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Support for Hello discontinued in Firefox 49
- FrozenVoid 10y agoGood riddance. Firefox having default plugins like this is one of the reasons i stay in v38.0
- hadrien01 10y agoESR 38 is still updated? I think its end of life was a few months ago...
- yuhong 10y agoI think ESR never has Hello or Pocket anyway.
- JohnTHaller 10y agoNope. Firefox ESR is at version 45.3.0. Firefox 38.x is insecure and should absolutely not be used.
- Sir_Substance 10y agoHello wasn't just a plugin though. It was a WebRTC enabled website. You could start a firefox hello session with the button in the top corner, but you could share it with someone using any modern browser. 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.
- deadbunny 10y agoEnjoy your vulnerabilities: https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/release-overview-high-res.7f1fea43e9e2.png https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/rele...
- rplnt 10y agoPublic vulnerabilities. It's not like 49 doesn't/won't have any.
- Sylos 10y agoWebRTC is a web-standard. So, the WebRTC-plugin itself is actually something positive, as it gives users control to disable it. Other browsers just implemented WebRTC without giving users control over it. 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.
- chris_wot 10y agoIt's got a long, long way to go: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/WebRTC/Privacy https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/WebRTC/Privacy
- arianvanp 10y agoWait it will be totally discontinued? Not even optional? So basically, Hello was deemed dead from the beginning?
- akerro 10y ago>So basically, Hello was deemed dead from the beginning? As everyone predicted.
- lucb1e 10y ago> As everyone predicted. After seeing how everyone reacted to it, yeah, that makes it easy to "predict" people don't like it.
- toxican 10y agoI think shoehorning something nobody asked for into a browser that has historically suffered from bloat and performance issues was a good indication of what the reaction would be.
- Certhas 10y agoSo they should have not bothered trying because people were always going to conflate unrelated things?
- philliphaydon 10y agoI'm on 48 and don't have that feature????
- just_observing 10y agoI'm on 48.0.1 - right click your bookmarks toolbar or Customise it. Hello and Pocket will be options - you may well have removed them?
- philliphaydon 10y agoI have a Pocket List option but no hello option. Strange.
- thrkw123456789 10y agoThis is a shame it was the best chance to get people off Skype.
- nisdec 10y agoThere is hope. Discord and Slack.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoIf you want me to eat something, don't shove it in my mouth, put it on my plate and tell me how delicious it is.
- Certhas 10y agoNobody forced you to use Hello and they barely promoted it in the auto update. Only reason I even know about is is people complaining about the bloat and supposed slowness that this bit of non-running code causes. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
- chme 10y agoSo is Jitsi Meet the only FOSS alternative?
- jcbrand 10y agoThere's also talky.io, which is FOSS and works well for me.
- chme 10y agoI looked for a bit but couldn't find the source for it.
- berdario 10y agoSome (most?) parts of it are open source http://otalk.org/ http://otalk.org/ https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-sourced-from-talky/ https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-source...
- jcbrand 10y agoHere you go: https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-sourced-from-talky/ https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-source...
- jbk 10y agoThere is also hubl.in https://hubl.in/ https://hubl.in/ Source is here: https://github.com/linagora/hublin https://github.com/linagora/hublin
- 0x006A 10y agochatb.org is also free software - https://chatb.org/ https://chatb.org/
- akerro 10y agohttps://vector.im/ https://vector.im/
- 10y ago
- Jaruzel 10y agoThe first thing I do on any new Firefox install is remove Pocket and Hello off the toolbar. I'm pretty sure most people do the same. In fact, I'm struggling to remember what Hello actually is...
- chme 10y agoHmm... I think "Hello" doesn't even show per default, at least on my machine. Or I cannot remember removing it. 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.
- jhasse 10y agoIn my experience the problem with Hello is that it's too buggy. I found appear.in to be a lot more reliable.
- chris_wot 10y agoNobody uses it because nobody asked for it.
- lucb1e 10y agoNobody asked for a telephone, they asked for faster horses.
- edraferi 10y ago> Nobody asked for an [automobile], they asked for faster horses. FTFY, assuming you're looking for the Henry Ford reference. People actually DID ask for the telephone. It was a natural extension of the widely deployed telegraph system.
- lucb1e 10y agoThat makes sense, I think you're right.
- nachtigall 10y agoI was about to use it as a OS-independent alternative to Skype (I'm on Linux). And I wanted to use this, also instead of facebook chat and the likes. 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.
- intherdfield 10y agoThe WebRTC functionality isn't being removed, just the built in video chat/sharing that was powered by Telefonica. You can still use a site like https://talky.io/ 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.
