recently jettisoned Thunderbird, its email client, mostly because of its impact on Firefox development (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAy...). Wouldn't a great native email client be a better way to grow the company than features like this? And shouldn't features be added to make the product better, not just because there are people sitting around with nothing else to do?
quantisan 11y ago
This could be useful for web app remote user testing and development.
marmaduke 11y ago
This is a pretty cool alternative to Skype, and it works OK on Linux too. why all the whining here?
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I'd personally love it as a skype alternative. I don't, however, want it integrated into my browser.
sanbor 11y ago
I'm thankful to Mozilla to produce multi-platform software libre, but I also have some comments about their current priorities. I think Firefox should try to gain users again with a good browser that it's fast and has great features expected in a browser. In this chart you can see how Chrome users increments and Firefox users decrement [1]. A feature to chat, call and share my screen it's not a feature that I expect from a browser. A button to store bookmarks in a third-party service it's not a feature that I expect in a browser. A good printing functionality or to save a page as PDF it's something that I would expect from a browser (you can save a page as PDF in Firefox for Android but not in desktop). Last year I made a little web project[2] that would take a group of images and generate a printable calendar. I'm fluent in CSS and HTML and it was pretty easy to make. To my surprise, Firefox has the same print dialog like from Firefox 1.0. I wasn't able to generate a decent pdf from their printing dialog, which was extremely basic and without a preview support. Chrome and Safari were pretty good and I was able to get very good results. They both show you a preview of the page before sending it to print. I am surprised to see that Firefox invests time and effort in things like VR[3] while lacking a good printing experience (I think a good printing experience would help lots of more people in concrete ways). Finally, after seeing how they abandon projects like Persona, FirefoxOS or Thunderbird, I'm not very prone to invest time in their projects that maybe they will end up abandoning (I have the same feeling with Google). Anyway, this is intended as feedback and hoping that they will start listening users about what they want from their browsers. Right now seems the opposite, Mozilla creative people trying to convince users that they want the things that they come up with. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...) [2](https://github.com/sanbor/printable-calendar https://github.com/sanbor/printable-calendar) [3](http://mozvr.com/ http://mozvr.com/)

85 points by duck 11y ago

d33 11y ago

The problem is that it's firefox-only.

goda90 11y ago
I think it might be cross browser too. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/which-browsers-will-work-firefox-hello-video-chat https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/which-browsers-will-wor...
- porkloin 11y ago
  It doesn't work on mobile though, which kinda sucks. But it does work cross-browser on desktop.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Why would you do browser-sharing on mobile? It's useless enough on the desktop, where it kind of makes sense...
  - excalibur 11y ago
    But it doesn't even connect if it can't find a camera and microphone. Because everyone has a camera on their desktop.

ktamura 11y ago

Firefox's problem is not lack of features. It's performance. To be sure, Firefox isn't the worst by many metrics, but it's no longer the stand-out that it was circa 2005-2008. That's why Firefox users left it for Chrome. And here we are in 2016, I feel that Firefox has a legitimate chance of fighting back if they get their act together. Chrome has become heavy on resource usage while Safari can be sluggish at times. Microsoft has done a great job with Edge but it's bound to Windows 10. This is the opportunity that Firefox should seize. Yet, they seem to be permanently confused about what they want to do. Chucking Firefox OS was a brave and laudable choice (I say this as a former user, not just an owner, of Firefox OS). But then they work on this? Seriously? Just keep your heads down and concentrate your resources on making Firefox faster and more efficient. Everything else will come with it.

