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Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

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Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#91

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 a total pain in the arse in practice - maybe I've just had a bad experience, but it seems to be a ludicrously over complicated solution to the problem, and still ends up unreliable. I don't think that implementation of it is anywhere near as easy as you think.

Most of the complexity in the WebRTC ecosystem (aside from things that are already done for you) is in the server space. You need STUN/TURN, you need to scale it, you have no idea how exactly to achieve that without spending infinite money. If your clients don't support your codecs, or you're proxying to SIP land (where you often won't have common codecs aside from A-law PCM), then you have to figure out a way not to blow your budget (both money and latency) on transcoding.

That said, if you don't have the client in your browser, nobody gets to even try.

You may think that WebRTC is a pain, but try implementing video chat with getUserMedia and WebSockets, or a custom plugin, and get back to me on how much of a pain WebRTC is.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#92
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/

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?

Most on this page work: https://webrtc.github.io/samples/

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#93

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.

Just have an iframe on the web torrent client page so you can reddit to pass the time!

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#94
post #84
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/

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.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#95
post #88
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did end up using libwebrtc but we had to strip a lot of the dependencies and also update it use system services instead where appropriate.

That means you're aiming for WebRTC 1.0, not for ORTC, right?

For now, yes. Our main goal in the short term is interop, since we are a little late to this party.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#96
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Service workers were designed to only work during events which you opted into. Either because you loaded the site which is now making requests, or because you OPTED IN to receive notifications. Think about it this way... why do you have to download an entire app just to use a site? Don't like the notifications? Turn the off.

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?

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#97
post #87

ive dreamt of this for years!!! so excited. quick question: i noticed that the camera isnt available on iOS 11 if you put a web-app capable page on to your homescreen. when you open the page in full screen, mediaDevices is undefined. is that just an iOS beta bug?

Sounds like a bug to me. You should file it at http://bugreport.apple.com.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#98
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shame it didn't make the current version, but great to hear it will be available in a later one.

To be clear, no promises. But we're definitely considering it and it seems like useful functionality.

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#99
post #97
post #87

ive dreamt of this for years!!! so excited. quick question: i noticed that the camera isnt available on iOS 11 if you put a web-app capable page on to your homescreen. when you open the page in full screen, mediaDevices is undefined. is that just an iOS beta bug?

Sounds like a bug to me. You should file it at http://bugreport.apple.com .

will do!

Re: Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11

#100
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…

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.

Just like with all of the other web standards, I'm pretty sure the WebRTC code is in the publicly available repo.

Obviously Apple isn't afraid to collaborate with other entities--Igalia did the CSS Grid implementation that ships in Safari and WebKit.

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