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Mozilla Software

Wengo Preview

Daniel Glazman hooked me up a few days ago with a preview of the OpenWengo extension for Firefox he’s been working on. It didn’t work with a build of mine (likely my fault), but did of course work with Firefox 1.5.0.1 which I tested with. I’m on very limited bandwidth here, and voice quality was very good in the limited testing I did. That was not only subject to my terrible connection, but had a trans-Atlantic hop, so it’s likely the worst case scenario most users will ever experience when using VoIP. It seems stable, and has a very well designed UI. The Dialpad UI (featured below) did strike me as a little basic (just regular buttons for numbers), but it’s an early build, I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets a little better looking over time. Address book is similar to Thunderbird in what it includes. Personally I’d love to see it support reading Thunderbird’s address book.

At this point the UI option for chat and SMS are implemented, but the feature itself doesn’t exist. He’s now working on chat right now, so I suspect we’ll see that soon. It looks like it’s pretty standard from the screenshot he provides.

Hopefully OpenWengo will work with GoogleTalk in the near future.

Overall, I think it’s got strong potential to beat Skype. I haven’t yet tested it’s Firewall skills (I’ll post again when I see how it does in this test). Provided it can meet/beet Skype with Firewalls, the biggest problem would be getting enough users to be useful. Working with Google Talk would be a big step in that direction.

Below are some screenshots I took:

Login Menu Wengo Address Card 20060131_wengo_buddies.png 20060131_wengo_dialpad.png