13 ms·

Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant m

by rident 9y ago

Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info. Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem. Then they removed browser support for anything but Chrome in Hangouts, initially promising to re-extend support, yet today the docs have changed to just say you must install Chrome. The most recent eco-system tie-in that this article doesn't mention is Google Hangouts Meet. The corporate conference room version of Hangouts that has a different interface, custom Google hardware, and less memorable links (/xcf-fges-sce vs. /organization/meeting-name). Pixel has similar limitations when it comes to screen mirroring, only a Chromecast will do for the Pixel! Yet other android phones freely connect to Chromecast/Roku/Firestick/etc all because of a hidden menu setting that Google has disabled and set to 0 by default. You must root your phone to get around it. Great flagship right? All this points to a company that's so fucking worried that their tech is going to be outpaced by the little guy that they have to resort to handcuffing users to their wares. I've almost completely switched to Slack in the mean time.

aianus 9y ago
I use hangouts exclusively on Safari. It's actually frequently unusable with Chrome (nobody can hear me).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rident 9y ago
  Meet though is exclusively Chrome. They have now cut Safari out of the picture as well... https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473 https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473
  - eridius 9y ago
    Wow, not even Firefox support? Hasn't Google heard of something called the open web?
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      Firefox was first to go. I'm sure they were ecstatic to have an excuse to end support when Firefox changed how their add-ons work.
      - eridius 9y ago
        Didn't they change it so it's much more similar to how Chrome extensions work? Shouldn't it in fact be easier now to have an extension work in both Chrome and Firefox? The Mozilla wiki page on WebExtensions even says "Much of the specifics of the new API are similar to the Blink extension API."
        StudentStuff 9y ago
        The Chrome extension used should work just fine with Firefox, but Google would rather try and force vendor lock-in. At this point I just use Jitsi, it works every time without any browser extensions to do a quick video conference or screen share.
        cpeterso 9y ago
        When it launched in 2013, Hangouts used an NPAPI plugin that worked in most browsers. In 2014, Google ported Hangouts to WebRTC for Chrome only because it relied on non-standard WebRTC features only implemented in Chrome. Note that Firefox did support WebRTC at this time and Mozilla in fact developed its own WebRTC video chat service in 2014 called "Hello" that worked in Firefox and Chrome. In 2015, Mozilla announced that it would drop support for NPAPI plugins in 2017, giving websites using NPAPI plugins ~18 months to switch to a non-plugin solution. When the NPAPI deadline came, Google announced the Hangouts would stop working in Firefox, they were "actively working to develop a solution" for Firefox, and until then Hangouts users should use another browser: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts-temporary-issues-with-firefox.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts... It's 2018 and Google is still working to support WebRTC in Firefox, but they're definitely working on it. In fact, WebRTC Hangouts does mostly work in Firefox now, but only for users with a G Suites enterprise account whose admin has manually enabled Hangouts. I don't know why. "Hangouts Meet" is a different product using WebRTC whose support for Firefox is still in development. I've been documenting this saga on this Mozilla wiki as part of the NPAPI deprecation and Win64 Firefox rollout: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Win64 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Win64
- 4ad 9y ago
  Since October 30 2016, Hangouts is unusable on me on Safari. I always use the pop-up feature in order to get individual chat windows that are real operating system windows, rather that the javascript windows in Gmail. Since that date, it doesn't work in Safari. It works for a few minutes, then the windows close themselves and disappear. The only solution was to use Chrome... which worked until very recently. Now I get the same problem with Chrome too, albeit the timeout is much longer, perhaps an hour or so or sometimes longer. Everything is fucked. By the way, this is Apple bug 29018740. It might help if someone makes another bug report and references this bug, though I doubt it because when the latest Safari version was released (with the bug still present, of course), I mentioned this to Apple and they responded: > Thank you for contacting us. If this is still an issue for you on current releases, please file a new bug report. Thanks Apple. By the way, this is just for text messaging. For voice/video Hangouts became unusable earlier than that. The video quality is approximately 120p and the audio is 1kbps or less, and I can't talk because noise cancellation doesn't work and I hear myself back with a 2 second delay and 80dB gain. Don't even get me started on CPU utilization yet...
pasbesoin 9y ago
When they started pushing Duo and whatever the other piece of the associated current Google chat/conference... duopoly, is. Supposedly with some move away from and/or deprecation of Hangouts, not to mention the explicit language and dates WRT killing Talk. Well, fuck me. I can't be bothered to keep up with their changing product lineup, naming, marketing, whatever TF this is. I just use non-Google stuff, now, for chat/video. FB Messenger may be busy selling my soul, but at least it's still "Messenger" and actually fucking works. Which is why pretty much everyone has it installed and knows at least basically how to use it. If I could just get my associates and friends to start using Signal or the like... (Of course, Signal could improve their UI a bit. NOT more fucking emojis, but instead making it very clear and easy to opt out of making it the default texting app (on Android). That is, not a big bar to opt in, with a little X within that bar to opt out. Tired of explaning that each time, to "normal" people, before they get back to me complaining that their texting doesn't look/work the same, any more. P.S. As I recall now, that other piece is Allo. If I even understand things correctly. I couldn't bring myself to read up on this thoroughly; I kept feeling the desire to throttle somebody. P.P.S. And I remember when, a few years ago, they REALLY wanted everybody to move to Hangouts. Including integrating their SMS activity. Only, this had significant bugs, including aspects of data loss and the irreversibility of changing to their set up. That they seemed to have little real momentum in fixing -- or even communicating clearly upon. I guess I should actually read the OP. But I'm not sure my blood pressure can take it, now.
