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It does not seem all that impossible now, now that Skype has been integrated into Facebook. From what I hear, they have stripped down most of skype and provided javascript apis for the facebook web app.

Before that, I always used to wonder how could one take all of signaling protocol (like the monstrous SIP, XMPP etc) and media (RTP) and cram all of it into the browser.

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Pretty different boats. Facebook/Skype requires a separate binary installation. Google Talk/Hangouts/etc currently requires Google's "Voice and Video plugin", which at least just integrates into Chrome rather than installing separate executables, but for the sake of this discussion, they're functionally equivalent.

Packing the necessary tools into a toolkit that a browser can utilize first-rate is, as you pointed out, a different challenge. Not sure what SIP or XMPP are "monstrous" though.

> Not sure what SIP or XMPP are "monstrous" though.

Both SIP and XMPP are way beyond "monstrous", hundreds of specs, and most implementations are not really interoperable beyond the very basics. (XMPP is still barely at the level irc reached almost 20 years ago, and that is after ten years of and ever growing and changing list of specs, which is actually the problem).

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