lucid00

When you give away tool with a widespread guaranteed userbase like this, someone is bound to build something that people will use. Not to say WebTorrent will be this big, but that's how the internet came to be.

And this is a completely decentralized upload and download library for the web, someone's going to build something popular with it I'm sure and it's not even at version 1.0 yet.

Comment · 10 years ago

That and they wouldn't get classic BitTorrent compatibility in a web app.

Comment · 10 years ago

"If this what you wrote was true then you would see big adoption of webtorrent which is not the case."

You're missing the point.

Think of it this way.

Check out this video: https://fastcast.nz/videos/cityscape-chicago-ii.html

Once you're done viewing even a second of it, just know you've just adopted WebTorrent.

You don't even need to know WebTorrent exists or was used and BitTorrent wasn't needed in any way.

Comment · 10 years ago

"That's a pretty big hurdle considering most regular torrent users don't even realize WebTorrent exists"

They don't need to. That's the point.

If I send a user to https://file.pizza/ to transfer a file to them. Not once to I have to mention that it uses WebTorrent. IMO that's the killer feature.

Comment · 10 years ago

I know you can't connect to normal clients. My point is normal clients don't really matter.

"Which means that you do not have almost any sources of seeders"

All it takes for someone to seed a file is to open a web page. Think about it.

At any point if I wanted to promote a song via WebTorrent, I could build WebTorrent into an audio player and encourage my user base to click a checkbox and seed the track (toss in IndexedDB support for storing it offline and it's even better).

Complete serverless resharing with almost every benefit of BitTorrent to boot.

The only thing WebTorrent needs the existing BitTorrent install base for is the existing torrents, which don't matter as much as you might think they do (most torrents are pirated content anyways).

So yes, WebRTC adoption does matter.

Comment · 10 years ago

I feel this is a moot point.

I'm pretty sure the install base of WebRTC data channels is far higher than BitTorrent (Chrome, Firefox, Opera and soon Edge and Safari), so existing Torrent clients providing support only helps out the existing torrents out there.

Down the line I'm willing to bet that WebTorrent grows to be more widely used than BitTorrent, just off of the lack of friction to get started for both users and developers.

Comment · 10 years ago

The "Safari is the new IE" article was about them being slow to adopt APIs and the yearly release cycle attached to OS updates.

This is about visuals and UI based APIs that can be polyfilled. They matter but not as much as stuff like WebRTC and Service Workers IMO.

Google can fix these problems with updates and polyfills. Apple can't do that. Some iOS and Mac OS users will at some point be left out.

Nothing in this article matter that much "position:sticky, no backdrop-filter, no scroll-snap-type, gradients" they're useful, but not critical.

Doubt we'll see apps that aren't possible without these. They just make the experience nicer, they don't make products happen though.

Meanwhile on the Chrome end we've got web apps like Emojoy (https://jakearchibald-gcm.appspot.com/), Offline Wikipedia (https://wiki-offline.jakearchibald.com/), Instant.io (https://instant.io/), PeerCloud (https://peercloud.io/) and even Facebook (http://Facebook.com/) all providing features and services in Chrome (WebRTC, Service Workers, Background Sync) that can't be polyfilled or will have to provide a far lesser experience in Safari because it lacks even a way to polyfill these features (only things I can think of are AppCache and WebSockets which don't get the job done for these services).

Comment · 10 years ago

To be honest, this isn't true.

Chrome Packaged Apps allow developers to build alternative browsers using Native Client.

Just no one has bothered to do so because it wouldn't make much of an impact, plus alternate browsers wouldn't be able to set themselves as the default browser.

Comment · 10 years ago

YouTube's rules have something against not displaying the video.

This will need to be updated to display the video to stay up.

Comment · 10 years ago

It is.

But it's not in certain contexts. Like in areas where a basic understanding of technology apply like on a tech blog or high profile position in politics or company where you make decisions that steer the tech sector, you'll do best with some basic programming knowledge.

Nothing serious is needed either, just a few weeks of learning Python and just read up on the rest of the programming world and you should at least have some understanding on how everything works.

Because I see more and more people in areas where programming knowledge can apply say "It's okay to not learn how to code" and people where it doesn't apply never go out of their way to say that.

Knowing how to code isn't always about getting a great job, sometimes it's just about making yourself better at your existing one.

Comment · 11 years ago

It supports ORTC which is sort of like WebRTC 1.5

It's backwards compatible with WebRTC so it'll work with Chrome and Firefox, but it gives you more control of the protocols so you could build something that doesn't rely on SDP.