One of the biggest questions in the WebRTC and webification community has been the lack of support of both Microsoft and Apple for the emerging standards. While popular browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera have all committed and released WebRTC support, Internet Explorer and Safari have not. For most users this is not a real issue, as they can just download one of the compliant browsers, often finding that the overall experience is better anyway. However, some users are only comfortable with their native OS based browser, and some organizations do not allow their employees to use an alternative for security or control reasons.
Now Priologic has released a new alternative for Internet Explorer (IE), an Open Source plugin that enables IE users to have WebRTC functionality. This new IE plugin will be released under a BSD2 license to enable any WebRTC team to use it and improve it either within their commercial products or as open source. Hopefully this is a stop-gap until the committed Microsoft support of the standards is delivered. Priologic's CEO, Doug Pelton, says that other teams have done great work enabling WebRTC in the IE browser, and have done it for free, but to date none have been open sourced. "EasyRTC is open source so it makes sense that we have an open source WebRTC plugin for IE," says Pelton. "Of course, the best-case scenario would be if Microsoft put full WebRTC support into Internet Explorer."
One key advantage of the Priologic approach of open sourcing the plugin is that it can be downloaded to IE browsers from servers located behind a firewall, and can be certified as reliable by security organizations. This enables groups that use IE for security reasons and ban downloads from the internet to now deploy full WebRTC capability to their IE users. In addition, the wide range of new applications and services that are emerging with WebRTC can offer the plugin on their sites, or even load it automatically to their WebRTC deployments.
Priologic will be demonstrating the open source plug-in and discussing it at the upcoming WebRTC World Conference and Expo in Atlanta next week (June 17-19). This is a great opportunity to understand how this capability, combined with other new capabilities and tools, are accelerating the WebRTC market forward.
In addition to the IE plug-in, the Priologic team has been busy and will be showing a number of technology innovations in Atlanta. They will be showing theirEasyRTC iOS Native Client, EasyRTC Android Native Client, EasyRTC C++ native client and a new EasyRTC 3rd party adapter. The EasyRTC 3rd Party Adaptor is designed to allow Media Servers and WebRTC Gateways access to and from EasyRTC. The Adaptor makes many of the features that are difficult to build in pure WebRTC more accessible, such as recording, archiving and playback of sessions and access to the broader public telephone.
Edited by
Allison Sansone
