Firefox 37 Coming Today With Heartbeat, HTTPS Bing

[smitty3268]

The functional goals are not a waste of time, the fact that you cannot use it to coordinate chats with other well known chat services makes it useless.

If you think people are going to build a Mozilla Chat Account service where millions of people Facetime then you really are not grasping how come having Video Chat inside the OS [ala OS X for instance or Skype] is an OS level service, not a Web Browser service.

I've got 700 million iOS users and > 100 million OS X users all with FaceTime ready services and built in front cameras.

No one on OS X is going to fire this up. People on Windows will use Skype.

So if this is targeted for the other 2.5% of the world then it should be coordinated to work natively with GNOME and KDE for starters, but not via a Browser.

I think your mistake is assuming that Mozilla wants to take over the world with their chat.

I don't think they do - it's more a demo of WebRTC than anything. They don't care if people switch to it away from Skype.

[smitty3268]

Mozilla integrating a media library into Firefox is sort-of like asking them to use Qt.

On one hand, the library handles the abstractions between most of the platforms; Qt/ffmpeg/MPV all work natively on Linux/Windows/OS X and work pretty well.
On the other hand, Mozilla would have to re-write a ton of code to fit in the new libraries (it's not a simple matter of "why not use...", just take a look at Martin G's blog about using libweston). And even if they did fit it in, there are certain things they do via the native options that wouldn't work so well via external libraries. E.G. Hardware decoding on Windows in MPV is not complete. It works, but it's not nearly as good as using the native decoders in Windows. Also, I don't know how well Qt would handle drawing things in the titlebar like what Firefox and chrome do now.

Mozilla actually prefers integrating the code into Firefox rather than calling out into system libraries. They've done so with VP8 and Theora.

But it's never going to just bring in ffmpeg or MPV in totality. The point of including the code is that it goes through a security audit, and those are huge codebases known for having lots of security flaws.

Further, they can't distribute patented h264 code - using the system libraries is to work around that.

[Luke]

Once again, another phone-home URL I have to disable

The "heartbeat" feature is sure to be disabled by millions because it is a pop-up survey of any kind. For me, no program on any computer I own can ever be permitted to initiate a connection to any IP addresss without being prompted by me, as I do not want anyone to have a database of every IP address I use, including all or even some wifi hotspots. If I use a hotspot for security-critical work and do not log into email, etc, I am not about to permit Firefox to phone home to mozilla! Fortunately, this antifeature can be disabled, though I suspect this will force many to go to "about:config" for the first time. Here are the official mozilla instructions for killing "heartbeat" popup surveys:

Disabling Heartbeat

We understand that any interruption of your time on the internet can be annoying.

open about:config
set browser.selfsupport.url to ""
enjoy the rest of your day!

[Slartifartblast]

The functional goals are not a waste of time, the fact that you cannot use it to coordinate chats with other well known chat services makes it useless.

If you think people are going to build a Mozilla Chat Account service where millions of people Facetime then you really are not grasping how come having Video Chat inside the OS [ala OS X for instance or Skype] is an OS level service, not a Web Browser service.

I've got 700 million iOS users and > 100 million OS X users all with FaceTime ready services and built in front cameras.

And that proves what ?

That there are a bunch of idiots in the world who are happy to pay over inflated prices for a nailed down device who cannot video chat to users on other platforms using that application. Be a bummer if email only worked on one platform wouldn't it.

Jees, itards.

[Lennie]

Mozilla actually prefers integrating the code into Firefox rather than calling out into system libraries. They've done so with VP8 and Theora.

But it's never going to just bring in ffmpeg or MPV in totality. The point of including the code is that it goes through a security audit, and those are huge codebases known for having lots of security flaws.

Further, they can't distribute patented h264 code - using the system libraries is to work around that.

An important reason why system libraries aren't used by browser is: security

They can update the version included in the browser, but they don't really have any idea how old the version is on the system or when it will be updated.

If they build the code to check how old the system installed codec is and they have a blacklist or whitelist to know if it's outdated they would obviously like to have a fallback included with the browser so they can still play the content.

If the browser has to include a fallback option, they might as well use it all the time.

[Lennie]

Do you really consider your local ISP more evil than MS?

How about your WiFi Access point at the local coffee shop ?

[Notgoodwolf]

It only supports 480p with VP9-encoded videos even though the player thinks it's playing in 720p or 1080p. Still not satisfied. Fixing YouTube should've been on Mozilla's priority list already a few years... At least playback now seems to work instead of random freezes and audio losses.

mp4 playback with the html5 youtube player is working for me now, including 1080p 60fps playback.
In about:config enable the following:
media.mediasource.enabled
media.mediasource.mp4.enabled
media.fragmented-mp4.exposed
media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled

then enable html5 mode at youtube.com/html5

It's not flawless, but the browser hasn't crached yet.

[Bucic]

Mozilla's pace with MSE is baffling...

[Lennie]

I just want to add 2 things:
1) FirefoxOS is actually quite popular in so-called "3rd-world countries" where smartphones are just becoming a thing. This built-in chat that let's them chat with people on Androids and normal PCs from their phone is definitely a big thing. In fact, it's what it was made for (if you notice, in the desktop version of "Hello", it gives you the option of integrating with your FirefoxOS contacts)

2) The web isn't really as "write-once, run everywhere" as people keep making it out to be. Even now, with Firefox Hello, it doesn't run very well in Chrome (it had video issues the last time I checked) even though Firefox and Chrome are supposed to be WebRTC-compatable. Let's not get into which JS functions each browser implements, or how they implement them. Then there's the CSS... everybody's favorite language, right? Because CSS looks exactly the same on every browser, right? No, it doesn't. Sure, it might be easier in some cases to write a webapp instead of a native app, but unless we get a monopoly on rendering engines (which would suck), it's never going to be that "perfect platform" it's touted as.

2. it is still is more write-one, run everywhere than anything else for GUI-applications

For example: does the GUI-application you build run on iOS, Android, Windows XP, Windows 8.1, Mac OS X, Linux desktops, your TV ? Or deprecated platforms like: Mac OS X on PowerPC ?

But you forget the other 2 advantages that go with it:

- There is nothing to install for users. All they need is a browser, every OS has a browser by default, lots of people have multiple browsers.

- it's very easy/fast to update a website to fix problems.

- there are many, many times more webdevelopers than native application developers. They are cheaper too. A large portion of them are also designers or UI-experts, which means they might actually make something usable for normal people without getting others involved (although there is a trend of putting less and less features in applications, making a good enough UI gets easier in that case).

- it is easier to do A/B-testing

- finally better offline support is coming (service workers), the original offline support wasn't all that great (HTML5 offline with a manifest file).

- most native toolkits suck at automatically scaling from mobile screens to large screens. Web technologies do this by design.

Maybe it's just me, but what you call a disadvantage. I think is actually an advantage.

[curaga]

How about your WiFi Access point at the local coffee shop ?

As if I'd ever use such :P If I absolutely had to, I would put all traffic over a SSH tunnel.