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Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

jobs.apple.com

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Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#11
post #5
post #4

At last. Where have they been all this time, under a rock? Does it mean they'll start supporting Opus as well?

Apple need to move Safari to the App Store. A Browser only being updated with the OS in 2016 is ridiculous.

When you get 80%+ of your OS updated within 6 months this isn't so much of a problem.

Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#12

From what I've been told, they are looking to hire 1 engineer. I guess that is better than nothing, but it doesn't look like webrtc is going to be any sort of priority for them. Also, it may not be super valuable in Safari, which has a small market-share. Where it is needed is mobile safari. From what I understand having it in Safari does not mean it gets built into mobile Safari. Also, note the date of the posting.…

iOS Safari has a large marketshare. WebRTC is more than video conferencing. It's also peer to peer networking which is a huge win for certain kinds of apps

Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#14
post #4

At last. Where have they been all this time, under a rock? Does it mean they'll start supporting Opus as well?

My guess is they didn't want to implement a competitor to FaceTime.

I wonder if there could be anything more toxic to a product's development than letting it compete.

Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#16
How about the security issue with WebRTC where the browser leaks the IP address? It's part of the way WebRTC works so I can't see how that can be fixed. It's both a security issue and a key enabling feature.

Update:

It looks like Google Chrome (desktop) team has published a plugin that alleviates the problem but can cause performance degradations with apps that use WebRTC. They seem to suggest that a decent fix won't be possible until UDP proxies are in wide use and Chrome adds support for that.

Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#17
post #11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple need to move Safari to the App Store. A Browser only being updated with the OS in 2016 is ridiculous.

When you get 80%+ of your OS updated within 6 months this isn't so much of a problem.

Safari is so far behind every other browser, it's not even funny.

Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#18

From what I've been told, they are looking to hire 1 engineer. I guess that is better than nothing, but it doesn't look like webrtc is going to be any sort of priority for them. Also, it may not be super valuable in Safari, which has a small market-share. Where it is needed is mobile safari. From what I understand having it in Safari does not mean it gets built into mobile Safari. Also, note the date of the posting.…

iOS Safari has a large marketshare. WebRTC is more than video conferencing. It's also peer to peer networking which is a huge win for certain kinds of apps

And it also allows you to directly access the camera from webpages and take photos from a JS API vs having to use a camera app and upload.

Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is they didn't want to implement a competitor to FaceTime.

I wonder if there could be anything more toxic to a product's development than letting it compete.

Apple isn't known for welcoming competition. How many patent suits in how many countries has Apple brought?

Re: Apple is hiring engineers to bring WebRTC to Safari

#20

How about the security issue with WebRTC where the browser leaks the IP address? It's part of the way WebRTC works so I can't see how that can be fixed. It's both a security issue and a key enabling feature. Update: It looks like Google Chrome (desktop) team has published a plugin that alleviates the problem but can cause performance degradations with apps that use WebRTC. They seem to suggest that a decent fix won't…

I don't have a full understanding of WebRTC, but AFAIK its a browser-to-browser connection library. How would that work without leaking the ip address? The browser at least has to know who to connect to?
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