Firefox Hello – Finally an Implementation of WebRTC in the Wild

I haven’t used Firefox extensively for a while now, I have to admit that I’m actually stuck with Chrome ecosystem. However, occasionally I still use Firefox browser for light browsing and testing purposes. Thankfully, today I decided to use firefox and once the browser starts I’m pleasantly surprised by the “Firefox Hello” notifications, I decided to give it a shot.

Quick Testing Between 2 Countries

I thought of testing Firefox Hello using 2 machines or using VM but I think it won’t really simulate inter-continental video conferencing. Therefore, since I’m in holiday in Indonesia (where internet connection isn’t great yet), I decided to remote in to my desktop machine in Australia using Team Viewer. The result is as seen below, the local video connection is being transmitted almost real time to the Australian machine. Please forgive the teddy bear by the way, he represented me for this screenshot :)

The remote machine does not have any webcam therefore nothing is broadcasted to the test machine.

I can see that this is going to be very useful going forward, sure there are a lot of video chatting solutions available right now such as Skype, LINE, Google Hangouts and many more. However the great thing about this is that this is the WebRTC implementation which should become the standard for video streaming over the web. This means we would soon be able to video chat ad-hoc-ly from any web browsers.

In Closing

All in all this is a very short post, but the main thing is that it’s really great to see an implementation of WebRTC in the wild. So far, I have only seen WebRTC implementation as prototypes and mainly in conferences, never an implementation that just works like Firefox Hello. I hope this project goes even further and we’ll see a much more mature product in the future.

Categorised in: App Review