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.
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.
That's why site-based VPNing is considered the gold standard. Instead of using a VPN client on a PC, you use a network appliance, that way the PC never has a concept of what your "true" IP is. Thus cannot leak it.
Some people have been toying with doing the same but using Virtual Machines. The VM wouldn't have a concept of what the true IP is and since everything goes through the virtual router it acts like a site-to-site VPN connection hiding your true address.
Which is great on a desktop or a home office situation. That's what I have. But for mobile situation where it's just your phone and the telco, that is not an option (unless you're in the habit of carrying a suitcase with your appliance).
The problem with this is that the VAST majority of endpoint appliances don't support OpenVPN. You're limited to PPTP, L2TP, or IPSec with pretty much every single vendor.
The important issue is that some WebRTC capable browsers can leak your internal address to a random page you are visiting even if you are not using WebRTC. If you are actually using WebRTC then you probably don't care if they know what your internal IP address is. ... that is of course if you ever care...
Reminder: WebRTC data channels can silently leak your internal and (if behind a VPN) real IP address.
I have been writing an MMO server, and I would be glad to use WebRTC datachannels, but only for client-server communications. I am far more interested in UDP-like semantics than peer to peer.
>This demo secretly makes requests to STUN servers that can log your request. These requests do not show up in developer consoles and cannot be blocked by browser plugins (AdBlock, Ghostery, etc.).
That's a bit of an overstatement. Running NoScript. No scripts, no WebRTC.
Well, imagine you're in a controlled environment (eg, China) and having your non-vpn IP leaked could compromise your identity. Having an easy way for a site to reveal you is therefore a security issue.
And I'm fairly sure my Sys Admin won't want random websites knowing my internal IP address.
Network shares etc. would likely be somewhere on the same range and they could launch subsequent attacks to try to sniff confidential documents and resources.
This is huge for many of us working with WebRTC for video (or audio), because the only way for Safari users to have the same experience as other browsers was through a plugin.
By closing this gap, you can have the same experience for 99% of desktop users. iOS will stil require a native app (I really, really, really hope they will implement it there next).
The use case I'm working with is embedding video as part of live support for retail, and we're looking at doing more than that.
Why does it matter: my personal belief is that WebRTC might be an important enabling technology for VR or AR-based shopping experiences (We actually applied to Y Combinator with that, but got rejected).
Sweet. Any documentation to point at? I am trying to stream the microphone of my iPhone through Safari and could not find any compelling way to do so, with plugins or anything else.
WebRTC can be used with TCP or UDP, so that's really beside the point. I'm waiting for WebRTC on Safari, but I use TCP exclusively for a number of reasons. (I transmit the data myself, and don't use PeerConnections).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is excellent news! Now we have all the major browser vendors committing to include WebRTC. I look forward to seeing this get implemented and deployed.
They can't. It uses a bunch of technologies they licensed, but which they have no rights to open up for others to implement. Apparently when he made the announcement Steve Jobs thought that it was all based on open technology, but the licensing turned out to be a can of worms.
That sounds really presumptuous, since chances are high @amelius knows about the alternatives, and since it's still a great point even with the alternatives; if I want to use Linux, great, good for me, but I'm not going to walk around trying to convince all my friends & family that are happily using FaceTime to switch to something that requires an installation, is harder to use, and is not integrated with the calling features of their devices.
Anyone with more experience in this area know if WebRTC would be useful for building a distributed hash table? It looks like it isn't just for audio and video data.
Readit News
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
Dead Comment
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.
https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc-ips/
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959893
Some people have been toying with doing the same but using Virtual Machines. The VM wouldn't have a concept of what the true IP is and since everything goes through the virtual router it acts like a site-to-site VPN connection hiding your true address.
Here's a guide that is recent and I can confirm that it works:
http://www.malwaretech.com/2015/08/creating-ultimate-tor-vir...
I have been writing an MMO server, and I would be glad to use WebRTC datachannels, but only for client-server communications. I am far more interested in UDP-like semantics than peer to peer.
That's a bit of an overstatement. Running NoScript. No scripts, no WebRTC.
And I'm fairly sure my Sys Admin won't want random websites knowing my internal IP address.
Network shares etc. would likely be somewhere on the same range and they could launch subsequent attacks to try to sniff confidential documents and resources.
By closing this gap, you can have the same experience for 99% of desktop users. iOS will stil require a native app (I really, really, really hope they will implement it there next).
The use case I'm working with is embedding video as part of live support for retail, and we're looking at doing more than that.
Why does it matter: my personal belief is that WebRTC might be an important enabling technology for VR or AR-based shopping experiences (We actually applied to Y Combinator with that, but got rejected).
The plugin I mentioned is http://skylink.io/plugin/ , but it only works for Safari on Mac.
You'll need to build a native app
https://webrtc.org/native-code/ios/
or try Bowser
http://www.openwebrtc.org/bowser/
(I haven't yet).
Pretty certain they're still a couple of years from mainstream adoption though, but I can certainly envision lots of business uses.
edit it looks like I misread the OP's comment, but it would have been more useful to comment than to downvote.
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.
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.
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.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pate...
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/04/apple-ordered-to-pay-625m-t...
Until video chat works without plugins I'm using the standalone apps.
I know chrome bundles the hangouts plugin. I wish it didn't and worked without plugins.
In additino, Skype is not updated in Linux since ages
https://github.com/feross/webtorrent
https://github.com/feross/bittorrent-dht
https://bitbucket.org/vardump/webrtc-kademlia
etc...