Chrome

All posts tagged Chrome

webrtcH4cKS: ~ How is WebRTC doing and who is driving usage? (Hint: Google Meet)

Posted by Philipp Hancke on December 14, 2021
Posted in: Other.
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I have been looking at these Chrome usage statistics available on chromestatus.com for a while together with Tsahi Levent-Levi for WebRTC Insights but they are too fascinating to keep them behind our paywall. Let’s do some coffee ground reading on the usage of a number of important APIs and what it tells us about what drives WebRTC in Chrome:

Google Meet.

Meet (or back in the day Hangouts) is a major driver for WebRTC to Chrome. It is no secret Google invests heavily in this area – surprisingly the only major party doing so. The data shows why. ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ Identifying Shared Tabs using Capture Handle (Elad Alon)

Posted by Elad Alon on July 22, 2021
Posted in: Standards, Technology.
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Introduction to capture handle - a new Chrome Origin Trial that lets a WebRTC screen sharing application communicate with the tab it is capturing. Examples use case discussed include detecting self-capture, improving the use of collaboration apps that are screen shared, and optimizing stream parameters of the captured content.

webrtcH4cKS: ~ Bisecting Browser Bugs (Arne Georg Gisnås Gleditsch)

Posted by Arne George Gisnås Gleditsch on May 14, 2019
Posted in: Guide.
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When running WebRTC at scale, you end up hitting issues and frequent regressions. Being able to quickly identify what exactly broke is key to either preventing a regression from landing in Chrome Stable or adapting your own code to avoid the problem. Chrome’s bisect-builds.py tool makes this process much easier than you would suspect. Arne from Whereby gives you an example of how he used this to workaround an issue that came up recently.
{“editor”, “Philipp Hancke“}

In this post I am going to provide a blow-by-blow account of how a change to Chrome triggered a bug in Whereby and how we went about determining exactly what that change was. ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ Troubleshooting Unwitting Browser Experiments (Al Brooks)

Posted by Al Brooks on December 11, 2018
Posted in: Guide.
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Echo cancellation is a cornerstone of the audio experience in WebRTC. Google has invested quite a bit in this area, first with the delay-agnostic echo cancellation in 2015 and now with a new echo cancellation system called AEC3. Debugging issues related to AEC3 is one of the hardest areas. Al Brooks from NewVoiceMedia ran into a case of seriously degraded audio reported from his customers’ contact center agents. After a lengthy investigation it turned out to be caused by a Chrome experiment that enabled the new AEC3 for a percentage of users in Chrome stable.
Al takes us through a recap of how he analyzed the problem and narrowed it down enough to file a bug with the WebRTC team at Google. ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ Chrome Screensharing Blues – preparing for getDisplayMedia

Posted by Philipp Hancke on June 14, 2018
Posted in: Technology.
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The Chrome Webstore has decided to stop allowing inline installation for Chrome extensions. This has quite an impact on WebRTC applications since screensharing in Chrome currently requires an extension. Will the getDisplayMedia API come to the rescue?

Screensharing in Chrome

When screensharing was introduced in Chrome 33, it required implementation via an extension as a way to address the security concerns. This was better than the previous experience of putting this capability behind a flag which lead to sites asking their users to change that flag… that got those sites an official yikes. ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ So your VPN is leaking because of Chrome’s WebRTC…

Posted by Philipp Hancke on April 2, 2018
Posted in: Technology.
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We have covered the “WebRTC is leaking your IP address” topic a few times, like when I reported what the NY Times was doing and in my WebRTC-Notifier. Periodically this topic comes up now and again in the blogosphere, generally with great shock and horror. This happened again recently, so here is an updated look into this alleged issue.

The recent blog post titled VPN Leak by voidsec highlighting how 19 out of more than 100 VPN services tested “leak” IP addresses via WebRTC is a quite interesting read. Some of the details about WebRTC are not quite correct the results are interesting nonetheless. At is core this is someone who sat down to test a long list of services and their behaviour, one by one. This is not the most exciting research task, but exhaustive studies like this often find something interesting. ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ getUserMedia resolutions III – constraints unleashed

Posted by Chad Hart on February 8, 2016
Posted in: Guide.
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Back in October 2013,  the relative early days of WebRTC, I set out to get a better understanding of the getUserMedia API and camera constraints in one of my first and most popular posts. I discovered that working with getUserMedia constraints was not all that straight forward. A year later I gave an update after the situation with Chrome was greatly improved, but Firefox at the time effectively only supported a single resolution so constraints were not much help. Specifically, I am interested in understanding what happens when you ask for a specific resolution. You might want to have a specific resolution returned by getUserMedia if you want to match the camera resolution to a specific video area to have a 1 to 1 pixel correlation, in a computer vision application where each pixel represents a distance, or if you are dealing with non-standard video devices. ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ Surviving Mandatory HTTPS in Chrome (Xander Dumaine)

Posted by Xander Dumaine on December 17, 2015
Posted in: Guide.
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“Only Secure Origins Are Allowed”

    – Chrome 47

Chrome 47 now forces secure origins (mostly) with HTTPS. This can be a pain to deal with, but Xander Dumaine is here to help with some guidance. Xander is a Senior Software Engineer who deals with the good and bad of WebRTC for Interactive Intelligence in Raleigh, NC. He is helping maintain simpleWebRTC and organises the Triangle WebRTC Meetup group in that area.

{“editor”: “chad hart“}

Want to keep up on our latest posts? Please click here to subscribe to our mailing list if you have not already. We only email post updates. You can also follow us on twitter at @webrtcHacks for blog updates. ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ OMG WebRTC is tracking me! Or is it?

Posted by Philipp Hancke on November 5, 2015
Posted in: Technology.
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There has been more noise about WebRTC making it possible to track users. We have covered some of the nefarious uses of WebRTC and look out for it before. After reading a blog post on this topic covering some allegedly new unaddressed issues a week ago I decided to ignore it after some discussion on the mozilla IRC channel. But this has some up on a the twitter-sphere again and Tsahi said ‘ouch’, here are my thoughts.

Claims

The blog post (available here) makes a number of claims about how certain Chrome behavior makes fingerprinting easier: ...  Continue reading