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Comment by numerlo | Hacker News Reader

It's in development in WebKit, it has been for a long while (the author just noticed it now and went with the full-of-assumptions article for the ad money) and it means absolutely nothing. Yeah, it will probably (and hopefully) one day end up in Safari. On the other hand, it also wouldn't be the first time WebKit had a feature that Apple chose to disable, especially on iOS Safari.

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This is correct. This is not new, it's been "in development" for months and it's been reflected in Webkit's public commit history for even longer.

Tweet from February from Google's WebRTC Project Director citing the change. [1]

It's definitely coming to desktop Safari. Doubtful we'll see it on mobile Safari, but fortunately on iOS, WebRTC support is already possible in-app.

[1] https://twitter.com/juberti/status/701482981647474688

What makes it doubtful that it'll make it to mobile Safari? (Not questioning it, just wondering.)

Apple has traditionally locked down mobile Safari to a far greater extent than desktop Safari when it feels there is a compelling UX or security reason. For instance non-fullscreen video is not possible on mobile Safari, but easily doable in desktop Safari and native applications. I'd expect this to be similar at least initially - it could still come to mobile Safari some day, I just think the initial release will be for desktop.

While I understand there's an argument to make on standards for them supporting it in mobile Safari, a mobile web browser is really a lousy place to build software like this. Customers are going to be much happier using a native application. We could certainly get into a discussion on what Google is doing with the mobile web on Android that would make mobile Safari support more important, but Apple is not going to be moving away from installable Swift/Objective-C based applications for the foreseeable future, and that's going to remain the best implementation route for a while.

> For instance non-fullscreen video is not possible on mobile Safari, but easily doable in desktop Safari and native applications.

It's possible on iPad, but not iPhone.

Yes, my bad, you're right. Do so little iPad dev that I forgot about that :)

Very interesting. Still trying to find a way to stream audio back from the Safari browser to a local server. No luck so far, ang thoughts perhaps?

There are really only two viable options, both plugins. The first is Flash, but the problem here is that you need a Flash media server on the back end. Twilio Client release branch 1.2 implements this. The second is the Temasys plugin which allows you to run WebRTC as you normally would in Chrome. Neither are good options to be honest.

Moreover, since it wasn't mentioned when Safari announced their version of Canary a couple weeks ago, I doubt we're getting WebRTC this year.

I wouldn't assume that. Since Safari Technology Preview is going to be updated every 2 weeks, as soon as WebRTC is stable enough, it'll be included in the Preview.

I'd be surprised if WebRTC isn't on the list to be a major feature of Safari in this fall's OS X 10.12 release, which will be previewed at June's WWDC.

The last time this was on HN, we talked about how they had just one position they were hiring to do the work.

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