14 DAY TRIAL // A team at Mozilla Labs has been working on adding advanced audio and video capabilities to the browser, Firefox in this case, under the Rainbow project.
Recently, Google announced the open source WebRTC project, which it aims to standardize. WebRTC already does many of the things the Rainbow team set out to do.
So Mozilla has done the obvious and has joined Google in promoting WebRTC as a web standard.
What's more, it will integrate the underlying technology into Rainbow, so the next version of the extension and API will be completely new and based on WebRTC.
"When we first released Rainbow late last year, we made cross-platform support for live streaming and one of our our main goals," Mozilla said.
"Google started the Web Real-Time Communication (RTC) project at webrtc.org, an open-source effort that provides many of the low-level platform APIs required to build support for real-time communication into browsers," it said.
"We’re happy to announce that we will be working with the WebRTC group on JavaScript APIs that let web developers build real-time voice and video applications," it announced.
The main reason behind this is that Mozilla (and Google most of the time) believes that the web should rely on standards, whenever possible.
Google is providing the low-level APIs as well as open source video and audio codecs suitable for real time communications. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, so Mozilla is putting its support behind this project.
That said, Rainbow is not dead, quite the contrary, it will live on with much more robust underpinnings.
"The next release for Rainbow will feature yet another (!) new API and will be built off the code from the WebRTC project," Mozilla said.
Mozilla plans to continue to work on Rainbow until it becomes stable and useful enough to be included into Firefox, which is the ultimate goal. There's no word on when this happens, since the project is very much in the early days.