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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Well, they have changed, but they've changed for the worse. Google has gradually been succumbing to the pressures I identified in that post; witness the move of Android to put gradually more services into proprietary Google Play Services, the ban on disconnect.me, the years-long struggle over pseudonymity on Google+ (finally resolved for the best), the ugly debasement of search results to drive traffic to Google+, the ban on non-Chrome browsers accessing Hangouts, the abandonment of XMPP compatibility by deceptively pressuring Google Chat users to move to Hangouts instead, and so on.

These are by no means crimes, but they're more evil than the things Google would have done in 2008 or 2009, and they're certainly not moving the internet in the direction I want to see it move in.

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> the ban on non-Chrome browsers accessing Hangouts

There is no such ban. I've been using Hangouts with FireFox and IE for months. If you attempt to access a Hangouts url with FireFox, for example, it prompts you to install a FireFox plugin.

Plugins are not websites.

The "Google Talk Plugin" is required for Chrome as well. At least on Linux, it's a separate install.

> the ban on non-Chrome browsers accessing Hangouts

What do you mean by this? The documentation lists support for Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari.

https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1216376

There is no way to get notifications if you're using Firefox or Safari.

A missing feature != ban. Plus I'm pretty sure you are wrong.

"This setting applies to all Hangouts notifications from Gmail, Google+ and the Chrome extension on the same desktop computer."

Gmail and Google+ are both supported in all major browsers.

https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3111923

I haven't tried using Hangouts lately, so maybe it's been fixed. It got broken back in August; http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-la... explains:

"I can understand asking why Hangouts doesn't work in Firefox. In short, we wanted to transition to WebRTC sooner rather than later, and at the moment there are things holding us back on both our side (e.g. upgrading our ICE implementation) and the Firefox side (e.g. supporting multiple video streams).

"But overall, surely you're not arguing that transitioning a major Google application from a proprietary plugin to an open web standard somehow demonstrates that Chrome doesn't value web standards."

It doesn't look like it was fixed. I tried:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/hangouts/

2. Click "get hangouts"

3. Click "computers"

Result is "You'll need to download Chrome before installing the Hangouts Chrome extension. Do you want to download Chrome now?"

edit: I think i remember being told on twitter that this was a confusing UI that would be changed. But that was several months ago.

I think the "confusing UI" thing becomes apparent if you click and try it. By hangouts on "computers" they mean as a desktop-installed app (which is just a wrapper around a Chrome app). I don't know why you'd want that (basically just a bookmark on your desktop?) but that's what it is.

If, however, you just start a hangout inside of gmail, it works fine in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE (just hung out with myself on two computers in multiple browsers to test that out) and there was never a time that was broken, contrary to the GP post.

Well, when you click "get hangouts" the options are "Android, iOS or Computers". So anyone that wants to run it on anything but a smartphone gets told that it can only run on Chrome. I don't see it mention anything about an app as opposed to running in a browser.

Perhaps this is just a confusing UI, but if so, it would be very easy to fix. If that's the case, I'm puzzled why it hasn't been fixed.

yeah, I had never visited that site until that discussion was making the rounds on twitter, so, no clue. I could see an argument for "this is a site where you can install hangouts as an app". There's nothing particularly wrong with using Chrome as a runtime (imagine if Mozilla's old Prism project had stuck around and people made "native" apps with it...requiring Firefox to run it would be just that: a requirement to run the app because that's how Prism worked), but if your motivation was to get users to use hangouts, I don't know why you wouldn't also mention that you probably already have it if you use gmail, so just open it up in there.

My only claim is that if you open up a chat window in gmail and hit the video button it works in other browsers and that using hangouts that way was never broken.

If so, I wonder why the site doesn't just say "to run Hangouts on a computer, just load a hangout in your browser" (possibly with a link to the right place). It seems such an easy thing to fix, and it was pointed out publicly, yet no change has been made.

It seems unlikely to me that the assumption is that people that pick "computer" over "smartphone" distinctly want a native app as opposed to just running hangouts in the easiest way possible. All they did was click on "get hangouts".

As I understood it Google updated Hangouts to use a PNaCl so that the needed code would be downloaded automatically instead of requiring users to install a plugin. Browsers that don't support PNaCl should have continued working with the legacy plugin. I'm not particularly familiar with the transition but it sounds like the unintentionally broke the older implementation. The Google+ team in particularly seems to iterate quickly so it's not particularly surprising things will break from time to time.

Of those, the Google+ one is my favorite and I am glad Vic Gundotra got fired.

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