May 22, 2018
Firefox is now supported by Google Hangouts and Meet
After extensive work from the Google Hangouts team and the Firefox WebRTC team both, the consumer version Google Hangouts and the enterprise version Google Meet, are working in Firefox with no plugin required thanks to WebRTC!
How we got here
To get the most out of Google Meet, use a modern browser, such as Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, or Safari. Talk face to face from your computer Make video calls with up to 25 people. Use Hangouts to keep in touch. Message contacts, start free video or voice calls, and hop on a conversation with one person or a group. Include all your contacts with group chats for up to 150 people. Say more with status messages, photos, videos, maps, emoji, stickers, and animated GIFs.
Turning off the NPAPI support in Firefox 53 resulted in the Google Hangouts plugin not working anymore. Unfortunately that meant that Firefox users could no longer enjoy Google Hangouts or Meet.
Google Chrome users could continue to use Hangouts and Meet without a NPAPI plugin, because the Google Hangout backend service had support for a flavor of WebRTC only implemented in Google Chrome. But that version was not spec compliant and was thus never supported by Firefox.
It took a considerable amount of effort from the Google Hangouts team to update their backend service to the latest version of the WebRTC specs to support Firefox. At the same time the Firefox WebRTC team implemented a bunch of features to support large scale conferencing for Google Meet.
Firefox Hangouts Microphone
In fact Google Hangouts, the consumer version, started working with Firefox 56. Now with Firefox 60 we were able to ship all the required features to also support Google Meet.
Firefox Hangouts Video
Thanks to all the hard working people involved in this project and resulting in making the Open Web a better and safer place from today on!
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