I was chatting with one of our developers, Rishi, trying to understand why would Google want to opensource the full audio and video stack they acquired when they bought GIPS (i.e. give away perfectly good code that they spent plenty of money to purchase). He explained that one reason is to encourage people to build Real-Time Communication (RTC) plug-ins that work directly in a web browser via HTML5 and Javascript. Then people can have all kinds of neat RTC tools that they can conveniently use from the web. Think about all the web applications you may use now: Google Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Chat…., and think about what if you could also do real-time stuff like video calling or conference calling from there. It’s the whole cloud-based concept.
Rishi also added, “However, for this vision to become reality, competing browsers like IE, Firefox and Safari would need to embrace these extensions. Also, from a users perspective, if the primary work environment is not the browser, there’s no particular advantages to having the video-collaboration tool live only in a browser. e.g. VSee customers include people collaborating on CAD/architecture designs, or software source code, and having your video-collaboration tool fit around this workflow and not intrude on screen real-estate is a huge advantage.”
I thought that was an interesting perspective. Personally, I love cloud-based when sharing documents or videos and stuff, but when I’m trying to concentrate on one particular thing, it’s helpful for me to clear my desktop of everything except that “blank piece of paper.” In those cases, the web browser can be my biggest enemy. Now I often find myself in the Catch-22 of having to get on the Web to access my information, and getting distracted in the process.
So does it matter to you whether you’re videoconferencing from the web?
starting a videocall from Facebook
starting a videocall from VSee
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(Clarification: The “web versus native app” debate has been going on for eons at various levels, but the debate these days is really more about developing for mobile platforms which is a whole other hot topic.)
- My favorite post that I’ve seen on the debate so far is this one by Matt Gemmell. It’s more philosophical and discusses the effects of direct interaction versus going through a virtual interface. I also like the visuals used to show the differences in web and native applications.
- Techcrunch argues that Google is actually trying to get a piece of both pies when it comes to web vs. native.
- This article is a simple and clear read that doesn’t get bogged down by too much technical jargon. It’s also more of a big picture article and takes a bit of time setting the context.
- A fun-to-read assessment of the current state of “The Great Debate” by Brad Frost. In the end it’s all about putting it where the money is.
- If you’re looking for bullet points, this pro-Web app article has some good ones about when native makes sense (with a light sprinkling of tech jargon).
- This GigaOm article is a short, level-headed look at what’s holding back the web app floodgates and what’s happening now.
- If you want it coming from a developer, this blog post was clearly written.
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When it comes to in-browser versus desktop application, I always try to consider what the requirements are of the application to reach its potential. An application like video conferencing can benefit more from direct access to the OS, drivers and hardware acceleration that is the native domain of a desktop app. I know that IE9 and FF offer some applications hardware acceleration but in different ways. Creating apps for these browsers just needlessly adds additional platforms you must develop for.
And besides, I don’t know how many times my browser has crashed when I’ve been in the middle of an important task. I use Google’s Chrome browser because of its individually threaded tab functions for more stability but, of late, Chrome is the browser that crashes more often on me than Firefox. Because of this I stick to Thunderbird for my email and consider video and voice conferencing as equally critical functions.
Just to play devil’s advocate, I thought the whole point of developing for the web was the idea of “one code fits all.”
Hehe! Yeah. I’ve heard that a lot (Java, ActiveX, SWF, Silverlight) Truth is that the browser as a virtual machine just isn’t powerful enough to do real time video. To date, this still requires something local that can dig into the OS and camera drivers. The browser can launch something local, but that’s about it.
The advantage of supporting web browsers is portability, although native apps may be more effective and easier to use, you limit the service to the supported platforms.
I have considered VSee for the company I work for (about 100 users), but we couldn’t use it as about 25% of the users are on Debian or Ubuntu Linux and wouldn’t be able to use VSee..