mdibaiee 11y ago
They are working hard towards making Firefox (and every other web product) faster and more efficient, Servo. I'm pretty sure Firefox will be faster than any other browser once Servo is used inside Firefox instead of Gecko, check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11175258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11175258
- tasnent 11y ago
  That was a great read. Thank you for linking it.
- sp332 11y ago
  But there are no plans to put Servo in Firefox. Servo is a new embedable rendering engine that can be put in other apps. It's not aiming to replace Gecko in FF.
  - skrebbel 11y ago
    Browser vendor makes a browser engine, and you believe they don't plan to put it in the browser? If you do a risky project that might fail or not pay off, and you don't want to get bad PR, you can do only two things: Keep it entirely secret, or develop it in the open but make no promises whatsoever. For an open source company, the choice is pretty easy. I always thought it was a public secret that of course they're going to put it in the browser, but they don't dare promising that before they know it's going to work out. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if nextgen Firefox is just going to be Servo + browser.html.
    - the8472 11y ago
      And considering onging projects (webextensions, e10s) it should be fairly obvious that even if they started today it would still be a multi-year project just to get to a point where pain-tolerant users might be willing to use it.
    - sp332 11y ago

ape4 11y ago

It would be nice if you could get at Hello without adding it to your toolbar.

sp332 11y ago
You could add it to the drop-down panel under the menu on the right?
- ape4 11y ago
  Right you are. That should be the default.

chris_wot 11y ago

Um. Wat? Is this some sort of screen sharing thing? Sharing web pages?!?

callahad 11y ago
Yep. Tab + voice + video sharing via WebRTC.
- kardos 11y ago
  Does anybody want or use this? Does it share all of your tabs? How do you control what it shares? It seems like a privacy time bomb waiting to happen.
  - callahad 11y ago
    I've found it pretty handy, especially when doing remote code reviews or preliminary interviews. It only shares the currently visible tab in a single window, and while enabled, that window gets a big banner and overlay video window that make it very difficult to accidentally share the wrong thing. Plus, WebRTC is encrypted between peers, which would thwart passive eavesdroppers.

gkya 11y ago

Firefox bundles Pocket and this, and these are irremovable, without maintaining one's own builds. Actually, Chromium's default install is better at respecting my freedom than Firefox. This is incompatible with their mottos: > Committed to you, your privacy and an open Web. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/desktop https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/desktop > We make it Firefox. You make it your own. -- The features you love. The privacy you trust. Our most customizable Firefox for Android yet. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/

sp332 11y ago
How is this unprivate or uncustomizable?
- gkya 11y ago
  I can't remove them as a user. I can't be sure that they won't add more of this third-party stuff. I can't trust their claims. This is like the case of online searches on Unity/Ubuntu. A non-essential, irremovable (non-destructively), annoying bit of software on my system.
  - aibara 11y ago
    You could always easily disable online searches in Ubuntu's Unity environment. And in 16.04 it's now off by default.
    - gkya 11y ago
      IIRC it was not easily disabled when it was first introduced, the control was added after community reaction. However, I just included as another example. Further, I don't know the situation now, but IIRC you can't remove (i.e. delete the code, not disable) zeitgeist and online searches, keeping Unity, those are hard dependencies, even though non-essential.
  - 21echoes 11y ago
    but the code does not execute unless you interact with it, as can be easily verified by inspecting source. move them out of your tab bar and never click them if it's a big deal to you.

bshimmin 11y ago

Is this actually a problem that's really crying out for a solution? I mean, I can't say I do collaborative remote planning of trips or shopping online very often at all, but on the rare occasions that I have, sending an email or an instant message of some sort with links in it really does mostly seem to do the trick ("Do you prefer <url> or <url>?" - "I like the first one" - "Great, I'll buy that, thanks").

sdegutis 11y ago
I feel like that's typical of most new apps/websites coming out. Trying to solve non-problems. That's why we never jumped onto using Slack at work. And now I'm feeling a bit validated about that decision, seeing as just a year later everyone's flocking away from it.
- bshimmin 11y ago
  They are?! Whither do they flock?
  - educar 11y ago
    we use rocket.chat at work and it's quite good.

ssivark 11y ago

I consider the need to share a tab a BUG, rather than a feature. Here's the filing on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1249185 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1249185 As I state there, Firefox Hello's user experience (before this change) was significantly superior to both Skype and Google Hangouts. But they seem intent on shipping a barely needed feature instead of providing excellent and usable video chat (where no other platform comes close, IMHO). When I last used it a few weeks ago, the "feature" was a disaster -- every time you switch tabs the other person you're chatting with would see exactly the page you see. This should be an opt-in feature, not a possibly opt-out one! (they claim that in future versions there will be a way to disable tab-sharing... though I don't see it currently) </rant>

callahad 11y ago

If you want to try it out, I'll leave this session open while I prep for a talk next week. Hello only supports 1:1 chats, not group ones, so this may not work immediately for you. (Edit: Link removed. It was nice meeting those of you who dropped by!)

