Chrome and Firefox talk to each other

Here is one for the developers. It’s always nice when tech companies play nice together, especially when both companies are in direct competition. Google and Mozilla decided to have a bit of chat via WebRTC, says the Chrome blog. According to the blog post, Web-Real-Time Communication is a new set of technologies that brings clear crisp voice, sharp high-definition (HD) video and low-delay communication to the web browser. It has proven quite popular in open source circles.

The service allows developers to include real-time video calling and data sharing capabilities into their products.

“In order to succeed, a web-based communications platform needs to work across browsers. Thanks to the work and participation of the W3C and IETF communities in developing the platform, Chrome and Firefox can now communicate by using standard technologies such as the Opus and VP8 codecs for audio and video, DTLS-SRTP for encryption, and ICE for networking,” says both companies.

So to test the success of the technology the two browsers teamed up to show it off in their respective offerings.

The two companies posted a link to the same YouTube video that shows the feature in action (the call is between Hugh Finnan, Google’s Director of Product Management, and Todd Simpson, Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer):

“This milestone builds on an earlier demo we showed late last year of WebRTC integrated with Social API. There we demonstrated an industry first with our implementation of DataChannels, a powerful component of WebRTC that can combined with an audio/video chat to allow users to share almost anything on their computer or device,” said Firefox on its blog. “Send vacation photos, memorable videos, links news stories etc., simply by dragging the item into your video chat window. Look out for more on this to come.”

Currently the feature hasn’t been rolled out in the browsers just yet, but users can check out the functionality by getting the Chrome 23 beta and the latest Firefox Nightly.