- rident 9y ago
  Duo is a mobile only video/voice chat app that uses a experimental transport protocol. Allo is a text chat app with lots of options for stickers and end-to-end encryption disabled by default. I don't have a strong need for either of these apps.
  - pasbesoin 9y ago
    Well, my Motorola G5+, purchased in August and on 7.0, came with an icon for Duo prominently displayed. Hangouts not installed by default. (Nor Allo, I now see.) So, Hangouts is not facing some declared or expected EOL, at this point?
signal11 9y ago
Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web, or go with a "heavyweight" website/app like Slack (which is painful if all you want is IM and none of Slack's extra features). I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking. == * this is not used pejoratively, I recognize people use IM tools in different contexts
- rident 9y ago
  Oh man, Slack really is a beast isn't it? I do like the multiple network nature of it (even though everything is saved to Slack's servers) but I find it hard to believe it does so little for it's footprint. They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.
  - shliachtx 9y ago
    Apparently they were built to mimic IRC but don't actually use it under the hood. But like you mentioned, they DO have some integration with IRC.
  - pr3dr49 9y ago
    You may explore Mattermost [1] if hosting on your own servers is a requirement. It is very easy to deploy and I found it very satisfactory, albeit testing with a relatively small team. I imagine scaling up would work. It ties in nicely with GitLab, which is another neat product for those who must not or wish not outsource information. [1] https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/
    - Freak_NL 9y ago
monksy 9y ago
I really want Jabber to succeed, but it looks like all of the social providers don't want this and want to keep your communication on their servers. Also, I really don't understand the appeal of pushing 100s of these chat apps out. I.e. Slack, Discord, allo, whats app, etc. They're not compatable with each other. You have to have a 100 different clients installed. Many which their desktop version requires 2 cpus and 128gb of ram to run each of them.
- dvanduzer 9y ago
  Slack has the saving grace of optionally supporting an XMPP gateway, for those still committed to that dream. For now. (I sincerely hope this comment isn't too prescient.)
  - corndoge 9y ago
    And indeed, an IRC gateway.
  - bad_user 9y ago
    They don’t do federation. And it doesn’t work very well.
    - dvanduzer 9y ago
      Indeed, Federation was only a part of their Enterprise offering. :rimshot: It is only Slack-to-Slack, so it is not interoperable in that way. Shared channels are a thing now too, and danged if I can keep up with all the new bells and whistles. Slack is very much an organizational groupware product, with chat done well. Not the utopia federated XMPP promises, but frankly, XML just needs to die. (Which, not coincidentally, is part of what attracted me to work on the telehash specification.)
- dmitriid 9y ago
  XMPP is the prime example of too little too late. XMPP missed both the shift to mobile and the shift to more engaging and complex messaging. There is a nice overview in "The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016"[1] where you can see how far behind XMPP is compared to nearly everything else. By 2016 nearly everyone could work over mobile networks, offline messaging, push notifications, syncing between multiple devices, file uploads, end-to-end encryption etc. XMPP had a plethora of experimental XEPs with unknown support across clients and servers. And not much has changed in the past year. So let's say you have the only client in existence that supports all these XEPs, Conversations for Android [2]. What can you do with it? Oh, you'd have to find a server that supports all your features and talk to people on the same client. And that's about it. For everybody else you're stuck with plain text messages. It will only get worse for XMPP. AliChat and WeChat has long been the way to pay for anything in China, with over a trillion dollars flowing through their systems annually. Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram are busy adding payment capabilities to their platforms. It will be years before a relevant XEP is drafted, and another few years before maybe one client and maybe one server will start supporting it. [1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html [2] https://conversations.im https://conversations.im
saagarjha 9y ago
Jabber still kind of works. It's what I use at least; all my Hangouts conversations come through on my Mac through the Messages app.
e40 9y ago
Slack and Zoom, for my teams.
zouhair 9y ago
I am a Firefox user and when I "need" to use hangout I just fire up Vivaldi.
- dorfsmay 9y ago
  Hangouts runs fine in the most recent version of Firefox.
eitally 9y ago
The reason they "killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem" is because all the other messaging products had decided to move away from an open standard (XMPP/jabber) to proprietary protocols, so there wasn't much point in restricting Google's own ability to innovate around their chat product by keeping it tied to XMPP. We can argue whether that was a good idea or not, but it wasn't purely Google being a bad citizen.
- rident 9y ago
  Sure there were other and earlier offenders, but that doesn't mean Google had to follow suit. They could have contributed something open and federated - an upgrade to XMPP. Branding would have been easy and the darling of the web would have held that image a little longer. But they didn't, the closing and interconnecting of Google's product ecosystem was the beginning of a trend which is now seen across most of their offerings: The Pixel has silly restrictions as I mentioned. Android apps, Drive, Docs and the office suite apps have gone stale since they came out of beta and lack the commitment to open source that Google once championed. Even their new HTML replacement, AMP, is heavily tied to Google resources, requiring entirely different implementations of the same experiences between the HTML and AMP versions further handcuffing the buyer to their ecosystem and the buyer's customers to Chrome.
  - Shoothe 9y ago
    Sadly that's also my thoughts about Google. When previously they were open and leading the innovation now they are just blindly copying competition in hope of somehow making it big. Twitter? Google Buzz... Didn't work. Facebook? Google+... Didn't work. Whatsapp? Allo... Didn't work.
    - wyclif 9y ago
      Google+... Didn't work. Actually, I just went over there and Google+ looks like it's working just fine. Many parts of it are thriving and there seems to be a lot of activity in communities. Google+ is niche. Just because it doesn't have the ubiquitous adoption level of Facebook doesn't mean it failed. I really hate this attitude in our circles that unless an app devours everything else and becomes a unicorn, it's a total failure.