15charlimit 11y ago

>Browse the web with friends Why? Keep that garbage out of the browser. Everything is too "social" and integrated already. Just give me a "dumb" viewer - nothing more, nothing less.

mangeletti 11y ago

Imagine your Tesla Model S has an issue where it won't charge. You call your buddy who also has a Model S, and she's having the same issue with hers. So, you call Tesla and tell them, "I can't use my Model S because the battery won't charge!". They're like "no worries, send us the diagnostic information and we'll get it fixed in no time". In a sigh of relief, you quickly head to your garage and use 1 of the the remaining 3 percent of your battery charge to send diagnostic data to Tesla... 12 weeks later, you're frustrated because you've been driving a sub-standard rental car, and you call Tesla again. "Why haven't you fixed this, yet?!". They reply, "We have! We just finished the update you've been waiting for. Go have a look!". You run to the garage and plug the car in to the wall. You get in and look at the screen to see if it's charging. Your Model S's computer welcomes you with a message: Drive with your friends now with Tesla Hello! You can now see where your friends are while you drive! Now, your battery is at 0.5%. That's Firefox.

deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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coldtea 11y ago
You forgot their foray into motorcycle engines [1] and driver licences [2] ... [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/ [2] https://login.persona.org/ https://login.persona.org/

educar 11y ago

Daily firefox user checking in. Every mozilla feature gets me upset because firefox was the poster boy for the underdog. I got behind them completely during the browser wars and have written firefox extensions as well. But look at them today. Firefox OS. Ads on the initial browser page. Pocket. They were extremely slow to catch up with multi-process tabs. And firefox just freezes up arbitrarily periodically. So very sad. Performance issues aside, Firefox has not been big on my privacy issues either. Running sync server is so incredibly complicated and it doesn't need to be that way. All it's doing is stash bookmark/password data and the amount of configuration required to run this on your own is mind numbing :/ Just see the wiki pages and they all say the pages need work.

marpstar 11y ago

Does anyone else remember Excite.com's chat application from ~20 years ago, which has the ability for people who were all on the same web page could chat amongst each other. I'm pretty sure you could navigate across pages and bring people with you, too. Very early precursor to this. I thought it was a lot of fun back then, but I was 11 years old.

dahdum 11y ago
Yes - I definitely remember shared browsing some time back in the mid/late 90's but I couldn't remember the app that did it. Excite doesn't ring a bell though, maybe there were more? I thought it was pretty useless back then...

anexprogrammer 11y ago

I don't understand what happened to Firefox or how they so comprehensively lost their direction. The whole rationale of the browser was to be something small, tight and easily extensible and to get away from the unreliability of Netscape. Now we learn they're deprecating full themes, changing plugins to be more limited (but again becoming more like Chrome), and filling the browser with pointless at best features. I can't recall ever wanting to share browsing. Screens when coding or helping sure, but it's a solved problem, so keep it and the kitchen sink out of the browser. It's probably why its becoming so slow and flaky. The two key problems it was intended to fix.

dmm 11y ago
> It's probably why its becoming so slow and flaky. I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" What's going on? Do browsers get full of history/cookies/profiles/plugins and slow down. Is it just the act of switching that speeds things up? [1] http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-1685425815 http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-16854258...
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" I think it's simply that anecdotes are extremely unreliable when it comes to something as large and complex as a browser that's so sensitive to the specific content you browse. Firefox is slow from time to time for some people; Chrome is slow from time to time for some people.
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  Well I'm sure profiles are a part of it. It got bad enough that I completely removed all profile and plugin data, and clean reinstalled. Firefox remains the worst performing browser I have on this system by very large measure. Five amazon tabs are enough to basically grind it to a halt. Chrome, IE, Opera and Palemoon (a fork of an older firefox) don't do that. So I've reached a point where I can't do much more to make it usable without a debugger. I've no doubt others are fine, or find Chrome the slow one. If everyone had the issues I currently have it'd be the single highest priority bugfix in the project. I'd maybe migrate to palemoon but I don't trust it on a security front.

