Does not work for iOS yet?
Edit: "At this time, WhatsApp Web is available only for Android, Windows Phone, Nokia S60, BlackBerry and BB10 smartphones." https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080003
That doesn't seem likely to me: what features does iOS not have right now, that this is likely to use? It seems more likely if they are targeting chrome only they did it to avoid the support overhead of making it work in multiple browsers.
> They have been much slower adopting features than the competition.
It's not a matter of speed. This seems to be using WebRTC for handling communications between the phone app and the browser. Safari has chosen not to implement WebRTC and so far it is still not a proper standard so I can see why. Google, as the developer of WebRTC, will obviously support it right away. Note that no browser other than Chrome can be used as well.
> WhatsApp Web is a computer based extension of the WhatsApp account on your phone. The messages you send and receive are fully synced between your phone and your computer, and you can see all messages on both devices. Any action you take on the phone will apply to WhatsApp Web and vice versa.
As a temporary solution, you could spoof the user agent by running chromium from command line:
chromium-browser --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.1132.47 Safari/536.11"
Ugh. This is why I was saying before that I'm quite worried that Whatsapp itself didn't come out and say publicly that it uses TextSecure's end-to-end protocol, and that we should stop praising them for "adopting end-to-end encryption" until they actually say they did (for which I got downvoted).
I think they still don't store it, What there are doing here is syncing all messages from phone to web when paired. FAQ clearly mentions that web version connects with phone to sync data - https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080002
Note that AFAIR the reason wasn't so that it was more secure, but to remind users that Snapchat is about the instant and so that users wouldn't expect it to store all of their lives, only the right now.
A cheap and easy way to keep your storage needs low, if you ask me.
So it seems to do some pairing between your phone and chrome? Not really what I call a web version. A real web version would run on, you know, any reasonably recent web browser.
I think the point of the pairing itself is more just to make sure people only have as many WhatsApp accounts as they have phone numbers. Not sure why it's Chrome only, though.
I like being able to chat with my friends while I am at work so I'm glad to see WhatsApp bringing web access.
Hopefully iOS support is around the corner, but given how often iOS gets preferential treatment over Android, I'm okay with my Droid friends getting first crack at it.
What did they do in an add-on that won't work in Firefox? Chrome add-ons and Firefox add-ons are rather close; I have one that has about 80% common code.
I'm running 2.11.498 (just updated) on my Android phone and the menu option is there. The new web.whatsapp.com just started working for me this morning.
- only works on one browser
- requires interop with the mobile app
- supporting mobile app version on Android only
- supporting mobile app version not universally available on Android, presumably because of Google Play registry population or something.
Used a US VPN to see whats the latest version and its 2.11.491, which is the same as installed version on mine (India). However, I still don't see the option to scan QR code.
I'm on WP8 which I imagine you probably aren't, so this may not be useful to you, but in case it's relevant across platforms, or in case there are any WP8 readers:
a.) I updated when I saw this HN submission, a 17mb update, to version 2.11.634 (it didn't updated automatically, but was available when I checked my app store)
b.) Opening whatsapp after the update showed it had updated (I could see some other features that had changed), but I couldn't find the web option. After killing whatsapp and restarting it, it then appeared on a menu where it hadn't been before
I know everyone is complaining about Chrome only support, but the more important question we should be asking is what technology stack are they using for the web client?
It's well documented that Whatsapp is a Erlang shop.
Did they stay with using Erlang for the web as well ... or did they switch to another technology like Nodejs, etc?
They seem to be using React for the View rendering. Websockets for data. Bluebird for promises. Google's CryptoJS for end-to-end encryption. MomentJS for time formatting.
The code seems to be pretty modular There are some nice gems in it like EXIF format decoding etc. This is nice to reverse engineer :)
110 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadhttps://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080002
It's not a matter of speed. This seems to be using WebRTC for handling communications between the phone app and the browser. Safari has chosen not to implement WebRTC and so far it is still not a proper standard so I can see why. Google, as the developer of WebRTC, will obviously support it right away. Note that no browser other than Chrome can be used as well.
1. The frontend only works on Chrome for desktop (it appears only because it uses the non-standards track filesystem API)
2. The backend service and mobile app does not work with iOS (it appears because it uses background networking)
They may seem related, but they aren't.
And even if they could, I'd doubt that they'd make Facebook wait 5 days for their app to be aproved.
[edit] Found the answer at https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080003
> WhatsApp Web is a computer based extension of the WhatsApp account on your phone. The messages you send and receive are fully synced between your phone and your computer, and you can see all messages on both devices. Any action you take on the phone will apply to WhatsApp Web and vice versa.
So how can they do this?
Also they don't even encrypt, they send messages over the air in plain text. YAY $16 billion!
https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/
Note that AFAIR the reason wasn't so that it was more secure, but to remind users that Snapchat is about the instant and so that users wouldn't expect it to store all of their lives, only the right now.
A cheap and easy way to keep your storage needs low, if you ask me.
Menu -> Whats App Web?
I like being able to chat with my friends while I am at work so I'm glad to see WhatsApp bringing web access.
Hopefully iOS support is around the corner, but given how often iOS gets preferential treatment over Android, I'm okay with my Droid friends getting first crack at it.
http://imagebin.org/328080
It's 2015, and we're still using browser compatibility checks.
Thought of signing in once with a smart phone and using it forever and continue using my dumb phone..
2.11.498 seems don't work for me. There isn't a WhatsappWeb option.
On WhatsApp site there's still your version.
(I'm on Chrome OS.)
Whatsapp version 2.11.476 updated on 16 jan 2015
I guess it's only limited to US and other regions.
a.) I updated when I saw this HN submission, a 17mb update, to version 2.11.634 (it didn't updated automatically, but was available when I checked my app store)
b.) Opening whatsapp after the update showed it had updated (I could see some other features that had changed), but I couldn't find the web option. After killing whatsapp and restarting it, it then appeared on a menu where it hadn't been before
It's well documented that Whatsapp is a Erlang shop.
Did they stay with using Erlang for the web as well ... or did they switch to another technology like Nodejs, etc?
The code seems to be pretty modular There are some nice gems in it like EXIF format decoding etc. This is nice to reverse engineer :)