I am not the best person to try to answer this as I do not and have not yet used Firefox Hello. but no one else has replied so I will attempt an answer.

I suspect you may now need to share a tab. But that could be any tab. Maybe it even works with about:blank or their privacy page. I have found these help articles:

• Firefox Hello - video and voice conversations online
• Send instant messages on Firefox Hello

I also looked up Firefox's privacy policy

• https://www.mozilla.org/privacy/
  • https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox-hello/
    • https://tokbox.com/support/privacy-policy

I have NOT carefully studied tok.box privacy policy, but at first glance they do not seem to hoover up excessive data. For instance I did not notice it saying thy were able to access your browsing History (other than when on their site or using their services.)

Thanks for replying. I'm still hoping for someone to point me to a hidden setting that turns Firefox Hello back into a simple video chat button, but sharing an empty tab could be a usable workaround.

Just in case anyone finds this question while looking for the same thing: I asked the developers in the Firefox Hello IRC discussion channel. It is not possible. Firefox Hello unfortunately has to do sharing these days.

I agree. While it may, on rare occasion, be nice to share a web page, I find plain video chat to be much more useful. Why not make it optional whether someone wants to video chat or share a page? This assuming everyone wants to share a web page is absolute nonsense. I don't ever recall having a need or desire to do so and I have been using browsers for over 20 years. On the other hand, the video chat that Hello used to be was very nice. Please bring it back so that Hello is again useful.

The new Hello is useless garbage, as far as I'm concerned.

Forgot to mention, the Hello video chat meant you weren't locked to a specific service such as Skype or Hangouts. You could just create the link and email it, without worrying about whether the recipient could connect. This new Hello is pretty much useless, as far as I'm concerned. Please bring back the old video chat, at least as an option.

Not the place to discuss development decisions. There are no developers here. Such decisions are rarely reversed, and one suspects probably some commercial/financial motive behind this.

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