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Right, Meet is derived from the Hangouts codebase, I still think they'll probably just delete it. Meet is a stable product, how valuable is this special privile

Right, Meet is derived from the Hangouts codebase, I still think they'll probably just delete it. Meet is a stable product, how valuable is this special privilege now?

badgersnake 2y ago
It works perfectly well in Firefox without it, so I guess not much.
ehPReth 2y ago
unsure how it's reported back now, but I believe (it's been a while since i've dug in there) it's also exposed as a metric for Google Workspace administrators to monitor client perf during said calls as well (but yeah it would just be easier to yoink it)
refulgentis 2y ago
This is interesting to me because you have all the right facts and are reasoning well with them. But, we end up at: "Yeah you're right it wasn't killed, just a rebrand, so they'll probably just delete the code for it" I worked at Google, and I can guarantee ya people don't go back and change names in old code for the latest rebrand done for eyewash 4 layers above me. Not out of laziness, either, it just has 0 value and is risky. Also, video conference perf was/is a pretty big deal (c.f. variety of sibling comments pointing out where it is used, from gSuite admin to client app). It is great on ye olde dev machine but it's very, very hard on $300 WintelChromebook thrown at line-level employees FWIW, they shouldn't have hacked this in, I do not support it. And I bet they'll just delete it anyway because it shouldn't have been there in the first place. Some line-level employee slapped it in because, in the wise words of Ian Hickson: "Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision."
- lupire 2y ago
  Google videoconferencing runs astronomically better on a $300 Chromebook than on a $2500 Intel Mac.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Heh, 100% agree. I switched to Chromebook went WFH started because of it. It couldn't handle it on an external display but at least it wasn't painfully bad
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Sure, I was sloppy in my use of the term "dead". Hangouts the product/brand ceased to exist, Hangouts the codebase lives on. It was ever thus. I worked at Google too, y'know ;)
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Cheers
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  This decision was to the benefit of users if it got videoconferencing off the ground before Zoom came along. (I swear, sometimes I think the Internet has goldfish-memory. I remember when getting videoconferencing to work in a browser was a miracle, and why we wanted it in the first place).
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Okay. Pretending you said something conversational, like: "is that quote accurate in this case? The API may have literally enabled the creation of video conferencing. I, for one, remember we didn't used to have it." I see. So your contention is: - if anyone thinks a statsd web API, hidden in Chrome, available only to Google websites is worth questioning - they're insufficiently impressed by video conferencing existing If I have that right: I'm not sure those two things are actually related. If you worked at Google, I'm very intrigued by the idea we can only collect metrics via client side web API for statsd, available only to Google domains. If you work in software, I'm extremely intrigued by the idea video conferencing wouldn't exist without client site web API for statsd, available only to Google domains. If you have more details on either, please, do share
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Scoping the data collection to Google domains is a reasonable security measure because you don't want to leak it to everybody. And in general, Google does operate under the security model that if you trust them to drop a binary on your machine that provides a security sandbox (i.e. the browser), you trust them with your data because from that vantage point, they could be exfiltrating your bank account if they wanted to be. But yes, I don't doubt that the data collection was pretty vital for getting Hangouts to the point it got to. And I do strongly suspect that it got us to browser-based video conferencing sooner than we would have been otherwise; the data collected got fed into the eventual standards that enable video conferencing in browsers today. "Could not have" is too strong, but I think "could not have this soon" might be quite true. There was an explosion of successful technologies in a brief amount of time that were enabled by Google and other online service providers doing big data collection to solve some problems that had dogged academic research for decades.
stefan_ 2y ago
It was just updated to extension manifest v3 version and someone went to the trouble of having some sort of field test id mess for it on top of all the nonsense. Doesn't seem like anyone is planning to get rid of it anytime soon. But the Git history of it is fascinating, starting at the initial merge that got it in that went with the old school trick of "just call X to explain why this is needed" to get your stuff merged. Then every non-trivial change ever to it is inevitably auto-reverted due to some failure before being resubmitted, this must be the "unparalleled Google developer environment" in action - nobody can or bothers to run the tests on a piece of software this big. Half the commits are various formatting nonsense. One third is my favorite - someone making a change to an extension API only to realize the fucking hangout guys sneaked an actual extension into the code base and they will have to update that one to reflect their change. I can feel their anger personally.

