Hacker News Reader

Comment by apitman | Hacker News Reader

Onto the list[0] it goes.

I always have the feeling that WebRTC had so much more potential than has been realized. I wonder how things might have turned out differently if it had better server and browser support ~5 years ago. I remember trying to use it for a game at the time and had trouble finding a good server implementation, and had all sorts of issues with Safari.

In the near future I'm not sure there will be much reason to use it over WebTransport, unless you're doing p2p. I actually prefer WebRTC's data channel API, since you can get separate datagram streams, whereas with WebTransport you have to multiplex them yourself[1].

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9221#name-multiplex...

View on HN

> had all sorts of issues with Safari

Tangential rant, but this appears to be intentional. As far as I can tell, Apple is intentionally lagging behind supporting various web technologies, to make the web as unattractive as possible (within their ecosystem), and by extension, to make native app development as attractive as possible, so they can take a cut of the profits.

If their reasoning is correct, then they would actually lose money by not investing into their own browser engine, which is somewhat amusing, because the worse of a job they do, the more money they make.

(I find this idea particularly painful in the context of "we at Apple love web technology so much, we're going to use our love of web as our main excuse for killing Flash"...)

Not a great strategy. Can't compare apples and oranges. Long term weakening their web offering will only strengthen their competition and likely have compounding effects against their app store. Maybe it's a short term thing for them. Seems a better way would be to embrace web and create the synergies with their existing offerings that boost both...but, I think this highlights the issue

It's not so much about a binary choice between app store vs web. I think it's more just, the web is not very "Apple". It's too open, wild. If they go "all in" on the web, they'd be afraid to risk "losing themselves" or fucking something up and creating a backlash.

This strategy of trying to snuff out web apps by locking all iOS users into a decade out of date fork of Chrome that only gets a trickle of new features, and those features consistently have added UX friction that exists in no other modern borders is working in North America.

True, it works some. But think of what could be done if they could get beyond their, albeit understandable, web aversion.

Tho I disagree that Safari is so defunkt as you make out. They have a bunch of new features. Check out: https://webkit.org/blog/15243/release-notes-for-safari-techn...

To be fair to them though, they’re the only browser where you can transfer RTCDataChannels to workers and get that off the main thread. All others are still lagging behind there.

Just seems trivially obviously not the case to me, but seems like a popular meme regardless.

https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1brp9jn/i_made_a_si...

https://ios404.com/

Regarding issues with Safari, they recently made a change where in order to get WebRTC data channels, you no longer had to request get user media permissions. This was the case before. It's still the case on Safari Mobile right now. But you can just say, request mic access, establish the connection, and once it's established, you just drop the mic access. In my case, typically about one to two seconds. So there are indeed quirks on Safari.

i've long felt the same. i came to conclusion the browser vendors decided it was kind of a mistake. it enables all sorts of local first and p2p things that cut out the service providers.

hopefully it will get some attention again. i have done a bunch of really interesting experiments with data channels. being able to choose the reliability is nice for sure.

> it enables all sorts of local first and p2p things that cut out the service providers.

And this is another reason why the web will always be a shaky foundation for local first and p2p software.

WebRTC will live on. I think it will continue to grow from grassroots efforts.

WebRTC has P2P and it also doesn't require the user to have any knowledge of Video/Networking. The alternatives to it are more geared at 'video developers'. I don't know which way the future will go.

Around 5 years ago, peer negotiation got massively simplified with new additions to the spec (see Perfect Negotiation). If you’re on a browser released since then, your life will be far easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com