- nachtigall 10y agoSession setup is a real showstopper if there are no builtin contacts. If I have to paste the talky.io URL first with <some-other-chat-program>, why not use <some-other-chat-program> in the first place? I know I can email (where I have an adress book) the URL, but why use another communications channel for call setup.
- fzzzy 10y agoBecause <another communications channel> is the channel that every user already has set up with the user they want to chat with. It varies for every person, so why not let them use what is most convenient for them? Nothing's stopping anybody from writing a walled garden site that provides a nice ui for messaging contacts you stored in an address book on top of that.
- chme 10y agoYes, I would rather see some more traditional FOSS video/audio/chat/screensharing solution. With an account, contact lists, account (not device) based E2E encryption* , easy to deploy server software and something that can be used from a browser (without any plugins) and native chat applications with an open standard. * Where messages are de/encrypted readable for every device/endpoint of an account not just for the one with the active session.
- burnbabyburn 10y agothe idea was great, probably no one ever used Hello because is was substantially broken.
- sildur 10y agoMozilla is the new Google.
- akerro 10y agobotnet?
- zbuf 10y agoI'd rather my browser focused on being a browser. And I think that's better for the long term health of Mozilla, and Firefox, too.
- lucb1e 10y agoWhere would you draw the line? A PDF reader is very useful, but not a core browser component. Or Chrome tying in with all the Google services, that's not browser functionality but Google service promotion. Why does Firefox get shit for this every time?
- ultramancool 10y agoPDF viewer is over the line too, Evince and Sumatra are so much faster and render nicer.
- swiley 10y agoBecause people who don't like that gave up on chrome.
- mrweasel 10y agoBecause we hold Mozilla to a higher standard than Google.
- felipeerias 10y agoIf that "higher standard" means that a Free SW project is forbidden from implementing new functionality and experimenting in general (even if some of those experiments fail, as is the case here), that's not a very good standard at all. In fact, it sounds more like a recipe for letting others innovate and being perpetually stuck chasing taillights.
- sethish 10y agoDisagree. They added a new feature requiring an external service and gave it to everyone by default. Now, Mozilla has opt-in experiments of new features that can be tested and seen by the community before they are integrated by default.
- red_admiral 10y agoIs it too much to hope that pocket will be next?
- tombrossman 10y agoSlightly off-topic but does anyone know the status of the "Send Tab to Device" function? It is my favorite feature on Firefox for Android and it has disappeared. Not the first time this happened, either. Are they randomly adding and then removing support for this? I'm definitely not the only one affected: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1087138 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1087138. 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.
- AlphaWeaver 10y agoIt seems to work on iOS...
- yaantc 10y agoCan't you automatically get the same with Firefox Sync? And indeed, it seems to me the UI has changed recently. Anyway, if you have sync enabled on both desktop and device, you can see the other sync'd devices open tabs (if enabled, what you sync is configurable). From the desktop is from the hamburger menu, "Synced Tabs" icon. From Android, you now need to go to the history pane. The first line is "Synced Devices", press this to see other tabs and open any ones as needed. So instead of explicitly selecting to send a tab to a device, just wait or force a sync (on Android: from the Settings sync page) if in a rush.
- tombrossman 10y agoIt's a bit of a crude workaround but that might work. My use-case is that I frequently browse to a site on my mobile and want to view it later on my desktop machine. I could do that with a couple clicks easily before. Now I will have to keep a bunch of tabs open on my mobile and remember to manually go and check for them when I'm back on the desktop. 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.
- vocatus_gate 10y agoTHANK-YOU, finally got rid of that stupid thing. For a while there it seemed like every new Firefox version had another stupid non-browser-related plugin that I had to go find out how to kill off before deploying to the network.
- brunoqc 10y ago> I had to go find out how to kill off before deploying to the network. Why?
- drivingmenuts 10y agoBecause anything unexpected that is deployed to a network will (not may) eventually become a security and/or support nightmare for someone. Better to keep users to a minimum set of features necessary to do their job. 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.
- alabamamike 10y ago+1 for stripping out feature bloat!
- mirap 10y agoYes! Thank you, The Mozilla Foundation.
- threepipeproblm 10y agoI was going to try it out -- "one of these days".
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoNever used it. Didn't need it. Not sure how I would get anyone else to use it, either, as I think I'm the only one in my family/circle of friends still using Firefox. Glad to be rid of it.
- nwah1 10y agoHello is essentially a tiny amount of javascript that connects to the existing WebRTC infrastructure. Other services will make use of this infrastructure to provide the same functionality. But the concept of having cross-platform realtime audio, video, and screensharing is very appealing.
- pbiggar 10y agoThis is great. Mozilla experimented with a new thing, it didn't take off, and they killed it. Bravo both for experimenting, and for killing it afterwards.
- tangue 10y agoAs a company, Mozilla is an open-source version of Yahoo.