Dear Slack: why is your WebRTC so weak? | Hacker News Reader

Dear Slack: why is your WebRTC so weak?

webrtchacks.com

83 pointseloycoto14 comments

> you need to have a very good excuse to launch something with WebRTC and not support Firefox.

I built audio chat over webRTC for https://precursorapp.com [1]. I built support for both Firefox and Chrome, but I can understand why someone would choose not to support Firefox.

There are lots of annoying little differences between the two implementations. For example, Firefox wouldn't fire a negotiationneeded event after adding a stream [2], so I had to add a special workaround for them. Connection stats was another area where the APIs diverged a lot.

In their defense, sometimes Firefox does a better job of implementing the spec than Chrome does. But since most people develop in Chrome first, it's no surprise that they put off working on a Firefox implementation until they're happy with their implementation in Chrome.

[1] Click on the mic icon at the bottom left of a document to try it out.

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1071643

This is our experience too for Epishow. It's not that we couldn't get it working, it's that we focus on one platform (chrome) then expand outward (web at large, which for now means ff).

Another problem is that Firefox is losing market share badly.

It's at less than 10% for most of the sites I manage, and steadily going down (apparently 14% globally).

Summary: why does Slack support WebRTC in Chrome but not Firefox?

The article doesn't actually answer that, but it does point out some odd choices that make it suboptimal even in Chrome.

Is that why Slack is so laggy in Firefox?

no, that's unrelated. and Slack often chugs badly in Chrome, too.

Well it's been a little over a year or so since i last worked with WebRTC, but portions of it have pretty bad cross browser compatability.

Firefox can talk with firefox fine, chrome with chrome, but the 2 have some issues talking with each other.

Maybe Slack just made a decision to support chrome until the 2 meet in a way that makes them compatible.

I've been working on a webRTC application as a full-time job for 1 and a half year now, and I've never faced cross-browser communication issues. The main problem at the moment is Chrome's implementation of the datachannel, it's terrible … (huge performance issues when having too many open connection, complete browser crash when using unreliable transport (fixed now, but it took almost one year), no support for Blob binary type …) As the article says, doing Chrome-only webRTC in 2015 and 2016 is really a strange decision …

Because it's a beta and not finished yet? God.

Is the backlash against Slash starting? (the Backslash!?)

seen a fair few negative posts of late.

Also why does your chat client take soo long (we're talking 20s+) to start up if you're not in the US.

I think your connection is bad? Europe here, starts in 1-2 seconds.

Tried in 4 countries, Australia included. Granted its better and worse at times it is consistently worse off than using fb (via web browser), Telegram (Mac app) & Whatsapp (web app). They have a better architecture under the hood it looks like.

If the devs tracked startup times, they would know what exactly i'm talking about.

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