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Chrome engineer, working on WebRTC here. Here's my personal opinion: Safari's WebRTC implementation is not outdated, it's just bindings over the same library t
by Orphis 5y ago
Chrome engineer, working on WebRTC here. Here's my personal opinion:
Safari's WebRTC implementation is not outdated, it's just bindings over the same library that is used and developed by Chrome. At worst, it's lagging a bit by a few months.
What the post highlights is how some features are not available, like some codecs on some platforms. That's unlikely to be a decision from the browser engineers but probably closer to the lawyers who need time to approve a codec or other engineers working on HW acceleration.
Another point is also that while WebRTC was available in most contexts, getUserMedia wasn't, and that's the API used to access cameras and microphones. Without it, WebRTC functionality loses its appeal. I believe that's now fixed and webviews can now use it.
While I don't necessarily approve of those decisions for the users' sake, I still respect their choice to be able to make decisions on their own product and chose when a feature is deemed safe for release in potentially dangerous contexts. I don't know their security model, but from talking with the engineers on many occasions, they are not unreasonable people.
And while Safari is lacking some new WebRTC related APIs released in Chrome, it would be fair to say that they are not all standardized yet at the IETF or W3C level. Other browsers don't necessarily implement them either, and that's fine.