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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Surely Hangouts can work over WebRTC?

Is it using a plugin in Chrome also?

As far as I remember it uses WebRTC on Chrome, that's how it manages to be plugin free there. But there's subtle differences in browser implementations w.r.t WebRTC, it's one of those... standards. WebRTC is also incredibly hard to debug from browsers.

Our WebRTC video calling system on Roll20 is used by around 50k people per week and works fine in both Chrome and Firefox.

So is our WebRTC web conferencing platform. I just tested a firefox-to-chrome video call, and it works fine. Hangouts, however, wants me to install a plugin on firefox. WTF!?!

There's no reason why hangouts can't work on Firefox. In my experience, firefox actually works better than Chrome, due to it having implemented the applyConstraints API.

This is just laziness or evil on Google's part.

Hangouts switched to WebRTC and NaCl (for video processing like hats) in Chrome back in 2014, but still requires plugins (NPAPI or ActiveX) for any other browsers.

https://www.cnet.com/news/in-chrome-googles-hangouts-plugin-...

What does hats mean in this context?

By 'hats', I meant the video effects for adding silly hats and glasses to people's faces. :)

I was working on a WebRTC client in Angular a few years ago and basically Firefox was weird.

The WebRTC team has released a polyfill [0] for browser incompatibilities so that would not really be a excuse for them, especially given the fact they have some of the top web engineers around.

[0] https://github.com/webrtc/adapter

Your experience from years ago, in the age of rapid releases, is like ancient history. WebRTC is supported on firefox, and I've used it with no problems.

lol thanks man, I know I'm an old-man in Internet years, I'm sure that it works now but then why is the Google Hangouts team temporarily not supporting it?

which sites are you using webrtc on firefox?

I see "Extension: Google Hangouts" in Chrome Task Manager[1], but I don't see anything Hangouts-related in chrome://extensions/. Seems that it's good old npapi plugin, but built-in into chrome, like Flash and NaCl.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/HLpLf

You can use "--show-component-extension-options" flag to display hidden extensions.

Most of the nonstandard features that Hangouts uses are built into Chromium and the JS APIs it exposes to Hangouts. In particular, SDES, google-ICE, RTP data channels, and plan B are all nonstandard features exposed that way. [1]

[1] https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/

Hangouts on Chrome uses NaCl for some visual processing (like hats), or at least it used to. So the NaCl code may show up as a plugin process.

I'm confused about this too. I thought WebRTC just worked everywhere now.

Safari still does not support WebRTC, and users must enable Flash on sites that require it. They've merged in a few commits [1], but their implementation is still lacking [2].

[1] https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/210942 [2] http://caniuse.com/#search=webrtc

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