14 DAY TRIAL // While WebRTC has been on everyone's radar for about a year, it's only now stable enough to be used in real world applications. Chrome and now Firefox are providing support for the all the major components of WebRTC by default.
With the release of Firefox 22 to the stable channel later today, Mozilla can boast about full support for the plugin-free communication technology.
The first major component landed in Firefox 20 which enabled getUserMedia, the API responsible for providing secure access to the webcam and mic in a laptop or tablet.
With the release of Firefox 22, PeerConnection and DataChannels are also supported and enabled by default.
PeerConnection handles the audio and video streams between browsers. DataChannels provides a P2P communication channel for arbitrary data, useful for text chat messages, photo sharing, even multiplayer games.
While Firefox 22 may come with full support for the core of WebRTC, there's still a lot to work on. One-on-one chats are supported, though some glitches may still surface. But things like group chat or conference calls aren't going to work great.
Audio quality may not be the best in this initial release either, as echo is still a problem. This should change when the Web Audio API is better supported. Chrome already supports live input processing with the Web Audio API, making it possible to improve and clean up the audio stream.
Mozilla also warns about a problem with audio and video sync – audio playback may fall behind the video. The good news is that the problem has already been identified and Mozilla is working on a fix.
WebRTC, in Firefox at least, is considered good enough for developers and early adopters, but it's not stable enough to be a real alternative to established services. If you're a developer interested in working with WebRTC, the Nightly channel release is a better place to start; it will contain more fixes and improved support.