Should we assume mobile safari will also get WebRTC support, or is that a lot less likely to happen in the near future?
It's coming to both macOS and iOS in Safari 11 and iOS 11.
Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
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Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the $1B question. The obvious application is the video conferencing style hangouts, Skype (which are using WebRTC already). The nice thing about having video conf capabilities in the browser is that you can embed it in any web page and start do interesting things with it - like interactive lectures. Improved gaming networking is another vertical. We've built Peer5 (W17) on top of WebRTC to create a P2P CDN for…
What about a WebRTC version of Twitch.tv? Is that feasible in 5 or 10 years? Twitch does transcoding and I'm not sure how transcoding would work with WebRTC.
What do you mean exactly by that?
You want to replace the contribution side (camera to server) by WebRTC or delivery side (server to screen)
or both?
Contribution: there are platforms who already uses WebRTC instead of rtmp to stream the live camera feed. You can use tokbox's apis for example.
Delivery: This is where it gets more tricky, the nice thing about http based streaming like HLS and DASH is that it's cacheable just like any other file served over http - making it extremely scalable and that's how most CDNs operate today. Changing that part into WebRTC has it's benefits like low latency but has a huge degradation in scaling complexity because of the connection state oriented nature of WebRTC, there are companies trying to build that as well e.g: Red5
Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#23Apple and Microsoft waited five years to deploy this thing. Given how quickly it was implemented and adopted by other browsers, I have to wonder what their motives were for deliberately not integrating it; because frankly they could've done it pretty quickly at any point in the last five years. I remember having to integrate WebRTC through cordova (thank goodness somebody did it first) a couple years ago, and wonderi…
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, underlying codec and protocol specs like Opus and RTC) it adds up to multiple thousands of pages. By comparison, the whole HTML5 spec (current WHATWG version) is 855 pages.
Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#24Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's coming to both macOS and iOS in Safari 11 and iOS 11.
Can you share a link please?
Here's the announcement on the WebKit blog: https://webkit.org/blog/7726/announcing-webrtc-and-media-cap...
Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#26What WebRTC apps can we expect will be mainstream in, say, 6 years? I'm just trying to picture what this technology will allow (or replace).
That's the $1B question. The obvious application is the video conferencing style hangouts, Skype (which are using WebRTC already). The nice thing about having video conf capabilities in the browser is that you can embed it in any web page and start do interesting things with it - like interactive lectures. Improved gaming networking is another vertical. We've built Peer5 (W17) on top of WebRTC to create a P2P CDN for…
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
Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#27What WebRTC apps can we expect will be mainstream in, say, 6 years? I'm just trying to picture what this technology will allow (or replace).
I look at it as WebRTC bringing the browser closer to an OS, in terms of the capabilities offered by the browser to application developers, out-of-the-box and without needing to convince or have users install something.
In terms of replacing, the obvious ones (as mentioned) are applications like Hangouts, Skype, GoToMeeting, etc.
In terms of enabling, time will tell but I try to think about what kinda of applications were possible before but not practical, because of the need to get everyone to install something. Hopefully this will increase the competitiveness of web to apps.
Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#28WebRTC was the #1 most requested web platform feature for Safari. Now coming to macOS and iOS: https://webkit.org/blog/7726/announcing-webrtc-and-media-cap...
You can even try it out now on Safari Technology Preview: https://webkit.org/blog/7627/safari-technology-preview-32/
Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not holding up progress. They have different objectives, and chief among them is power efficiency. Chrome eats up a lot more battery life than Safari.[1] So did Flash (among other conflicts), and I think we all accept now that "holding that up" was good for the web in the long run. Apple tends to take a little longer and suffer a little short-term pain to get it right in the long run. [1] https://daringfireba…
Apple has absolutely kneecapped web technologies. Mobile Safari has simple, egregious bugs that have been open for years. We're talking about things like being able to crash the browser with CSS or file selection, etc. It's impossible to make the case that Apple is just rejecting features for the sake of the user. The next question is why, and you'll need some creativity to come up with any other answer than pointing…
Any input that can crash the browser is a potential security vulnerability. Can you point me to an example of an inpatched crash in Safari that has been "open for years"?
Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
#30SO 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 element on Mobile Safari a few years ago without having to wait for the entirety of WebRTC to be vetted. :P
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And now, for my own unrelated Web API peeve:
Beyond service workers and all that jazz, I'm a little bummed out that the Pointer Events API isn't even listed on the Webkit Feature Status page: https://webkit.org/status/
It just seems like such a pleasant unification of all of the input-type APIs (mouse, touch, pen, hypothetical future peripherals...)
At least touch events have a "force" property with Apple Pencil input in the meantime. No tilt though.
Maybe next year :/