The development of WebRTC has revolved around the browser, and specifically Chrome, Firefox and Opera. At the WebRTC Conference & Expo, we were able to hear a keynote presentation from Andreas Gal, vice president of Mobile Engineering, Mozilla, to get a firsthand look at the company’s involvement with the growth of real-time communications.
“The reason we can keep up and make a competitive product like Firefox is that we’re more than just engineers – we have a large community of developers. Being an open-source project is very central to who we are,” he said.
The Web today is very different from just a few years ago. There are standards-based Web pages, and HTML5 and other open standards driving the development of different browsers.
Gal explains how browsers are competing for users every single day, which is great for users, since they’re getting high-speed, quality browsers. He also walked through the evolution of the desktop and mobile phone. The smartphone landscape is completely siloed – if you are using an Apple device, you’re using an Apple platform, Apple services and Apple ads. It’s completely different from the desktop. Same goes for Android and Microsoft.
So where does this leave Firefox?
Mozilla broke down the stranglehold of proprietary desktop technology through innovation and open standards. It aims to do the same with mobile devices.
“We need to figure out what’s missing in mobile technology, and fill in that gap,” Gal said. The missing piece, he says, is telephony.
The most compelling part of WebRTC is enabling everyone to communicate with everyone. It can bridge the different devices together, bringing WebRTC to mobile not just for the Web, but for telephony as well.
Gal demonstrated the use of WebRTC data channels for gaming and WebRTC on a mobile device, and also brought up the discussion of codecs. VP8 and H.264 have been a hot discussion this week at the event, especially off the heels of the indecisive IETF meeting recently. He says as an open-source company, it’s rooting for VP8, but the codec split is a bigger challenge on desktop, since not all hardware has encoders and decoders for H.264 and most mobile hardware does.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
