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Mozilla Combines Social API and WebRTC
theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla has put together a demo which combines WebRTC with Firefox's Social API. Over on Mozilla's Future Releases blog, Maire Reavy writes, 'WebRTC is a powerful new tool that enables web app developers to include real-time video calling and data sharing capabilities in their products. While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps. Sometimes when you're chatting with a friend, you just want to click on their name and see and talk with them in real-time. Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos — or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in – simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"
If you were likewise confused by this blurb about clicking on friends' names in the browser, what WebRTC actually is at a technological level, at least, is basically a collection of real-time P2P streaming-media stuff that is currently usually implemented via browser plugins or 3rd-party software. W3C is trying to standardize and expose it via more normal javascript APIs.
The basic functionality will include things like: users opening video or audio streams with each other (which includes NAT-punching, negotiating codecs, etc.) to support Skype-style video chat in the browser; streaming logic to deal with sending/buffering/etc. for P2P streams; support for data connections directly between users, to allow browser-based multiplayer gaming to bypass a central server; and some kind of management of local multimedia resources that I don't fully understand.
The draft standard is here.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Indeed.
For every "FIREFOX IS FAST!!" there's always got to be another design decision to slow it back down with some sort of new bloat.
Look at it this way: this news isn't for the anti social neck beard that doesn't want to mingle, but for the anti social neck beard that may want to implement said functions at his work and get paid
... the documentation on these features exist, and the Social API works for more things than just Facebook. There's literally a whitelist in the browser (about:config, key social.activation.whitelist) which only allows Facebook to use the Social API features. (And if you edit the whitelist yourself and try to use the feature on a different site, it just re-opens the Facebook sidebar because Facebook's siderbar seems to be hardcoded in other places too.)
Phoenix through Firefox1.x were light browsers.
Modern Firefox is so damn bloated that it might be the fattest browser on any system I own.
On my work laptop, only three things kick on the system fan: 1) compiling, 2) opening Eclipse or doing anything in it whatsoever, 3) launching Firefox with one or two tab set to auto-open.
Which is why I use Chrome now, and if I couldn't for some reason then I'd run Safari or (*shudder*) Opera.
Firefox is a browser of last resort, like IE. It's a clunky beast like Netscape/Mozilla used to be. It's as if they've forgotten why they created Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in the first place...
You're going to get modded down (probably rightly so) for your flame presentation, but your content is true: the thing that most slashdotters don't appreciate is that 99.99% of the world does not use computers to "hack out perl scripts and learn that exciting new regular expression syntax". They use computing to socialize. It's an extension of their social circle, which explains why things like Facebook are so wildly popular. But it's certainly true that a certain segment of the population doesn't get this, and is offended that "their" technology is being used by the unwashed masses for things as mundane as socialization.
Humans are social creatures and social computing is only going to become more and more important to daily life as time goes on. I think it's much like... gearheads being annoyed that anyone can buy a car now and run it for 200,000 miles without having to know how to replace head gaskets and so on. It took "their" hobby and made it far less relevant, so that reliable cars are accessible to anyone. Since it's less exclusive now, they have suffered a loss of their club. The same thing has happened to the oldschool command-line computer hackers. They're seeing the world at large adopt technology, and use it in their normal day to day lives, and they don't like it one bit.
I don't think techies object to using technology for socialization. That's something techies themselves have been doing for decades! Even years ago before so many "normal" people were on the internet, social technologies like IRC, Usenet, and mailing lists were extremely popular.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The web browser is the GUI of the cloud. The operating system is irrelevant as Firefox on OS X, Linux or Windows will provide exactly the same user experience reducing the OS to an api.
I wonder if these standards will result in an explosion of new web browsers or of specialized applications, each claiming to be better/faster than the other.
Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos â" or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in â" simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"
In other words, what iChat has allowed me to do for half a decade? I've used it to run contract negotiations with the contract document shared via iChat to all parties, for example.
So what exactly is new here?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Is that the IETF WebRTC draft mandates the Opus audio codec for all clients..
http://www.opus-codec.org/
From:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-audio-01
3. Codec Requirements
To ensure a baseline level of interoperability between WebRTC
clients, a minimum set of required codecs are specified below. While
this section specifies the codecs that will be mandated for all
WebRTC client implementations, it leaves the question of supporting
additional codecs to the will of the implementer.
WebRTC clients are REQUIRED to implement the following audio codecs.
o Opus [RFC6716], with any ptime value up to 120 ms