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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

6 replies on “Wengo Preview”

2 days ago I installed the last Windows version of wengo but I failed to properly installed I think.

And I’m behind a firewall … so I think that was the cause… what I didn’t like it was that wengo got a lot of cpu cycles to the point that other applications start behaving very slow.

So for now I’ll stay with skype, that BTW used my firewall with no configuration on my part.

J.

It’s 1.5.0.1 not 1.5.1, unless you’ve got a super-secret version none of us know about 🙂

@ Darku, Yes Zoep works with any open Jabber based system you should check it out. https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1927&application=firefox

It deliberately only occupies minimal UI real estate while maintaining a Firefox native feel, it works like the options window. (the multi function button is pretty cool imo)

My firm wrote Zoep extension for Voipster and Daniel and I have been joking about who’s extension going to kick who’s ***. We will see, but it’s friendly rivalry 😉

What I like most about Zoep is that it’s open-source, Voipster have opened up parts of their infrastructure that would normally be closed-source, it will be interesting to see how open-zoep develops for sure.

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