fpgaminer 11y ago

Lots of negativity in these comments surrounding Firefox and Mozilla's direction with it. I've been using Rust, a Mozilla product, quite a bit recently and have even contributed to the project. I am throughly impressed with Rust, the language, the ecosystem, and most importantly the way it's maintained by Mozilla. It's an incredible gift by Mozilla to the community at large, and for that they've earned a lot of respect from me. I agree that Firefox's performance is quite bad these days, but Mozilla is already working on that (with Servo). Pouring more devs into it is not likely to make progress on that front faster (too many cooks). They could have taken a more gradual approach to the problem, by slowly evolving the existing codebase, chipping away at performance. But they've been trying that for a long time. Servo is, in my opinion, the better plan. And with it also comes a massive security hardening. It's a long road, but one worth waiting for. So, Mozilla has already dedicated the necessary resources to handle performance. What are they to do with the rest of their company's resources, and most importantly, what can they do to grow the company? Firefox Hello and other projects like it are part of that effort. We may not agree that Firefox Hello is a good idea. Personally I don't have a use for it either. But bless them for trying and experimenting. And let's not forget that Firefox is a "free" product. I can't imagine Mozilla is swimming in money. They don't have the resources that Google or Microsoft have, and yet they still have a solid chance at leap-frogging their competition with Servo. Personally, I continue to use Firefox as my daily driver, because it appears to respect my privacy more than Chrome, despite its performance issues.

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panic 11y ago
So, Mozilla has already dedicated the necessary resources to handle performance. What are they to do with the rest of their company's resources, and most importantly, what can they do to grow the company? Mozilla recently jettisoned Thunderbird, its email client, mostly because of its impact on Firefox development (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAy...). Wouldn't a great native email client be a better way to grow the company than features like this? And shouldn't features be added to make the product better, not just because there are people sitting around with nothing else to do?

quantisan 11y ago

This could be useful for web app remote user testing and development.

marmaduke 11y ago

This is a pretty cool alternative to Skype, and it works OK on Linux too. why all the whining here?

CaptSpify 11y ago
I'd personally love it as a skype alternative. I don't, however, want it integrated into my browser.

sanbor 11y ago

I'm thankful to Mozilla to produce multi-platform software libre, but I also have some comments about their current priorities. I think Firefox should try to gain users again with a good browser that it's fast and has great features expected in a browser. In this chart you can see how Chrome users increments and Firefox users decrement [1]. A feature to chat, call and share my screen it's not a feature that I expect from a browser. A button to store bookmarks in a third-party service it's not a feature that I expect in a browser. A good printing functionality or to save a page as PDF it's something that I would expect from a browser (you can save a page as PDF in Firefox for Android but not in desktop). Last year I made a little web project[2] that would take a group of images and generate a printable calendar. I'm fluent in CSS and HTML and it was pretty easy to make. To my surprise, Firefox has the same print dialog like from Firefox 1.0. I wasn't able to generate a decent pdf from their printing dialog, which was extremely basic and without a preview support. Chrome and Safari were pretty good and I was able to get very good results. They both show you a preview of the page before sending it to print. I am surprised to see that Firefox invests time and effort in things like VR[3] while lacking a good printing experience (I think a good printing experience would help lots of more people in concrete ways). Finally, after seeing how they abandon projects like Persona, FirefoxOS or Thunderbird, I'm not very prone to invest time in their projects that maybe they will end up abandoning (I have the same feeling with Google). Anyway, this is intended as feedback and hoping that they will start listening users about what they want from their browsers. Right now seems the opposite, Mozilla creative people trying to convince users that they want the things that they come up with. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...) [2](https://github.com/sanbor/printable-calendar https://github.com/sanbor/printable-calendar) [3](http://mozvr.com/ http://mozvr.com/)