by rident 9y ago

aianus 9y ago

I use hangouts exclusively on Safari. It's actually frequently unusable with Chrome (nobody can hear me).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rident 9y ago
Meet though is exclusively Chrome. They have now cut Safari out of the picture as well... https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473 https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473
- eridius 9y ago
  Wow, not even Firefox support? Hasn't Google heard of something called the open web?
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Firefox was first to go. I'm sure they were ecstatic to have an excuse to end support when Firefox changed how their add-ons work.
    - eridius 9y ago
      Didn't they change it so it's much more similar to how Chrome extensions work? Shouldn't it in fact be easier now to have an extension work in both Chrome and Firefox? The Mozilla wiki page on WebExtensions even says "Much of the specifics of the new API are similar to the Blink extension API."
      - StudentStuff 9y ago
        The Chrome extension used should work just fine with Firefox, but Google would rather try and force vendor lock-in. At this point I just use Jitsi, it works every time without any browser extensions to do a quick video conference or screen share.
        cpeterso 9y ago
        When it launched in 2013, Hangouts used an NPAPI plugin that worked in most browsers. In 2014, Google ported Hangouts to WebRTC for Chrome only because it relied on non-standard WebRTC features only implemented in Chrome. Note that Firefox did support WebRTC at this time and Mozilla in fact developed its own WebRTC video chat service in 2014 called "Hello" that worked in Firefox and Chrome. In 2015, Mozilla announced that it would drop support for NPAPI plugins in 2017, giving websites using NPAPI plugins ~18 months to switch to a non-plugin solution. When the NPAPI deadline came, Google announced the Hangouts would stop working in Firefox, they were "actively working to develop a solution" for Firefox, and until then Hangouts users should use another browser: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts-temporary-issues-with-firefox.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts... It's 2018 and Google is still working to support WebRTC in Firefox, but they're definitely working on it. In fact, WebRTC Hangouts does mostly work in Firefox now, but only for users with a G Suites enterprise account whose admin has manually enabled Hangouts. I don't know why. "Hangouts Meet" is a different product using WebRTC whose support for Firefox is still in development. I've been documenting this saga on this Mozilla wiki as part of the NPAPI deprecation and Win64 Firefox rollout: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Win64 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Win64
4ad 9y ago
Since October 30 2016, Hangouts is unusable on me on Safari. I always use the pop-up feature in order to get individual chat windows that are real operating system windows, rather that the javascript windows in Gmail. Since that date, it doesn't work in Safari. It works for a few minutes, then the windows close themselves and disappear. The only solution was to use Chrome... which worked until very recently. Now I get the same problem with Chrome too, albeit the timeout is much longer, perhaps an hour or so or sometimes longer. Everything is fucked. By the way, this is Apple bug 29018740. It might help if someone makes another bug report and references this bug, though I doubt it because when the latest Safari version was released (with the bug still present, of course), I mentioned this to Apple and they responded: > Thank you for contacting us. If this is still an issue for you on current releases, please file a new bug report. Thanks Apple. By the way, this is just for text messaging. For voice/video Hangouts became unusable earlier than that. The video quality is approximately 120p and the audio is 1kbps or less, and I can't talk because noise cancellation doesn't work and I hear myself back with a 2 second delay and 80dB gain. Don't even get me started on CPU utilization yet...

