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Thursday 15 January 2015

Firefox gets free video chat, and it works with Chrome


As it stands, Google Hangouts and Skype have something of a stranglehold on the video conferencing market. For the most part, those tools work well enough, but the barriers to entry are surprisingly high. Mozilla is setting out to change that by building video conferencing directly into Firefox, and eliminating the need for accounts or dedicated clients. Even better, it’s built on open standards, so your friends and colleagues don’t have to use Firefox to accept a video call.

While Mozilla has been experimenting publicly with the Firefox Hello project for months now, the recent stable release of Firefox 35 brings this feature into the limelight. Smack dab on the menu bar resides a happy little chat icon, and clicking it allows you to start a new video call. From there, you can sign into your Firefox account to manage your contacts, but that’s an optional step. Without signing up for anything, you can start a chat, and simply send an invitation URL to anyone you’d like. They click the link, and the video conference begins. It’s shockingly easy to use, and that’s the real innovation here

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