May 22, 2018
Firefox is now supported by Google Hangouts and Meet
It's the other way around: Google is working on a new version of Hangouts that can run in Firefox without the Google Talk plugins. As far as I know, it isn't ready yet. Hangouts brings conversations to life with photos, emoji, and even group video calls for free. Use Hangouts to keep in touch. Message friends, start free video or voice calls, and hop on a conversation with one person or a group. Include all your friends with group chats for up to 150 people. Say more with photos, videos, maps, emoji. 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. Reviews and ratings for Messenger for Google™ Hangouts. Find out what other users think about Messenger for Google™ Hangouts and add it to your Firefox Browser. Google Hangouts is an instant messaging and video chat platform with a versatile feature set. Add to Chrome Add to Edge Add to Firefox Add to Opera Add to Brave.
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
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.
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.
Google Hangout Plugin Not Working
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!