>the point of pre-bundling it is to get more attention and in that way to promote WebRTC //
Presumably though instead of FF dev team making a Moz sponsored extension Telefonica came to them and said "we'll give you this barrel of cash if we can put our name on a new part of FF that gets default installed".
Indeed Moz could have just had Telefonica named as devs on an extension and shipped it as default - which would seem more natural. The way it is makes it more like a marketing move to hijack FF as a place to put an advert.
Appear.in seems to work fine and without messing with my browser chrome.
I would be extremely surprised to find out that was how it happened. More likely we (Mozilla) just have contacts at Telefonica from our Firefox OS work, and Telefonica happens to have this opentok software which provides a useful piece of making Firefox Hello work, so co-branding was a win/win.
Going with that line, was the inclusion of Hello such a complex thing that it needed to be bought in from outside of Mozilla - I'd assumed that using WebRTC as a video chat component made things [relatively] quite facile which is why there are so many implementations popping up.
What's the essential feature that Telefonica brings to the table that makes it worth Mozilla compromising their brand across 500 million installs [using Wikipedia figures there] - that's essentially saying that what Telefonica bought to the table is worth, what, > $5 million [assuming 10¢ per install for the brand placement]. Can you expand on the "win/win" part on the Mozilla, and their supporters, side?
Presumably though instead of FF dev team making a Moz sponsored extension Telefonica came to them and said "we'll give you this barrel of cash if we can put our name on a new part of FF that gets default installed".
Indeed Moz could have just had Telefonica named as devs on an extension and shipped it as default - which would seem more natural. The way it is makes it more like a marketing move to hijack FF as a place to put an advert.
Appear.in seems to work fine and without messing with my browser chrome.