[drdaeman]

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.

[mkal_tsr]

I agree.

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.

[olefoo]

Except this isn't "bundled with a monolithic browser blob"; it's enabled by supporting WebRTC, and it's compatible with other WebRTC implementations.

That we're even discussing this goes to show the tragic decline of critical thinking and basic reading comprehension on this board.

[drdaeman]

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. ;)

[mkal_tsr]

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