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Comment by windlep | Hacker News Reader

WebRTC was "generically" added to Firefox in 2013, ie: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/06/webrtc-comes-to-firefox/

Of course, with it being added generically, tons of websites immediately started using it..... nope. Ok, well, lets go back before that blog post... https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-c...

Ah ha, isn't that neat. WebRTC in Firefox and Chrome and a demo of it! Wait, still pretty much zero use in the wild of WebRTC...

This is why Google/Mozilla are adding features utilizing these new specs to the browser, because they're cool and no one else is. In the case of WebRTC, it's for a good reason, its a PITA to run TURN/STUN servers to ensure that people behind firewalls can establish a connection.

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Working for a major player in the WebRTC space certainly gives me a bias, but "noone cares" is pretty far from the truth. There are millions of WebRTC users already, hell, we might even be approaching the billion now if you count Snapchat and Hangouts as WebRTC services. (Yes, Snapchat uses WebRTC for their video chat features)

Check out: - https://appear.in/ - https://talky.io/ - https://screenhero.com/ - https://github.com/feross/webtorrent - https://peercdn.com/ - https://sharefest.me/ - ...and lots, lots more. Sorry to the ones I forgot to mention/don't know about.

For some pure WebRTC experiences. http://simplewebrtc.com/ if you want to build something yourself.

The thing is, you don't know that the service you're using uses WebRTC, quite frankly because the technology doesn't matter, the user experience does. Also, the sheer fact that we seem to have standardised a very good (and very secure) way of doing peer to peer transfers, and that's getting implemented in browsers, with client libraries for iOS and Android is HUGE.

I've had good experiences with talky and I know hangouts uses webrtc.

I think the biggest problem is the lack of accounts, chat, logging, and persistence in webrtc. Thats what keeps it from being a p2p communication protocol in general whereas now its just a toy for video calls.

I mean, when you cannot share links during your video call easily, somethings wrong.

Agreed, I believe Hello will be added text chat along with the video calls using WebRTC data channels in an upcoming release.

Hangouts still uses the Google Talk plugin, as far as I'm aware.

It may be "something wrong" for you, but for me it's exactly what I need to let my mother video chat with her grandson after Skype became useless (breaks more often with every passing release, it seems; we've given up on it).

Sharing links, accounts, chat, logging and persistence are all irrelevant for my use, and they in any case don't belong in webrtc - webrtc is a component for people to use to build services like what you appear to want.

> I think the biggest problem is the lack of accounts, chat, logging, and persistence in webrtc.

WebRTC is not a messaging technology, it is a raw data communication technology. It is just here to move bytes from one client to another. The features you are talking about are managed by said clients, meaning that it has to be handled by Firefox/Chrome itself.

Facebook uses WebRTC for calls on the release versions of Firefox. That probably counts for something.

Cool, I didn't know that. It definitely counts for something.

As for STUN/TURN being painful, Twilio recently released a STUN/TURN service platform: https://www.twilio.com/stun-turn. At least makes things somewhat simpler.

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