Seems unGoogley.

That's some hugh quality snark right there. Thank you good sir.

It's hard to understand who you're trying to blame here, but it sounds like a classic case of the "two ways of doing a thing" (the deprecated way and the one that doesn't work yet).

I should have been more clear. I meant that it doesn't work. I get a message saying that I should use chrome. I'll get a screenshot and update here.

Here is their doc: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205138367-Common-is...

For the same reason Microsoft used to make things that only worked in Internet Explorer.

You ought to do so

I use the built in auto fill with Kee (for KeePass). It works great, my password manager types my passwords in initially and Firefox stores and syncs them across devices with reliable auto fill.

I'm a web dev, used Chrome heavily for years. Switched to Firefox 6 months ago. It was ok, but now with 57 it's great. There's hardly anything that doesn't work. Only use Chrome for Hangouts and Google Cast now.

I prefer chromes DevTools, that's the only reason I'm still using it.

They use user agent detection to serve Gecko-based browsers a lesser version of their pages. Override your user agent to WebKit and you'll see what I mean.

It’s never not worked for me if you’re referring to https://hangouts.google.com I use it daily as my primary IM and am primarily a Firefox user across all platforms. Never had an issue with Hangouts even after the Quantum update

Vanilla WebRTC in its current form is still too unstable to actually be usable for production video chat applications. Its limitations affect all of the leading commercial providers: Tokbox, Twilio, Agora, etc.

For example, on MacOS, there is a severe breaking CoreAudio bug in WebRC that hasn't been fixed for over 3 years which affects 8% of users by causing unmuted microphones to not transmit any audio [1]. We've never seen this problem come up with Hangouts though.

iOS builds for Google's WebRTC libjingle_peerconnection library have been broken for over 2 months, too [2].

It's no surprise that there is some core Hangouts team within Google building something else. Even Google's own AppRTC "reference" application implementation has some seriously questionable design decisions in its code (such as sending signaling messages to Google App Engine to forward over websockets).

Google needs to figure out how to bridge the gap between both organizations so that everyone can benefit from the stability gains made by the Hangouts team.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/webrtc/issues/detail?id=4799

[2] https://github.com/pristineio/webrtc-build-scripts

AIUI, they're also relying on some parts of WebRTC that aren't interoperably implemented yet, like the statistics model.

AFAIK, it uses NPAPI plugin. Chrome stopped supporting NPAPI plugins, but that only means user can't install them, Google chooses now what plugins you should have, and it bundles Flash and Hangouts with browser. These plugins are well hidden, no more chrome://plugins and I can't find them in filesystem.

You can see "Extension: Google Hangouts" in Chrome Task Manager when Hangouts is active.

But I still think it's not malicious trick for browser wars, more likely that they abandoned Hangouts and will shut it down after some time, launching even more half-working chat services before that, with machine learning, VR, brands engagement, integrated video news and other crap everyone can't live without.

Whatsapp Web works perfectly for me in Firefox, but only after messing with my adblocker settings; the website depends on javascript from at least three domains to work.