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> Apple took years to finally add WebRTC support to Safari, far enough behind Chrome and Firefox "Far behind Chrome" should never be used in a sentence. Ever.

> Apple took years to finally add WebRTC support to Safari, far enough behind Chrome and Firefox "Far behind Chrome" should never be used in a sentence. Ever. Chrome releases up to 40 new "standard" features once every two months, many of them are just internal Chrome APIs with a "standards spec" in the form of a draft. Specifically for WebRTC. It was shipped in Chrome 23, in May 2012. Guess what? Here's the timeline: - In 2010 Google buys a company called Global IP solutions with some proprietary tech - In May 2011 it opensources this tech - In October 2011 publishes the draft spec - Just 7 months later ships it enabled by default in Chrome Do you know when the final stable spec arrived? In May 2018, full seven years later after Chrome enabled it by default. That's why Safari had it implemented since September 2017, because the spec was finally in a proper shape. No idea why Firefox rushed headlong into it though.

rektide 5y ago
how do specs get to 1.0? browsers heed the call to implement & do so. they work through what it takes to improve & finalize the spec. your timeline, to me, indicates less that the spec was rushed & bad, and more that it took apple 5 years to get off their hostage taking kick & finally face the music & do what should have been done years ago, which is implement. once apple did start to implent, 1.0 came soon after: because that is how specs work. companies implement, they find what's not right, & they improve, then make a 1.0. I would definitely be interested in a changes over time review of webrtc. my feeling is that the core ideas & protocols were largely stable, but needed tweaking & elaboration, needed conformance suites elaborated. I could be wrong. this is in contrast to something like spdy, which evolved seemingly a good number of times in major ways, before ultimately getting parlayed into quic+http3.

rektide 5y ago

how do specs get to 1.0? browsers heed the call to implement & do so. they work through what it takes to improve & finalize the spec. your timeline, to me, indicates less that the spec was rushed & bad, and more that it took apple 5 years to get off their hostage taking kick & finally face the music & do what should have been done years ago, which is implement. once apple did start to implent, 1.0 came soon after: because that is how specs work. companies implement, they find what's not right, & they improve, then make a 1.0. I would definitely be interested in a changes over time review of webrtc. my feeling is that the core ideas & protocols were largely stable, but needed tweaking & elaboration, needed conformance suites elaborated. I could be wrong. this is in contrast to something like spdy, which evolved seemingly a good number of times in major ways, before ultimately getting parlayed into quic+http3.