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Legitimate question, outside of WebRTC, plugins which are icky, and Flash which I hope dies a fiery death in a chlorine triflouride fire, is there any other opt

by 50CNT 11y ago

Legitimate question, outside of WebRTC, plugins which are icky, and Flash which I hope dies a fiery death in a chlorine triflouride fire, is there any other options for doing browser based audio and video chat? It'd be cool to know of alternatives. Rhetorical follow up, if it's the only wagon in town that doesn't either require you to maintain several different plugins for several different browsers (plus having users install them), or doesn't run on my OS (Thanks Adoma/be), how is it a bandwagon instead of a future standard? That makes about as much sense to me as talking about the CSS bandwagon, or the http bandwagon, or the TCIP bandwagon.

peyton 11y ago
> how is it a bandwagon instead of a future standard Not saying I subscribe, but there's a view that a web browser should be for browsing web documents, not peer to peer video. There are limited development resources, and some feel those should be allocated to making web browsing faster and more power-efficient, rather than making a new networking platform and dealing with all the performance, compatibility, and security work that entails.
- 50CNT 11y ago
  There's the cynic in me who thinks that the year of the linux desktop is when everything runs in the browser anyway. After switching away from windows, proper web clients have been a godsend for those programs that think: "linux port, lol nope". Considering I'm working in China right now and there's a sizeable population still running XP, that's happened quite a bit. Anything that makes that easier to do is a win in my book. If I wanted to spartanly text browse the web, I'll point emacs at an URL. Not gonna waste cycles on all those silly stylesheets.
extra88 11y ago
Safari and IE don't support the Stream API either, that's the more critical piece you need to get pluginless video into the browser. Without WebRTC, you could still do server-mediated audio/video chat but access to the webcam and microphone hardware is a prerequisite.

by 50CNT 11y ago

peyton 11y ago

> how is it a bandwagon instead of a future standard Not saying I subscribe, but there's a view that a web browser should be for browsing web documents, not peer to peer video. There are limited development resources, and some feel those should be allocated to making web browsing faster and more power-efficient, rather than making a new networking platform and dealing with all the performance, compatibility, and security work that entails.

50CNT 11y ago
There's the cynic in me who thinks that the year of the linux desktop is when everything runs in the browser anyway. After switching away from windows, proper web clients have been a godsend for those programs that think: "linux port, lol nope". Considering I'm working in China right now and there's a sizeable population still running XP, that's happened quite a bit. Anything that makes that easier to do is a win in my book. If I wanted to spartanly text browse the web, I'll point emacs at an URL. Not gonna waste cycles on all those silly stylesheets.

extra88 11y ago

Safari and IE don't support the Stream API either, that's the more critical piece you need to get pluginless video into the browser. Without WebRTC, you could still do server-mediated audio/video chat but access to the webcam and microphone hardware is a prerequisite.