Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-calling/

by rnyman • 13 years ago

1388 69 13 years ago

hacks.mozilla.org

theevocater2• 13 years ago

Amazing work both teams. Video conf is still such a painful thing on the web despite everyone's repeated attempts to make it work. Anything that makes it easier and simpler for users is a huge win.

pthatcherg2• 13 years ago

I think Google+ Hangouts are pretty good :).

theevocater2• 13 years ago

I've attempted to use them various times and every single time they've failed to be of use to me. The whole gtalk + video being combined with google+ hangouts has not worked well at all for me so far.

r00fus• 13 years ago

I can't use Google+ hangouts at work. A P2P video conferencing tool becomes far more interesting. Especially now that Skype is effectively fully logged.

y0ghur7_xxx• 13 years ago

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

I'm giddy with excitement on what this could be used for.

Please correct me if I'm wrong:

Does this mean that when you chat with another person you are directly linked to them, making the communication more secure than say Skype (which passes the 'data' through Skype servers)?

dbond• 13 years ago

Yes, although a relay (TURN) server can still be needed if a direct connection cannot be established (mobile connections etc). Its pretty easy to hook as well, we should see some some great apps come out of it, especially when data channels are fully supported.

tracker13• 13 years ago

Where available it's a direct peer2peer connection... where not available it can use an intermediary server... end to end encryption is enabled though, so the in-between servers can't realistically view your data stream.

I think things like this are necessary to really get to a point where you can replace the last places Flash makes sense... I do hope development tooling catches up though.

Quarrelsome6• 13 years ago

Still.... need.... adoption.... on..... all..... clients. Killing off flash relies on the slowest chunk of the market getting its act together. I'm looking at you IE.

nextparadigms4• 13 years ago

I wonder if this eliminates the need for ZRTP on video calls, or are there situations where it can still be used to protect the user's privacy? Will we see WebRTC with ZRTP eventually?

josh26002• 13 years ago

Not to sideswipe your comment, but this piece is a really great overview and analysis of ZRTP: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/11/lets-talk-ab...

wslh• 13 years ago

Does it mean that the Microsoft acquisition was a bad decision? it seems like a lot of features end in the browser.

zapt02• 13 years ago

This might force Skype to move into the browser. Sort of how Spotify can be launched from the web, users will be able to call from inside the browser via a bridge plugin as long as Skype is running in the background.

tnuc• 13 years ago

There is probably still going to be a need for a centralized server to see who is/isn't online.

Hopefully more features do end up in the browser and not within the walled gardens of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Quarrelsome6• 13 years ago

Depends how much hardware continues to remain on most machines. If the market eventually shifts towards dumber and dumber boxes (as people keep predicting) that centralised model will still be sweet for performing things like encoding.

notatoad• 13 years ago

Microsoft & Skype are hard at work on a competitor to WebRTC, and don't appear to have any plans to support this - they seem in favour of moving VoIP to the browser, but they're going to do it in a Microsoft-y way.

And of course, the Skype acquisition was purchasing marketshare, not technology.

SCdF• 13 years ago

Tent.io could do some cool stuff with this...

Dziodas• 13 years ago

I think a lot of companies can do some cool stuff with this

tracker13• 13 years ago

Though not yet ready for Firefox... you can checkout twelephone.com for a working site using WebRTC ... they're making good progress on this.

davidw• 13 years ago

Cool, now when will this work on my Nexus 7, with the beta version of Chrome?

woogley• 13 years ago

Chrome 26 shows the Android flag for this. Beta on Android is v25, so 6 weeks or less, hopefully ..

ohwp• 13 years ago

One year ago I've seen demo's with Opera Mobile 12 and WebRTC

Found this linke: http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-webrtc-opera-mobile-12/

Quarrelsome6• 13 years ago

I like how whoever wrote the samples is really not a fan of jquery selectors.

simonrobb• 13 years ago

I love seeing two teams working together on a project like this instead of competing against one another. The web's going to be a better place as a result of this kind of collaboration.

fnbr• 13 years ago

Amen. It's things like this that get me excited for the future.

indubitably2• 13 years ago

I'm not convinced that Mozilla and Google are as chummy as this video suggests.

dobbsbob2• 13 years ago

doesn't mozilla get all their funding from google? type about:config in FF and search for google entries its everywhere

pthatcherg2• 13 years ago

Actually, the respective Mozilla and Google WebRTC teams get along quite well. I work at Google on WebRTC, and from what I've observed the joint work as been close, and always positive.

kumarharsh• 13 years ago

This is the most fantastic news I've heard this week!!! Congrats!

dobbsbob2• 13 years ago

p2p live sports and ppv incoming

ryanatkn• 13 years ago

If anyone is interested I just published a Kickstarter project for Mydentity, which combines WebRTC and Mozilla Persona into a non-profit private messenger.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanatkn/mydentity-is-a-...

ck2• 13 years ago

Ha! But shouldn't they be going at each others throats for the best competition?

In any case it's nice to see friendly rivals compared to microsoft.

glavata• 13 years ago

Chatroulette is the 1st application that comes to mind...

amasad• 13 years ago

This is great. But like most APIs by w3c it looks terrible. Many lines of code to do something that can be done in a few if only they embrace the de facto standard API design from the JavaScript community.

nsp• 13 years ago

Sexyrsd

kriro• 13 years ago

Hello Skype, Mozilla and Chrome just checking in making sure you have some backup strategies.

tocomment• 13 years ago

Does anyone know how this works with firewalls? How about NAT?

songgao• 13 years ago

Is it just me or everybody who finds the number of points for this one is always equal to "Chrome calling Firefox" one?

hobbyist• 13 years ago

Hello IE, it's IE calling :)

_pmf_• 13 years ago

> Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling

Hold on a second, I'll set aside a huge slab of memory.

Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling

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