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Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

blog.peer5.com

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Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#101

Post by imron »

devrandomguy wrote: post #66
vvanders wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you'll see gaming pick up WebRTC for many of the reasons that Glenn build netcode.io[1]. It's overly complex and doesn't guarantee UDP which is a non-starter for most games. [1] http://new.gafferongames.com/post/why_cant_i_send_udp_packet... / https://github.com/networkprotocol/netcode.io

> ... there is a trend away from peer-to-peer towards client/server for multiplayer games ... Really? Why? It seems obvious to me that communicating directly with other players would be faster than relaying messages through a server. Even if the server and the clients are all in the same building, the server is still going to add the latency of its entire stack. Unless that server is acting as a very simple stream-or…

> Really? Why?

Cheating. Having an authoritative server reduces the ability to cheat and limits the type of cheating that is possible.

The more you trust the client, the more cheating can affect the game.

Also, client-server scales to more players.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#102

Post by ghughes »

MichaelGG wrote: post #96
threeseed wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because ordinary users never, ever opt in to things they shouldn't. And because of that one opt-in mistake suddenly they have invisible service workers mining Bitcoins which they could never learn about since the discovery mechanism for service workers is currently non-existent. Again, the concept of background tasks isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it needs to be locked down to specific use cases not a free fo…

So limit the amount of CPU/bw/etc. they can use, just like mobile platforms do for background apps?

Installing an app is a higher bar than tapping the "get out of my way" button on a modal dialog that some website just shoved in your face.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#103

Post by DavidNielsen »

andybak wrote: post #76
om2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the version that will ship in iOS 11 / High Sierra. Not yet determined for future versions.

Is that a political or technical decision?

They would likely argue that HEVC and H.264 are hardware accelerated on nearly all of their devices whereas VP8 likely isn’t. This would mean compromising on battery life as they’d have to provide a software fallback where needed. I don’t see Apple being very willing to provide a bad user experience and given how hard they were pushing HEVC during their 2017 WWDC keynote the best bet is that they think that’s the better option.

Alternatively they’d have to add VP8 support in their chips and one suspects they would be unwilling to spend silicon on that which could otherwise be used for whatever witchcraft their silicon designers are whipping up.

I’d grant that as a valid technical reason for limited video codec support. Silicon and battery are at a premium.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#104

Post by cpncrunch »

om2 wrote: post #39
russelldc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't get many WebRTC projects/test pages to actually work on the new Safari preview. Is there anywhere they list the specific features implemented from the spec?

We're working individually with WebRTC sites to get them running. There's complications because many sites use legacy APIs that are not in the spec but still exist in Chrome. We're adding some of those for more compatibility.

It looks like RTCPeerConnection(config) is throwing an error if you don't pass in a null config.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#106

Post by alwillis »

andybak wrote: post #76
om2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the version that will ship in iOS 11 / High Sierra. Not yet determined for future versions.

Is that a political or technical decision?

Is that a political or technical decision?

One obvious technical issue is that, as far as we know, there's no VP8 decoding hardware in any of Apple's products; implementing VP8 decoding in software might be more of a power drain than Apple wanted.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#107

Post by alwillis »

DavidNielsen wrote: post #103
andybak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a political or technical decision?

They would likely argue that HEVC and H.264 are hardware accelerated on nearly all of their devices whereas VP8 likely isn’t. This would mean compromising on battery life as they’d have to provide a software fallback where needed. I don’t see Apple being very willing to provide a bad user experience and given how hard they were pushing HEVC during their 2017 WWDC keynote the best bet is that they think that’s the bet…

The WWDC session on HEVC: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/503/

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#108

Post by IMcD23 »

spike021 wrote: post #90
sherbondy wrote: post #30

SO excited about this. Data-channel and all. Non-jailbroken torrenting on iOS at long last :P https://webtorrent.io/ Also, definitely worth trying out this AR.js demo if you're running the beta: https://freinbichler.me/apps/web-ar/ Always thought it was a little peculiar that the Media Capture APIs are tied to what is otherwise a very data/protocol-oriented spec. Wish we could have had a camera feed in a canvas eleme…

How would this allow you to torrent on iOS without jailbreaking the device? My phone, though an iPhone 6, seems to shut down Safari if I've been using other apps long enough. I can't imagine it staying alive long enough to torrent anything large.

Keep Safari active. You can use other apps in split screen while the file downloads.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#109

Post by jarmitage »

megablast wrote: post #94
xiaoma wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About fucking time. I've literally been waiting for this for two and a half years! This is absolutely huge. Many, many services that could once only be provided at a premium fee or by large to massive companies like Skype or Google can now be offered for free by small start-ups without having to worry about "this page was designed to be viewed in [preferred browser] version [foo] or higher" hassles.

> I've literally been waiting for this for two and a half years! Well, I have been figuratively waiting for it for 6 years.

If people had just built on Doug Engelbart's NLS then we could have had this decades ago :P

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#110

Post by madeofpalk »

o_____________o wrote: post #74
threeseed wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posts like this genuinely confuse me. If all Apple cared about was the App Store then why do they continue to hire WebKit engineers and build new features ? It would be easier just to fork WebKit, never add anything new and deliberately make it so unusable that everyone rushes to apps.

Sincerely, what's confusing about it? There is a massive monetary incentive toward native. I don't think it's any kind of top-down nefarious decision, but is probably an emergent quality based on priority. I worked with a group of engineers full time for years around mobile/iOS, and we were pretty amazed at how severe but unaddressed these bugs were. The move to WKWebView was helpful, but still lacking. The app store…

> Sincerely, what's confusing about it? There is a massive monetary incentive toward native.

No there's not. I'm a web developer so I'm pretty invested in the web platform, but even I can see how incredibly naive this assertion is. Native will always win due to just having more power and capabilities. Web will always be a step behind.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by apathy or lack of resources.

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