What's wrong with it? It works just fine in my Firefox. I was expecting the screen that tells me I have to "upgrade" to IE to even see the screen. But, nope, works fine.

I'm curious, why is everyone promoting it as a new feature for instant messaging? Yahoo Messenger has had voice chat facilities for ages.

Maybe if you had an up to date version of Firefox you'd be fine... cause it works with no problems here.

And people complain about Microsoft's FUD...

3) Skype is currently free for PC-to-Phone. Free as in beer.

I just assumed it was a flash item that didn't work in Linux because of lack of flash 8 player.

I see that as the most likely cause. I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.4 on XP (full UA string Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4) with Flash 8.0.something and it works just fine.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060608 Ubuntu/dapper-security Firefox/1.5.0.4

Probably due to a lack of Flash 8... but all I see is this [imageshack.us].

msn messenger has had voice chat for years too

Only uber geeks due this? I am sitting in an office right now with a bunch of folks who use the their computers for VOIP related things, and most are engineers. So I don't see where it is only going to be used by "geeks" that doesn't make any sence what so ever. People are willing to use voip and computers for phone conversations, just look at all the "normals" with a webcam the internet is more accepted as a form of communication than I think even the phone, its becasue of pages like myspace etc. which have made the net usable.

A guy at work installed it on a trials machine, and that machine suffered weird problems. It could release, obtain, and renew a DHCP address, but couldn't ping anything, not even the gateway (which is also the switch that does the DHCP stuff).
He rolled the system back, and it all works.

There is a lot of different stuff on that machine though, so it **might** not be just due to that. I wonder if it hooks into the IP stack at some level, and that's what messed it up? Anyone else have any similar issues with it?

Don't know what version of "mozilla" your running, but was able to see the launch page just fine on FireFox, the only one that matters.

Yeah, I think he misspelled "Skype."

Not only that, but Firefox loads the page just fine. What an idiotic submission.

It's VOIP! And instead of bypassing the telco, it requires a telco! And instead of working on every computer, it only works on Windows computers. And instead of being free, it costs money! And instead of working with every IM system, it only works with MSN! And instead of rendering it in HTML, we decided to give Adobe/Macromedia a cut and do the whole web page in Flash!

Couldn't have put it better myself, although when my computer goes to the messenger website, it detects that I am coming from a mac, and offers me the mac version, so I guess it's not limited only to Windows. However, since the website won't even let me see the page for the windows version, I can't compare the differences. Perhaps the mac version has yet to offer full VOIP functionality.

Currently Skype is free to regular phones from your PC, in North America. This is a promtion untill the end of the year
http://www.skype.com/help/guides/skypeout.html [skype.com]

So did MSN.. They've all had voice chat.

It's the PC to POTS feature that's really new.

Of course, only XBox users are smart enough to know that. Too bad slashdot isn't made-up-bullshit unfriendly.

Perhaps the submitter doesn't have Flash installed or is using an extension like noscript or flashblock. When I loaded the site with noscript enabled, I saw only a blank page. I had to allow the site before it displayed properly. Yet, I would hope the submitter would be intelligent enough to know the difference between a page that doesn't load properly in Firefox and one that simply needs the Flash plugin or JavaScript support (in the case of noscript users).

There's a decent EARLY replacement for Skype available in OpenWengo [openwengo.org] but it's super beta at best right now. The voice quality isn't as good as Skype yet (at least from NorthAm). However, it's got a ton of potential (and video!).

Works fine with FF 1.5 on Win32 using UserAgent Switcher to send the user agent exactly as grandparent says. I'd say it's Flash 8, not MS trying to keep out Linux users.

No it isn't. It uses Flash 8, which Macromedia hasn't released a Linux client for.

To U.S. phones, for U.S. users.

It's not Linux friendly. Firefox is fine if you have Flash 8.

It's called the Session Initiation Protocol, and pretty much every VoIP service OTHER than Skype uses/supports it. (With a few small exceptions such as Google Talk which uses the Jingle VoIP extensions to the XMPP (aka Jabber) protocol). Note in that particular case that Google and many of the big proponents of SIP (especially Project Gizmo/SIPPhone) have been working on solutions for XMPP+Jingle interoperability with SIP.

There are a wide variety of SIP softphones available, just as there are a wide variety of SIP service providers. Many of these also support the IAX protocol, which is primarily used by Asterisk PBX systems.

Examples, most of these service providers provide their own SIP client, but in most cases SIP clients are interchangeable between SIP services:
StanaPhone (http://www.stanaphone.com/) - Free incoming DIDs (dial-in phone numbers) in various New York area codes
SIPPhone/Gizmo Project (http://www.gizmoproject.com/) - Free PC-to-PC, DIDs and outgoing PSTN cost money (not much though)
Free World Dialup - Primarily PC-to-PC (or Asterisk-to-Asterisk or whatever), but with some PSTN in/out capability
The list goes on and on, and I haven't even included the "landline replacement" VoIP providers. (Vonage in the U.S. is the most well known example, but most educated consumers hate them as they have some rather customer-unfriendly policies such as locking telephone adapters to their service and forbidding the use of your own telephone adapter without paying a significant extra fee). A few other providers do use other (although usually still known and standardized) protocols such as AT&T CallVantage (which uses the MGCP protocol).

See http://www.voip-info.org/ [voip-info.org] for LOTS of addition information on hardware, setup, and cheap providers.

For US AND Canada.

When this product was in beta I went to the site with IE 7 beta 2 and it did not render right for me. I had to use Firefox to see what it was all about. When I saw this submission I could not believe that MS would intentionally break Firefox knowing that most VOIP users are FF users as well.