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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

#41
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget energy efficiency. That's a huge priority for Apple and explains a lot of delays. Safari is way more energy efficient than Chrome.[1] [1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/05/safari_vs_chrome_on_the_m...

This is completely unrelated. This is a feature which their platform completely lacks, if they added this feature it would not have an effect on the energy efficiency of code which does not use it.

In a sense you're right. But we also want to make sure WebRTC websites don't blow out your battery, and we went to some effort to make sure it uses efficient video encoding/decoding paths. That said, this was not a majority of the effort.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#42
post #39

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.

Is there any chance for Screen(or window or tab) Sharing to make it in?

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#44
post #28

WebRTC 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/

Does it support VP8 as required by RFC 7742 "WebRTC Video Processing and Codec Requirements"?

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#45
post #44
post #28

WebRTC 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/

Does it support VP8 as required by RFC 7742 "WebRTC Video Processing and Codec Requirements"?

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

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#46
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.

Is there any chance for Screen(or window or tab) Sharing to make it in?

Not in High Sierra / iOS 11 but we're aware of this and considering it for a future version.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely unrelated. This is a feature which their platform completely lacks, if they added this feature it would not have an effect on the energy efficiency of code which does not use it.

In a sense you're right. But we also want to make sure WebRTC websites don't blow out your battery, and we went to some effort to make sure it uses efficient video encoding/decoding paths. That said, this was not a majority of the effort.

Besides battery life, Chrome on the Mac prevents sleep indefinitely sometimes. If you check with pmset -g assertions, you'll see Chrome saying "WebRTC has active PeerConnections".

No thanks Google, you shouldn't get to decide when my PC goes into sleep mode.

I really hope Safari is better than that...

Edit: just as i'm typing this, Chrome has:

pid 19325(Google Chrome): [0x001ccbbb00018b19] 01:55:40 NoIdleSleepAssertion named: "WebRTC has active PeerConnections"

2 hours for... what? I have no idea which page is guilty.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#49
post #23

Apple 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, under…

I'm not related to the Safari or any other browser team in any way. But I totally believe that it's a giant amount of work. I personally researched the effort which would just be required to implement webrtc data channels in a server application and have been rapidly been put off after seeing that I would need to have support STUN, TURN, ICE, DTLS and DTCP. With each of them having giant specs. The media formats and all the JS APIs would add on top of that.

I guess it's also not an easy decision to "just include libwebrtc" into ones own application, since that's a giant dependency which pulls in lots of chromium code.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#50

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?

Try running https://test.webrtc.org/

Unfortunately this test page uses legacy APIs that have been removed from the spec years ago, so it can't give an accurate assessment.
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