You aren't exactly making this sound more free. I would honestly prefer it if I could just buy her a large TV and we could setup video calls with it. (They already have cameras built in nowdays.) Hell, why stop at the TV. Her phone likely has all that is needed for this. Does this go any further to making that happen?
I guess I can see how it does. I mean, the idea is that this protocol can be used to communicate between two vendors. But, that can already be done. It is done, on a regular basis. What, exactly, makes this special?
At a technical features level? Absolutely nothing. This provides nothing to an end user that they couldn't already get. The only thing this changes, from an end user perspective, is the number of steps it takes to do things.
tl;dr: This is an evolution of browser standards, not a revolution in consumer software (from an average end-user POV)
From a developer POV, this is pretty cool because now it is (or at least, is well on its way to being) significantly easier to build an app that relies on real-time media shared between peers with only the only onus on the end-user being having an up-to-date browser. The simplest and most obviously useful application of this is a basic VoIP tool.
I think this is ultimately my confusion. I'm at the point now where I'm actually usually advising family members on devices that rely less on browsers. Why not show a chat from gmail/whatever in a browser to a regular app on an android/ipad device? Even better, include another app in there. Just to really drive home how "open" this is.
Also, why is this stuff better than SIP related technology from a while back?
I believe gchat would do that, google hangouts might integrate with the ios/android app as well (I have not tried this).
The excitement here is that this is a non-flash solution, so technically it will work on any device that can run Chrome, regardless of whether or not it can / wants to run Flash. So in the near future this may make it into Chrome for Android and iOS.
WebRTC is a very necessary step in removing Flash's hooks into the modern internet; after this, there will be very few reasons to support it at all anymore. And that is a very good thing for speed, compatibility, and security.
I guess I'm just confused by two points. First, the odd belief that non-flash automatically equals good. Second, that non-flash for some reason necessitated "in browser." Why?
Neither of these automatically grants any additional security. If anything, it is just tying us to fewer vendors that can do this. I guess it doesn't matter, but I can recall a time when I was able to choose which application handled certain content type. We seem to be saying we do not want that for video now.
