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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

#161

Post by o_____________o »

madeofpalk wrote: post #110
o_____________o wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Did you read the next sentence after what you quoted?

Because Apple has always shaped so much of our development environment, it's easy to take these things as natural law. I'm assuming you're a younger developer based on your assertions – I would probably even agree with those suppositions based on the tone of posts like mine that seem anti-Apple. But the history of these technologies is glaring, and native/web/hybrid apps have never been given equal footing.

Nothing you said refutes a financial incentive in the app store, and most apps don't need "more power and capabilities", they need access to a basic API that isn't randomly crippled.

If you care about this subject, read about the history of UIWebView, WKWebView and hybrid apps, you will see how uniquely broken the platform is. Android doesn't suffer the same problems for a host of reasons, but that makes sense given Google's incentive for web. Hybrid and web apps are then not terribly appealing since they're only effective on one platform, so the ecosystem stagnates.

Here's a post I saw a few days ago, by coincidence: https://hackernoon.com/if-it-werent-for-apple-hybrid-app-dev...

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#162

Post by TD-Linux »

candiodari wrote: post #125
TD-Linux wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebRTC has codec negotiation, which means you can give preference to a particular codec while still supporting both.

Except that open source and free software can't (legally) do that. Both HEVC and H.264 require the patent holders to be paid in order to be allowed on either a device or content.

Cisco provides a fully licensed encoder, OpenH264, that you can download for free (Firefox uses it). That loophole was removed for H.265, though. I would have rather had only VP8 mandatory to implement in the standard, but at least this situation is better than the reverse.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#163

Post by clouddrover »

alwillis wrote: post #157
clouddrover wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perhaps it's Mozilla that needs to get with the times Mozilla is with the times. HLS works well in Firefox. You just do it with JavaScript and it's disappointing that Apple doesn't bother to do that on their website. Here's an article on JavsScript based HLS from a couple of years ago: https://blog.peer5.com/http-live-streaming-in-javascript/

Again, performance and battery life is going to be better with Apple’s approach for mobile devices, especially since iOS devices have hardware accelerated playback.

> with Apple’s approach for mobile devices

Web browser considerations aren't relevant on iOS because Apple forbids alternative browser engines. Firefox on iOS is not Firefox because Apple doesn't allow it to use Firefox's JS runtime or Firefox's render engine. As a result there isn't any true browser competition on the iOS platform, which is a shame.

Personally, I want to run full, real Firefox on my iPhone. It's a low quality move from Apple that they stop me doing that.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#164

Post by shmerl »

clouddrover wrote: post #163
alwillis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, performance and battery life is going to be better with Apple’s approach for mobile devices, especially since iOS devices have hardware accelerated playback.

> with Apple’s approach for mobile devices Web browser considerations aren't relevant on iOS because Apple forbids alternative browser engines. Firefox on iOS is not Firefox because Apple doesn't allow it to use Firefox's JS runtime or Firefox's render engine. As a result there isn't any true browser competition on the iOS platform, which is a shame. Personally, I want to run full, real Firefox on my iPhone. It's a l…

Well, ditch Apple. Why do you put up with this?

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#165

Post by kalleboo »

microcolonel wrote: post #75
om2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebRTC is actually quite complicated to implement and it took a large effort by a big chunk of the WebKit team, even though we had a lot of code that we could reuse. People have a lot of theories about Safari deliberately omitting one feature or another, but the truth is there's only so much we can do at once. ETA: If you look at the page counts of all the required specs (ECMAScript APIs, WebRTC protocol specs, under…

I understand, though when it comes to WebRTC, there is an existing, efficient, stable implementation in a license which is compatible with WebKit and Apple's proprietary embeddings of it. You aren't going to be translating the WebRTC protocol diagrams and interfaces yourself. The main effort would be elsewhere (adapting it to Apple's platform TLS libraries perhaps, verifying the bindings, fitting it into the composit…

"Nobody deploys ES6 today since no browsers support ES6 yet so there's no point in browsers spending engineering effort adding ES6 support"

logic.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#166

Post by whatever_dude »

alwillis wrote: post #118
whatever_dude wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in essence, and I personally hate how they tend to handicap mobile Safari, but the recent announcement of WebRTC and WebAssembly support (including mobile!) means they're catching up fast, and maybe changing their approach to web technology.

I believe that’s a short-sighted view. The past year or so, the Safari/WebKit teams have been killin’ it. I use Mobile Safari a lot each day and I can tell you it’s not handicapped.

I'm curious if you do Mobile Safari development, however.

I don't believe it's a short-sighted view. I think it's quite the opposite; my opinion comes from from spending years doing (web) development for it.

Their focus has always been on things that matter little (they were by far the first to implement `backdrop-filter`) while still keeping important things severely broken (as `position: fixed`) and messing with things that should work in a pretty obvious manner anywhere else (like overflow scrolling).

WebAssembly and WebRTC are the opposite of it. "Last year or so", maybe, but it'll take more than one year of good work for me to look at the team at a good light.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#167

Post by cpncrunch »

cpncrunch wrote: post #104
om2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, the problem was using the deprecated 'url' property, rather than the newer 'urls' (which works).
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