Chrome’s WebRTC roadmap | Hacker News Reader

Chrome’s WebRTC roadmap

blog.chromium.org

27 pointsavsaro10 comments

The single most important feature of Chrome that changed the Internet? The silent update every 6 weeks!

It's too bad Firefox gets a lot of flack for it, though. I think it's because of 2 reasons:

1) Firefox users are used to a certain way of having their favorite browser work

2) Firefox still "promotes" version numbers, and this makes them a good target for jokes about moving so fast from version 11 to version 12, or whatever, while at this point Chrome users don't even care so much about the version anymore

FireFox gets a lot of flack for it because of plugin support. We use GWT for an internal webapp and the developer plugin is not compatible every time they do a release of FireFox (it really is, but packaging makes it not). New machine? Grab off of a mailing list. Tired of daily prompts to upgrade? Hit cancel when it isn't listed as compatible. This happens often enough and is annoying enough that the GWT developer plugin is the only one I use now. Chrome, on the otherhand, really does have seamless upgrades.

I know FireFox has a more robust plugin architecture and half the time is the plugin developers' fault and FireFox has been working on a new plugin system for a while, but it's the same problems FireFox had with upgrades for years, they just happen more frequently, exacerbating the problems.

I assume you mean "extension" everywhere you've written "plugin".

Potentially, I just remember from having fought with this late last week with the GWT Developer one, which was called the "GWT Developer Tools Plugin", and I can't ever remember what Firefox calls a Plugin vs. Extension vs. Add-On.

I can't wait for all the applications that are going to be possible with this technology. I haven't been that excited for a particular browser feature in a long time!

What if I told you the same technology is already available and widely deployed? http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/

So excuse my ignorance, but does the multiple independent streams mean that multi-party chat support is going to be available right away, not just 1 to 1?

They are planning to allow multiple peer connections per page but the current implementation doesn't allow more than one. Trying to create another webkitPeerConnection00 object will throw an error or it will error or be unresponsive when you attempt to use it.

But yes, p2p multi-party chat is very possible with WebRTC. Unfortunately, there's additional overhead as each client has to send it's stream to each other client instead of having a server to multiplex it. It also means the app developer's costs are lower and of course if you want you can still PeerConnect to a server that then acts a multiplexing hub.

I think "multiple independent PeerConnection" will enable, in some way, multi-party chat. And over each PeerConnection you can have multiple streams (e.g. audio/video and data stream for something else).

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