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That's a bad and misleading comparison here though. Your cassette player had to add the bulky recording feature to become a recorder, but did not need it to be

by TheDong 12y ago

That's a bad and misleading comparison here though. Your cassette player had to add the bulky recording feature to become a recorder, but did not need it to be a player. Firefox is a webbrowser, not a video conferencing software, but it had to add WebRTC to be a web-browser (the bulky bit), so adding in recording is trivial. A more honest analogy would be saying you had a cassette player that already had all the hardware to record -- necessitated by it being able to play cassettes for some reason -- but didn't have a record button vs one having the button.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
>but it had to add WebRTC to be a web-browser Does this mean that we now get to claim that IE and Safari are not web browsers?
mattmanser 12y ago
Not really at all. They're going to have to add a whole load of features and new UI elements which will increase the cost of updating and progressing the browser. Either it's going to be a half assed Skype tacked in behind a menu somewhere, or a browser cluttered with all the visual UI of a chat program. To say they had to do most of it anyway is compete nonsense. The protocol is like 1/10th of a decent chat program.
ZeroGravitas 12y ago
Random vaguely relevent historical asides: 1. The Walkman was born after a Sony exec had started using a Sony Pressman tape-recorder intended for transcribing meetings/interviews to listen to audio tapes while on planes. They took out the recording functionality and speaker (while adding stereo to the headphones) to make it smaller/cheaper/more portable. 2. Firefox was born after some Mozilla devs took the full featured Mozilla suit and simply hid a lot of the features (email, HTML editor, NNTP newsreader). They later on actually did the work to remove unused code, but at first it was merely cosmetic, though everyone likes to believe there was a mystical time in the past when Firefox was a lean, mean, codebase rather than a minimilist reskin on top of a lot of bloat. Not sure how that relates to WebRTC, just thought the parallel was amusing.

by TheDong 12y ago

jsprogrammer 12y ago

>but it had to add WebRTC to be a web-browser Does this mean that we now get to claim that IE and Safari are not web browsers?

mattmanser 12y ago

Not really at all. They're going to have to add a whole load of features and new UI elements which will increase the cost of updating and progressing the browser. Either it's going to be a half assed Skype tacked in behind a menu somewhere, or a browser cluttered with all the visual UI of a chat program. To say they had to do most of it anyway is compete nonsense. The protocol is like 1/10th of a decent chat program.

ZeroGravitas 12y ago

Random vaguely relevent historical asides: 1. The Walkman was born after a Sony exec had started using a Sony Pressman tape-recorder intended for transcribing meetings/interviews to listen to audio tapes while on planes. They took out the recording functionality and speaker (while adding stereo to the headphones) to make it smaller/cheaper/more portable. 2. Firefox was born after some Mozilla devs took the full featured Mozilla suit and simply hid a lot of the features (email, HTML editor, NNTP newsreader). They later on actually did the work to remove unused code, but at first it was merely cosmetic, though everyone likes to believe there was a mystical time in the past when Firefox was a lean, mean, codebase rather than a minimilist reskin on top of a lot of bloat. Not sure how that relates to WebRTC, just thought the parallel was amusing.