websocket

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on October 23, 2018. Zoom recently started using WebRTC’s DataChannels so we have added some new details at the end in the DataChannels section.

Zoom has a web client that allows a participant to join meetings without downloading their app. Chris Koehncke was excited to see how this worked (watch him at the upcoming KrankyGeek event!) so we gave it a try. It worked, removing the download barrier. The quality was acceptable and we had a good chat for half an hour.

Opening chrome://webrtc-internals showed only getUserMedia being used for accessing camera and microphone but no  RTCPeerConnection like a WebRTC call should have. This got me very interested – how are they making calls without WebRTC?

Why don’t they use WebRTC?

The relationship between Zoom and WebRTC is a difficult one as shown in this statement from their website:

The Jitsi folks just did a

comparison of the quality ...  Continue reading