Mozilla are clearly becoming desperate to find any distinguishing factors to market Firefox. Sadly, this feels like the beginning of the end for this browser.
Mozilla is working on some pretty neat stuff; and is paying attention to the rest of the world, not just the American/European/Japanese market.
Also since they are a foundation owned corporation with a public benefit mission https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ they can take a longer-term view than some of the other big players.
Having played with one of the flame dev phones for FirefoxOS I wouldn't be too surprised if within the decade they are dominant in areas of the world that don't have an installed base ( rural india, sub-saharan africa outside of SA, etc. ).
Remember that more people are going to acquire mobile internet devices in the next 5 years than were on the internet in 1998.
The underlying problem and a source of debate is this "public benefit" part, as perceived by some engineers vs others.
The problem is simple to describe, but nearly impossible to solve.
On the one hand, ask anyone whenever they want to have video conferencing without having to download additional software and based on open standards blah blah — and you're likely to hear "yeah, that's cool, where do I get it?" before you finish the questions. Because, without going in much detail this all sounds awfully good.
On the other hand, a few engineers have issues with this. Questions like "why this is bundled in giant monolithic browser blob" are perfectly valid. Especially those who value classic UNIXes' approach to do things, may be well dissatisfied with this kind of stuff being done in the name "public benefit", considering this as yet another case of "dancing bunnies" problem, with masses being ignorant of the issues.
I'm very against the style of discussion about these topics, it's very "you agree with this feature 100% or any criticism is seen as an attack" rather than an attempt to debate the merits of features / implementations.
I thought the topic quickly moved to be about A/V conferencing, WebRTC and other features in general, not Hello in particular. There isn't much to discuss about yet-another-WebRTC-site, so the topic had shifted.
And then everything depends on how one views things. Firefox is a monolithic blob, and WebRTC is a fairly tightly integrated part of it. This is valid point to discuss.
For one, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have WebRTC as a part of the browser and not as an fairly autonomous plugin/extension (bundled with browser default packaging, no problems here). Tight vs loose coupling.
You know, one thing I absolutely love about Flash is that I can completely remove or selectively disable it as I see fit. ;)
It seems even with the separate efforts for once-browsers-now-OSes (Firefox OS/Chrome OS/etc), we're still getting feature-creep in the browser. I understand that webRTC is a spec from the W3C, but I'm not sure that's the ... best ... solution.
Maybe I'm a bit too old-school in this regard, but I view the WWW as an interactive document repository (sites/forums/rich-apps), whereas the Internet is the network that the WWW operates on. So for me, a browser is used to explore/use the WWW whereas individual applications and tools are used to explore/use the Internet.
I feel this is an important distinction because I would like at least one modern/popular web browser to retain this philosophy, which is difficult when each browser (and parent umbrella org) decide to push more desktop-app-like functionality to the browser.
10 years ago the internet was quite different (and 10 years prior to that too), I'm curious / worried / cautious how it'll be in another decade. At least it'll be an interesting ride :-P
Mozilla is working on some pretty neat stuff; and is paying attention to the rest of the world, not just the American/European/Japanese market.
Also since they are a foundation owned corporation with a public benefit mission https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ they can take a longer-term view than some of the other big players.
Having played with one of the flame dev phones for FirefoxOS I wouldn't be too surprised if within the decade they are dominant in areas of the world that don't have an installed base ( rural india, sub-saharan africa outside of SA, etc. ).
Remember that more people are going to acquire mobile internet devices in the next 5 years than were on the internet in 1998.