After months of beta testing, Google today quietly released a new version of Chrome that contains WebRTC, a collection of real-time communications protocols that includes everything you need to turn the browser into a high-end communications system.
If other browser vendors follow suit and adopt WebRTC, any device with a web browser will be able to make voice and video calls, as well as easily share data. Unlike the often fuzzy voice quality of today’s mobile phones, browser-based calls will be crystal clear thanks to built-in high-definition audio codecs.
This could lead to a whole new generation of communications applications, as every business process that once involved someone picking up a phone and making a call is transformed into a click. It could also accelerate the move to Internet-based calling and away from the public switched telephone network, as people increasingly connect with each other by exchanging online presence information, rather than by exchanging phone numbers.
A Google employee who works on WebRTC predicted that it would take “one hour” for Facebook to integrate WebRTC into its platform.
“A lot of carriers are rightfully freaked out about this,” said Jose de Castro, the CTO of Voxeo Labs, an incubator linked to Voxeo, which offers carriers an appliance that provides a bridge between WebRTC and traditional phone networks. If Facebook’s billion users can easily connect via voice and video simply by clicking on a link, large numbers might abandon the traditional phone network.
However, De Castro, whom I interviewed a few weeks ago for this IEEE Spectrum article, doesn’t think that will necessarily happen, at least not quickly. “The reality is that the public switched telephone network is still
WebRTC’s fat lady (Photo credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi)
the most reliable way to reach someone for business purposes,” he said. “I think that will be the case for a very long time.”
Facebook users, in particular, have had the ability to connect with each other via Skype since July 2011, and that hasn’t spelled the end of traditional phone calls. Neither has Apple’s FaceTime, another example of a real-time communications technology.
But both Skype and FaceTime only allow communications with other Skype or FaceTime users. WebRTC allows communications between any browser, and it can also be implemented in native apps, making it more flexible and potentially more disruptive.
On Tuesday, TokBox, which seeks to make it easier for developers to incorporate live group video into their apps, announced that its OpenTok API was leveraging WebRTC both in Chrome 23 and iOS. You can expect a lot more announcements like that to come.
Mozilla is planning to ship WebRTC in Firefox 18, though users will need to change their settings to turn it on. Opera already incorporates some WebRTC components and is working to include the entire framework.
Microsoft has participated in standards discussions around WebRTC, but hasn’t said when it will begin to include it in Internet Explorer. Apple showed up to an initial meeting about the WebRTC standard, which is currently being hammered out by groups at the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force, but hasn’t since indicated whether it will support WebRTC or not.
If you’d like to take WebRTC for a test drive, you can go to https://apprtc.appspot.com and give your browser permission to access your microphone and camera. Logging in will start a communications session, which will appear as a number at the end of the URL (for example, https://apprtc.appspot.com/?r=02020318). If you send that link to a friend, you will be automatically connected, provided that the connection is not blocked by a firewall.
The ability for WebRTC to negotiate firewalls will be included in the next version of Chrome, which will be released in about six weeks.
Elise Ackerman, Contributor
QUBITS: a blog about the future of communications technologies
ORGINAL SOURCE: http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/11/06/googles-chrome-browser-now-contains-a-disruptive-new-communications-framework/