Comments on: Do we Care about ORTC on Edge?

By: Sojharo

Sojharo — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 08:47:33 +0000

Two more questions. I am asking here as this is the most relevant post and it also made me read it twice.

When Chrome will be available without Plugin like Edge?

Also when do you think WenRTC/ORTC support in Edge will be completed?

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 18:39:45 +0000

In reply to Philipp Hancke. Fippo, this is where we diverge in our opinion. We can probably hack each other here all day long but I believe it is not worthwhile to do so :-)

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 18:38:50 +0000

In reply to Philipp Hancke.

Not sure how I “missed” that tiny fact of existing interoperability – thanks for pointing that out.

By: Philipp Hancke

Philipp Hancke — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 14:17:24 +0000

– Getting “Hello World” to work on ORTC is harder than with WebRTC
I disagree. However, it does not matter, use a library. It’s not like web developers deal with the DOM directly all day, we have jQuery for that. Oh wait, that sounds familiar… see http://fluent-ortc.surge.sh/#/

– “Voice using Opus is a win”. Well, not just yet, the codec preference is SILK, G722, Opus, G.711 so for interop, g.722 will be used currently. See above re interop 🙂

– “It makes ORTC APIs less stable than those of WebRTC, and we’ve seen how people complained about the frequent changes in the browser APIs of WebRTC”. I have not yet complained about all the last-minute changes to the PeerConnection API. But I think the “hybrid model” offered currently is the wrong way. I must have missed developers asking for those changes, this is more design-by-committee.

– “This means that the next version of Edge will have different APIs for ORTC than the current one”. Read my webrtchacks post again. There are already differences between the spec and the Edge implementation. However, that doesn’t matter. I don’t see people complaining about all the differences between the spec and Chrome either.

By: Philipp Hancke

Philipp Hancke — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 13:47:56 +0000

uhm… audio-interop between Chrome, Edge and Firefox is already here… https://simplewebrtc.com/audio

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 11:52:35 +0000

In reply to Sojharo.

There are already flavors of adapter.js that work with MS Edge for the basic use cases. They don’t offer interoperability – just the ability to use the same code across browsers.

As for Temasys, I can’t answer for them, but as far as I know, there’s no plugin infrastructure available for Microsoft Edge at all, so even those who wish to do that aren’t able to anyway.

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 11:48:50 +0000

In reply to Nick Galea.

Nick,

You raise an important point – the fact that the need for a specific browser or OS depends a lot on the use case – where your customers are located and who they are.

Edge support can be important to some, but irrelevant to others.

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 11:47:37 +0000

In reply to Lennie.

That’s why it’s yes and no Lennie.

We care about this being something that is *happenning* but does it changes what we need to do today as developers? For most of us – not just yet.

By: Sojharo

Sojharo — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 11:44:51 +0000

Aren’t people like TemaSys making plugins for MS Edge too? Will we be able to ask our users to install TemaSys plugin if they really want to use MS Edge? Main reason for us to use ORTC alongwith WebRTC will be just to save users from plugins. This is what WebRTC aims towards. Looks like there is no turning back now. If Microsoft has started with ORTC then we might not be able to see WebRTC support ever. I hope there will come something like adapter.js so that we won’t have to write two set of codes; one for MS Edge browser and one for other browsers which support WebRTC.

By: Nick Galea

Nick Galea — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 10:25:44 +0000

Interesting post! Well from the stats of our own service, we have started to care less and less about IE or Edge. 95% of the people that use our Webmeeting service have chrome or firefox. Yes, some users try with IE first time but we can see they come back in seconds with chrome. So they have Chrome installed and ready to switch to it. I think we have waited so long, might as well push on and see Microsoft wipe it self out of the browser market. Microsoft’s Skype Agenda is just to big to expect an open standard answer from Microsoft. I say within 2 years Microsofts market share in browser will be less than 10%.