WebRTC 1.0: Real-Time Communication Between Browsers Draft Published

w3.org

45 points·vr000m··5 comments

To me, the biggest question left is if/when the default mobile browsers will support this.

I feel like Apple and Google both have too much desire to push people towards facetime and hangouts to ever have default support for webRTC that works reliably.

When it comes to WebRTC, Chrome on Android works just like Chrome on Windows/Linux/Mac. Safari is the browser I'm worried about. Even IE implements a couple of WebRTC APIs, though they're not very useful by themselves. Safari has absolutely no support for any WebRTC stuff.[1]

1. http://iswebrtcreadyyet.com/

It is true that both Firefox and chrome browser on the android support this. Further there is openwebrtc, which is gstreamer based and compiles for iOS and Android.

But... the algorithms/configurations are not entirely sufficient for the mobile use-case even though they support the WebRTC API. Mainly because

1. compute resources on laptop differs from tablets/smartphones: i.e., being able to efficiently encode and decode video (720p+) in real-time.

2. variability in network capacity, and latency on mobile devices mainly due to 3G/LTE, but also related to quirky WLAN chipsets. (mainly a congestion control problem)

This all boils down to having a different configuration to the media engine in the browser. I think there is still a lot of components needed (FEC, congestion control, etc.) would make WebRTC awesome on the mobile.

*disclaimer: callstats.io does webrtc analytics, and insofar we consistently observe variability in media quality irrespective of WLAN or 3G.

Chrome works great, for the phones that it's the default pre-installed browser for.

Outside of the Nexus devices, many still ship with android browser as the default, Samsung galaxy's are a particularly baffling offender in this area.

About time!

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