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Comment by Sir_Substance | Hacker News Reader

It seems there is a lot of confusion going on here.

Firefox hello is a website that implements webRTC based video conferencing in a browser agnostic way.

The "firefox hello" button that has shown up in recent versions of the browser is a bit of UI magic over an API to this website. The video conferencing code is not implemented in the browser.

If you send a firefox hello link to a chrome user, it opens the webpage when they click on it instead of the UI element.

I actually think it's really neat, and have replaced skype with it since it works so widely and doesn't require everyone to have an account to use it.

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I have a success story with that.

I moved abroad and I have a chat with my parents using Skype from time to time. After the Microsoft acquisition Skype had to be upgraded and the old version stopped working. My parents aren't tech-savvy really and I failed to diagnose their problem remotely, so I tried https://talky.io/ (just because I watched Sam Dutton talk about WebRTC and he used that web for a demo).

It worked (to be completely fair, slightly worse than an average Skype session), and it kind of blew my mind. My parents weren't impressed though, when I explained them how amazing was that we were video conferencing using a website and open standards.

EDIT: typos

This is exactly the sort of thing it is fantastic at. Being able to email or SMS people link and have it Just Work without passwords or accounts or port forwarding is actually really nifty, and exactly what you need to start a chat with grandma.

For the record, my experience has been that firefox hello is superior in quality to skype.

Awesome testimonial. If it's superior (or even close to comparable) to skype, I'm switching immediately.

The problem I had doing something similar was getting the link to them. You need some other out-of-band communication method, whereas with skype you just agree to a time of the week when to sign on and call each other. Email sort-of works, but not as easily as the central logged-in lobby system.

Would be very easy to have a website that coordinated this. Even pastebin would do pretty easily.

This is a like a case study in how to [not] handle messaging towards technical users. There's no issue here, but it just appears like Firefox is now shipping apps or something, rather than essentially a bookmark.

that's certainly what I came to complain about, until I read the comment you replied to.

What led you to believe that the linked page was targeted towards technical users?

Not saying it was. Just that FF has a lot of sensitive, technical, users, so Mozilla has to deal with this insanity it looks like. Thus, they might consider having a "how it works" or "why" section to calm such users.

Can't they just look at the source code?

> Firefox hello is a website that implements webRTC based video conferencing in a browser agnostic way.

It's very misleading. The page is full of quotes like these:

"All you need is Firefox"

"Get Firefox to get started"

"Want to start using Hello? All you need is Firefox"

"Get Firefox and start your first conversation"

You do need Firefox to start the conversation. I believe it is used to authenticate the user[0].

Then the link you get can be used on any browser.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to know how to start a conversation from a different browser.

[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Loop/Architecture

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