pasbesoin 9y ago

When they started pushing Duo and whatever the other piece of the associated current Google chat/conference... duopoly, is. Supposedly with some move away from and/or deprecation of Hangouts, not to mention the explicit language and dates WRT killing Talk. Well, fuck me. I can't be bothered to keep up with their changing product lineup, naming, marketing, whatever TF this is. I just use non-Google stuff, now, for chat/video. FB Messenger may be busy selling my soul, but at least it's still "Messenger" and actually fucking works. Which is why pretty much everyone has it installed and knows at least basically how to use it. If I could just get my associates and friends to start using Signal or the like... (Of course, Signal could improve their UI a bit. NOT more fucking emojis, but instead making it very clear and easy to opt out of making it the default texting app (on Android). That is, not a big bar to opt in, with a little X within that bar to opt out. Tired of explaning that each time, to "normal" people, before they get back to me complaining that their texting doesn't look/work the same, any more. P.S. As I recall now, that other piece is Allo. If I even understand things correctly. I couldn't bring myself to read up on this thoroughly; I kept feeling the desire to throttle somebody. P.P.S. And I remember when, a few years ago, they REALLY wanted everybody to move to Hangouts. Including integrating their SMS activity. Only, this had significant bugs, including aspects of data loss and the irreversibility of changing to their set up. That they seemed to have little real momentum in fixing -- or even communicating clearly upon. I guess I should actually read the OP. But I'm not sure my blood pressure can take it, now.

rident 9y ago
Duo is a mobile only video/voice chat app that uses a experimental transport protocol. Allo is a text chat app with lots of options for stickers and end-to-end encryption disabled by default. I don't have a strong need for either of these apps.
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  Well, my Motorola G5+, purchased in August and on 7.0, came with an icon for Duo prominently displayed. Hangouts not installed by default. (Nor Allo, I now see.) So, Hangouts is not facing some declared or expected EOL, at this point?

signal11 9y ago

Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web, or go with a "heavyweight" website/app like Slack (which is painful if all you want is IM and none of Slack's extra features). I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking. == * this is not used pejoratively, I recognize people use IM tools in different contexts

rident 9y ago
Oh man, Slack really is a beast isn't it? I do like the multiple network nature of it (even though everything is saved to Slack's servers) but I find it hard to believe it does so little for it's footprint. They too though made a Google-like transition and went from an open protocol (IRC/XMPP) to a closed/custom API. At least here, the server admin can enable those protocols if they want and the API seems to offer enough features that someone could probably integrate Slack into another IRC-like client.
- shliachtx 9y ago
  Apparently they were built to mimic IRC but don't actually use it under the hood. But like you mentioned, they DO have some integration with IRC.
- pr3dr49 9y ago
  You may explore Mattermost [1] if hosting on your own servers is a requirement. It is very easy to deploy and I found it very satisfactory, albeit testing with a relatively small team. I imagine scaling up would work. It ties in nicely with GitLab, which is another neat product for those who must not or wish not outsource information. [1] https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/
  - Freak_NL 9y ago

monksy 9y ago

I really want Jabber to succeed, but it looks like all of the social providers don't want this and want to keep your communication on their servers. Also, I really don't understand the appeal of pushing 100s of these chat apps out. I.e. Slack, Discord, allo, whats app, etc. They're not compatable with each other. You have to have a 100 different clients installed. Many which their desktop version requires 2 cpus and 128gb of ram to run each of them.

