Mozilla To Remove Hello In Firefox 49 (softpedia.com)

Firefox's voice and videoconferencing add-on was described as "the first global communications system built directly into a browser" -- but things change. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: An entry on Mozilla's issue tracker opened on July 17 reveals ongoing efforts from Mozilla engineers to remove the Hello system add-on from default Firefox installations starting with version 49, set for public release on September 13, 2016. Mozilla added Hello to Firefox in version 34, released on December 1, 2014, and from the beginning, it was part of the browser's core code, but was moved in December 2015 into a separate add-on, one that came pre-installed with Firefox, making Hello its first ever system add-on.

Mozilla plans to remove Hello from the codebases of Firefox Beta 49, Firefox Developer Edition 50, and Firefox Nightly 51. Based on the currently available information, the deadline for the Hello code removal operations is for this Monday, August 1, after which the first Firefox builds with no Hello integration will be available for testing, and will ship out in the fall with the stable release.
The article suggests this may have been a space-saving measure, "since Mozilla is focused on rebuilding Firefox's code from scratch to keep up with speedier competitors like Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi."

Comments

A step back towards sanity

[KiloByte]

Great! Now please remove Pocket and Australis as well, bring tabs back to their ergonomic place not on top, stop hiding "http://" from URLs as if it were a "default" protocol (it's not -- names like ftp.*.debian.org are assumed to be FTP even if they don't support FTP anymore), drop that annoying "reader mode", etc. (Yeah, there are extensions or about:config settings to mask most of those, but most users don't know that.)

On the other hand, instead of copying Chrome, please work on actual security improvements, like DANE (currently marked "WONTFIX").

Re:A step back towards sanity

[Leslie43]

This, so much this. All of it.
If we wanted Chrome we would just use Chrome.

Some of their steps have been infuriating, whoever is directing their development should have been removed a long time ago. I'll toss in another obvious misstep, and that was the decision to focus on 32bit instead of 64bit, how they thought that was a good idea is beyond me, luckily public outcry got them to pull their head out of their @ss.

Re: A step back towards sanity

[Bradmont]

Whoa whoa whoa.... Don't you dare touch reader mode. It is one of the best features on any browser at the moment. But I mean, who wants to be able to actually read an article without navigating all the crap and clickbait covering 90% of most web pages these days...

keep up with speedier competitors

[fustakrakich]

like Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi...

and Seamonkey...