Ericsson Research introduced Bowser, the world’s first WebRTC-enabled browser for mobile devices, in December 2012. Since then, we’ve seen the browser in action at various events, including the WebRTC Conference & Expo. This week, however, Ericsson announced plans to discontinue Bowser.
When Bowser was released, it was the world's first mobile WebRTC browser. Since then, the standard has moved on and both Chrome and Firefox on Android have added support for WebRTC.
“It was never our intention to develop a fully-fledged browser, rather we wanted to make it possible for developers to start experimenting with WebRTC on mobiles early on,” Stefan Alund and the Bowser team posted on the Ericsson labs blog. “We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has shown interest in Bowser and the WebRTC standard. You have provided valuable feedback and made this experiment worthwhile. Ericsson Research will still contribute to the definition and development of the WebRTC standard via IETF and W3C, and we do not exclude that we some time in the future will again make a test browser available for download if there is an idea we want tested.”
Discussion on a Google forum from Alund’s post has elicited some disappointment in the move.
From user Dan K:
“This is very disappointing. I literally *just* got my iPad today for the sole purpose of experimenting with this. Seriously.
I can understand not wanting to have to maintain the residual issues of authoring a web browser outside of your WebRTC goals. But I would still highly urge you to restore the project to the app store, even as an experiment. Perhaps label it ‘beta’ or ‘Bowser experiment’ so that there is no mistake that it's trying to compete in the realm of Safari or mobile Chrome. It's still a useful resource.
Whatever you decide, thanks for your hard work and efforts on this. Hopefully Google or Apple will include WebRTC in their respective browsers in the near future to fill the void.”
He also continued in defense of Bowser on iOS:
“Experimentation has been done on both of those browsers, but those are exclusive to Android. Shutting down Bowser effectively removes the only tangible browser-based demonstration currently on iOS.
While it's certainly not Ericsson's job to ensure there's a solution out there for iOS, it provided a big incentive to develop browser-based WebRTC apps simply because it was living proof developers would be able to target iOS through a browser. Because of this, Bowser has a very evangelical quality to the notion of WebRTC. It was a living prototype any developer could show their boss to prove that WebRTC is a viable concept for user media exchange on the web rather than writing native apps using Apple's built in APIs. Again, I understand it's not Ericsson's job to evangelize and foster WebRTC development outside of their own efforts, but their work, especially in the form of this browser, had some pretty big influence.
I imagine Apple will eventually support this in mobile Safari, which in my opinion, would have been the better time to take this experiment down. Shutting it down now promotes a level of uncertainty, and fragments development for those writing WebRTC apps today (i.e. they can write a web app to service desktops and Android, but have to write something fundamentally different for Apple to enable WebRTC and get it past certification)”
Alund didn’t have much to add to the Ericsson statement, saying, “The research team working Bowser is very small and we have not had time to give it enough attention. So instead of continuing to neglect Bowser, we decided to pull the plug.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