dvanduzer 9y ago
Slack has the saving grace of optionally supporting an XMPP gateway, for those still committed to that dream. For now. (I sincerely hope this comment isn't too prescient.)
- corndoge 9y ago
  And indeed, an IRC gateway.
- bad_user 9y ago
  They don’t do federation. And it doesn’t work very well.
  - dvanduzer 9y ago
    Indeed, Federation was only a part of their Enterprise offering. :rimshot: It is only Slack-to-Slack, so it is not interoperable in that way. Shared channels are a thing now too, and danged if I can keep up with all the new bells and whistles. Slack is very much an organizational groupware product, with chat done well. Not the utopia federated XMPP promises, but frankly, XML just needs to die. (Which, not coincidentally, is part of what attracted me to work on the telehash specification.)
dmitriid 9y ago
XMPP is the prime example of too little too late. XMPP missed both the shift to mobile and the shift to more engaging and complex messaging. There is a nice overview in "The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016"[1] where you can see how far behind XMPP is compared to nearly everything else. By 2016 nearly everyone could work over mobile networks, offline messaging, push notifications, syncing between multiple devices, file uploads, end-to-end encryption etc. XMPP had a plethora of experimental XEPs with unknown support across clients and servers. And not much has changed in the past year. So let's say you have the only client in existence that supports all these XEPs, Conversations for Android [2]. What can you do with it? Oh, you'd have to find a server that supports all your features and talk to people on the same client. And that's about it. For everybody else you're stuck with plain text messages. It will only get worse for XMPP. AliChat and WeChat has long been the way to pay for anything in China, with over a trillion dollars flowing through their systems annually. Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram are busy adding payment capabilities to their platforms. It will be years before a relevant XEP is drafted, and another few years before maybe one client and maybe one server will start supporting it. [1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html [2] https://conversations.im https://conversations.im

saagarjha 9y ago

Jabber still kind of works. It's what I use at least; all my Hangouts conversations come through on my Mac through the Messages app.

e40 9y ago

Slack and Zoom, for my teams.

zouhair 9y ago

I am a Firefox user and when I "need" to use hangout I just fire up Vivaldi.

dorfsmay 9y ago
Hangouts runs fine in the most recent version of Firefox.

eitally 9y ago

The reason they "killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem" is because all the other messaging products had decided to move away from an open standard (XMPP/jabber) to proprietary protocols, so there wasn't much point in restricting Google's own ability to innovate around their chat product by keeping it tied to XMPP. We can argue whether that was a good idea or not, but it wasn't purely Google being a bad citizen.

rident 9y ago
Sure there were other and earlier offenders, but that doesn't mean Google had to follow suit. They could have contributed something open and federated - an upgrade to XMPP. Branding would have been easy and the darling of the web would have held that image a little longer. But they didn't, the closing and interconnecting of Google's product ecosystem was the beginning of a trend which is now seen across most of their offerings: The Pixel has silly restrictions as I mentioned. Android apps, Drive, Docs and the office suite apps have gone stale since they came out of beta and lack the commitment to open source that Google once championed. Even their new HTML replacement, AMP, is heavily tied to Google resources, requiring entirely different implementations of the same experiences between the HTML and AMP versions further handcuffing the buyer to their ecosystem and the buyer's customers to Chrome.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  Sadly that's also my thoughts about Google. When previously they were open and leading the innovation now they are just blindly copying competition in hope of somehow making it big. Twitter? Google Buzz... Didn't work. Facebook? Google+... Didn't work. Whatsapp? Allo... Didn't work.
  - wyclif 9y ago
    Google+... Didn't work. Actually, I just went over there and Google+ looks like it's working just fine. Many parts of it are thriving and there seems to be a lot of activity in communities. Google+ is niche. Just because it doesn't have the ubiquitous adoption level of Facebook doesn't mean it failed. I really hate this attitude in our circles that unless an app devours everything else and becomes a unicorn, it's a total failure.