Firefox 37 Coming Today With Heartbeat, HTTPS Bing

[pal666]

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.

by the end of 2014 there were 400 million ios smartphones in use and 1600 million android ones. it makes it clear that 1) there are no 700 million ios users in existence 2) there are more linuxes out there than anything else and 3) you are full of shit

[tuuker]

Firefox mod called Cyberfox is quite fast catching up with releases.

[curaga]

I can't believe it, but I just checked: Bing is still using HTTP by default, though it has HTTPS available. What a shame!
Fortunately I was never affected because I search in Bing using DuckDuckGo's !b bang, and it defaults to HTTPS. But still...

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

[89c51]

From the release notes:

Implemented a subset of the Media Source Extensions (MSE) API to allow native HTML5 playback on YouTube (Windows only)

[tuuker]

Mozilla should integrate ffmpeg plugin so all HTML5 playback functions will work on every platform and do not have rely on system codecs.

[dragorth]

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.

First, building a chat app has proven quite popular, see success of such apps as Slash and HipChat. Second, Mozilla Firefox is used on a large number of platforms, Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Mac OSX 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, BSDs, Debians, Fedoras, Androids. So you have one chat service that interoperates with each other on all of those platforms.

Versus Windows which only integrated Skype on the very latest, like last two years, OSes. Versus OS X that has had Facetime that only works with FaceTime users. Is there a default client for the BSDs or Linux. Android has Messages, and Hangouts on Google Experience Phones. They don't interact with each other very well or at all.

Since this is based on WebRTC, you could take the JS code and run it in Chrome or Opera. The reason why The Web as Platform is so appealing is the long reach. And the same/similar experience on all platforms.

[grndzro]

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

I do. Both ATT and Charter here charge 50$ for 700kbps. While across the highway people are getting 50meg for the same price.

[Daktyl198]

First, building a chat app has proven quite popular, see success of such apps as Slash and HipChat. Second, Mozilla Firefox is used on a large number of platforms, Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Mac OSX 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, BSDs, Debians, Fedoras, Androids. So you have one chat service that interoperates with each other on all of those platforms.

Versus Windows which only integrated Skype on the very latest, like last two years, OSes. Versus OS X that has had Facetime that only works with FaceTime users. Is there a default client for the BSDs or Linux. Android has Messages, and Hangouts on Google Experience Phones. They don't interact with each other very well or at all.

Since this is based on WebRTC, you could take the JS code and run it in Chrome or Opera. The reason why The Web as Platform is so appealing is the long reach. And the same/similar experience on all platforms.

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.

[profoundWHALE]

Mozilla should integrate ffmpeg plugin so all HTML5 playback functions will work on every platform and do not have rely on system codecs.

They could also integrate MPV and then not worry about a GUI or anything.

[Daktyl198]

They could also integrate MPV and then not worry about a GUI or anything.

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.