Right, Meet is derived from the Hangouts codebase, I still think they'll probably just delete it. Meet is a stable product, how valuable is this special privilege now?

badgersnake 2y ago

It works perfectly well in Firefox without it, so I guess not much.

ehPReth 2y ago

unsure how it's reported back now, but I believe (it's been a while since i've dug in there) it's also exposed as a metric for Google Workspace administrators to monitor client perf during said calls as well (but yeah it would just be easier to yoink it)

refulgentis 2y ago

This is interesting to me because you have all the right facts and are reasoning well with them. But, we end up at: "Yeah you're right it wasn't killed, just a rebrand, so they'll probably just delete the code for it" I worked at Google, and I can guarantee ya people don't go back and change names in old code for the latest rebrand done for eyewash 4 layers above me. Not out of laziness, either, it just has 0 value and is risky. Also, video conference perf was/is a pretty big deal (c.f. variety of sibling comments pointing out where it is used, from gSuite admin to client app). It is great on ye olde dev machine but it's very, very hard on $300 WintelChromebook thrown at line-level employees FWIW, they shouldn't have hacked this in, I do not support it. And I bet they'll just delete it anyway because it shouldn't have been there in the first place. Some line-level employee slapped it in because, in the wise words of Ian Hickson: "Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision."

lupire 2y ago
Google videoconferencing runs astronomically better on a $300 Chromebook than on a $2500 Intel Mac.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Heh, 100% agree. I switched to Chromebook went WFH started because of it. It couldn't handle it on an external display but at least it wasn't painfully bad
mike_hearn 2y ago
Sure, I was sloppy in my use of the term "dead". Hangouts the product/brand ceased to exist, Hangouts the codebase lives on. It was ever thus. I worked at Google too, y'know ;)
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Cheers
shadowgovt 2y ago
This decision was to the benefit of users if it got videoconferencing off the ground before Zoom came along. (I swear, sometimes I think the Internet has goldfish-memory. I remember when getting videoconferencing to work in a browser was a miracle, and why we wanted it in the first place).
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Okay. Pretending you said something conversational, like: "is that quote accurate in this case? The API may have literally enabled the creation of video conferencing. I, for one, remember we didn't used to have it." I see. So your contention is: - if anyone thinks a statsd web API, hidden in Chrome, available only to Google websites is worth questioning - they're insufficiently impressed by video conferencing existing If I have that right: I'm not sure those two things are actually related. If you worked at Google, I'm very intrigued by the idea we can only collect metrics via client side web API for statsd, available only to Google domains. If you work in software, I'm extremely intrigued by the idea video conferencing wouldn't exist without client site web API for statsd, available only to Google domains. If you have more details on either, please, do share
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Scoping the data collection to Google domains is a reasonable security measure because you don't want to leak it to everybody. And in general, Google does operate under the security model that if you trust them to drop a binary on your machine that provides a security sandbox (i.e. the browser), you trust them with your data because from that vantage point, they could be exfiltrating your bank account if they wanted to be. But yes, I don't doubt that the data collection was pretty vital for getting Hangouts to the point it got to. And I do strongly suspect that it got us to browser-based video conferencing sooner than we would have been otherwise; the data collected got fed into the eventual standards that enable video conferencing in browsers today. "Could not have" is too strong, but I think "could not have this soon" might be quite true. There was an explosion of successful technologies in a brief amount of time that were enabled by Google and other online service providers doing big data collection to solve some problems that had dogged academic research for decades.

stefan_ 2y ago

It was just updated to extension manifest v3 version and someone went to the trouble of having some sort of field test id mess for it on top of all the nonsense. Doesn't seem like anyone is planning to get rid of it anytime soon. But the Git history of it is fascinating, starting at the initial merge that got it in that went with the old school trick of "just call X to explain why this is needed" to get your stuff merged. Then every non-trivial change ever to it is inevitably auto-reverted due to some failure before being resubmitted, this must be the "unparalleled Google developer environment" in action - nobody can or bothers to run the tests on a piece of software this big. Half the commits are various formatting nonsense. One third is my favorite - someone making a change to an extension API only to realize the fucking hangout guys sneaked an actual extension into the code base and they will have to update that one to reflect their change. I can feel their anger personally.