955011 - Display URL previews for chat messages

Status: REOPENED

(Thunderbird :: Instant Messaging, enhancement)

Description

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

*** Original post on bio 1581 at 2012-07-11 19:09:00 UTC ***

*** Due to BzAPI limitations, the initial description is in comment 1 ***

Comment 1

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Attachment: A bad mockup from a long time ago

*** Original post on bio 1581 as attmnt 1735 at 2012-07-11 19:09:00 UTC ***

It would be nice if received media was inlined into the conversation so a new page wouldn't need to be opened. GTalk on Gmail does this and Mibbit does too, and I generally find it convenient. I believe Mic had an example add-on that did this (but required disabling some security options).

Some examples of what could be shown:
Images are automatically put in place of their URL
YouTube videos would automatically be inserted
The first paragraph of a Wikipedia link could be given as a tooltip
...

Comment 2

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Attachment: Video Link preview from Mic

*** Original post on bio 1581 as attmnt 1736 at 2012-07-11 19:10:00 UTC ***

Originally from https://wiki.instantbird.org/File:Video_Link.png

Comment 3

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Attachment: Full video player inline

*** Original post on bio 1581 as attmnt 1737 at 2012-07-11 19:11:00 UTC ***

Originally from https://wiki.instantbird.org/File:InlinePlayer.png

Comment 4

[Instantbot]

Attachment: LimeChat rendering an animated GIF

*** Original post on bio 1581 as attmnt 2151 by mconley AT mozilla.com at 2012-12-05 19:13:00 UTC ***

aleth asked me for a screenshot for how LimeChat does this.

Note that the screenshot doesn't convey the awesomeness that is an animated GIF. I probably should have created a GIF instead.

Comment 5

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Attachment: Link_Bugzilla_reloaded.png

Another example from the wiki with Bugzilla links

Comment 6

[rod.rodney]

What if this plugin could be whitelisted so only certain domains and CDNs are permissible e.g. Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook etc?

Comment 7

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Rod, I'm not 100% sure of the security issue for allowing this, i.e. I'm not sure if allowing only certain domains would "solve" anything or not.

Maybe Florian can elaborate on the issues with this.

Comment 8

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

On the behalf of Florian:
Closing bugs related to the Instantbird UI as WONTFIX, as the development of the standalone chat client Instantbird has stopped. Instantbird users are encouraged to migrate to Thunderbird. The user interface of instant messaging in Thunderbird will feel familiar, as the Thunderbird IM support started as a fork of Instantbird.

Comment 9

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

This is closed, but I came across probably the "sane" way to do this... oEmbed provides a standardized way to go from a "link" to a piece of structured data to embed: https://oembed.com/

They also give suggestions on security in there (which boils down to an iframe with limited scope, IIRC).

I'd still like to see this done for Thunderbird, but likely won't have the time to implement it myself.

Comment 10

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

I'm going to reopen this and move it to TB: IM. I think it applies as equally there and probably matches what users expect from modern instant messaging clients (e.g. Slack).

Comment 11

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

I'm renaming this as the description clearly talks about receiving URLs and then display media from them.

See bug 1209854 for displaying media received over the chat protocol itself.