Will WebRTC rock again in Firefox in 2024?

It’s been a long time since I took a close look at Firefox in terms of the WebRTC API offered. To be honest, Firefox isn’t the browser I use to develop and therefore to surf the net. The two are unrelated, but as I’m always developing, I use a single browser for everything…

And for WebRTC, I mainly use Chrome to test new APIs or to build prototypes, and when I need to do demos, I rely on WebRTC Adapter or I’ve got into the habit of doing less on other browsers which is not really cool!

So, while I’m working on the second edition of my WebRTC API map (which should be the subject of my next post), I’ve been using my WebRTC API Graph tool to see what’s changed in the WebRTC field.

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many changes. So I went to the Firefox Release Notes for Developers pages to get additional information on the changes I saw in the browser.

And hopefully, Firefox has good release notes which allowed me to find my happiness 😎

Firefox updates

Firefox is updated every 4 weeks. In 2023, the first version landed on January 17 (Firefox 109), while the last is scheduled for December 19 (Firefox 121).

If I’m counting right, in 2023, Mozilla will release 13 versions of Firefox.

At the time of writing, 11 versions have been released, and of these 11, 9 have WebRTC enhancements.

Main WebRTC evolutions done in 2023

Here are the main themes being worked on in Firefox over the course of 2023:

• Support for missing methods and properties of “ORTC” API such as in RTCRtpSender, and RTCRtpReceiver

• Support for missing stats reports such as RTCMediaSourceStats, RTCPeerConnectionStats

• Support for the Compression Streams API

• Support for the WebTransport API

• RTCPeerConnection.connectionState 😵

• Support for the Audio Output Devices API and with the use of a new dedicated API selectAudioOutput() 🥳

• Support for the WebRTC Encoded Transforms

Note: connectionState and setSinkId: It’s so good to finally see these APIs supported on Firefox!

Note: setSinkId is still not supported on Safari… 😫

WebRTC changes in Details

I took all the release notes and extracted the content around WebRTC. Here are the notable changes

Firefox - 119 (Oct, 24th)

• The relative priority for send streams can now be specified by including the sendOrder property inside an options argument passed to WebTransport.createBidirectionalStream() and WebTransport.createUnidirectionalStream() (Firefox bug 1816925).

Firefox - 118 (Sept, 26th)

• The RTCRtpTransceiver.currentDirection and RTCRtpTransceiver.direction properties now support the “stopped” value for indicating whether a transceiver has stopped. This value should now be used instead of the deprecated RTCRtpTransceiver.stopped property (Firefox bug 1568296).
• The array returned by RTCPeerConnection.getTransceivers() now omits stopped transceivers. Similarly, RTCPeerConnection.getReceivers() and RTCPeerConnection.getSenders() omit the receivers and senders associated with a stopped transceiver (Firefox bug 1568296).

Firefox - 117 (Aug, 29th)

• The ReadableStream.from() static member is now supported, allowing developers to construct a readable stream from any iterable or async iterable object (Firefox bug 1772772).
• WebRTC Encoded Transforms are now supported, allowing web applications to modify incoming and outgoing WebRTC encoded video and audio frames using a TransformStream running in a worker. The supported interfaces include: RTCRtpScriptTransform, RTCRtpScriptTransformer, RTCRtpSender.transform, RTCRtpReceiver.transform, RTCEncodedVideoFrame, and RTCEncodedAudioFrame, and the RTCTransformEvent and worker rtctransform event (Firefox bug 1631263).

Firefox - 116 (Aug, 01st)

• The Audio Output Devices API is now supported on all platforms except for Android. This API allows web applications to redirect audio output to a permitted Bluetooth headset, speakerphone, or other device, instead of having to use the browser or underlying OS default. Affected APIs include MediaDevices.selectAudioOutput(), MediaDevices.enumerateDevices(), HTMLMediaElement.setSinkId(), HTMLMediaElement.sinkId, and the permission policy Permissions-Policy: speaker-selection (Firefox bug 1498512).

Firefox - 115 (July, 04th)

• No notable changes

Firefox - 114 (June, 06th)

• The WebTransport API is now supported, which includes the following interfaces: WebTransport, WebTransportBidirectionalStream, WebTransportDatagramDuplexStream, WebTransportReceiveStream, WebTransportDatagramDuplexStream and WebTransportError. For more information see Firefox bug 1692754, Firefox bug 1818754, and Firefox bug 1791835.

Firefox - 113 (May, 09th)

• CanvasRenderingContext2D.reset() and OffscreenCanvasRenderingContext2D.reset() are now supported, and can be used to return the associated rendering context to its default state. (Firefox bug 1709347).
• The Compression Streams API is now supported. The interfaces provided by this API are used to compress and decompress data using the gzip and deflate formats (Firefox bug 1823619).
• The AV1 video codec is now enabled on Android. Hardware accelerated decoding is used if supported by the device (Firefox bug 1672276).
• The following WebRTC methods, properties, and dictionaries are now supported: RTCRtpSender.getCapabilities(), RTCRtpReceiver.getCapabilities(), RTCRtpSender.setStreams(), RTCSctpTransport & RTCPeerConnection.sctp, RTCMediaSourceStats, RTCPeerConnection.connectionState, and RTCPeerConnectionStats. The corresponding bug reports are, respectively: Firefox bug 1531460, Firefox bug 1531461, Firefox bug 1510802, Firefox bug 1278299, Firefox bug 1804678, Firefox bug 1265827, and Firefox bug 1531087)
• The deprecated and non-standard attributes mozRTCPeerConnection, mozRTCIceCandidate, and mozRTCSessionDescription were permanently removed (Firefox bug 1531812).

Firefox - 112 (April, 11th)

• navigator.getAutoplayPolicy() is now supported, allowing developers to configure autoplay of media elements and audio contexts based on whether autoplay is allowed, disallowed, or only allowed if the audio is muted. See Firefox bug 1773551 for more details.

Firefox - 111 (March, 14th)

• RTCInboundRtpStreamStats.trackIdentifier is now supported. This allows developers to associate inbound-rtp statistics with a particular track when using RTCPeerConnection.getStats(). (For more information see Firefox bug 1804676).

Firefox - 110 (Feb, 14th)

• The midi permission of the Permission API is now supported. This allows the permission status for using the Web MIDI API to be queried using navigator.permissions.query() (Firefox bug 1772166).
• ReadableStream now supports asynchronous iteration over the chunks in a stream using the for await…of syntax (Firefox bug 1734244).
• WebRTC now supports sending the set of available encodings when adding a transceiver to a peer connection, and also getting the active encoding associated with a sender. Specifically, RTCPeerConnection.addTransceiver() now supports using the sendEncodings option in the init parameter object, and RTCRtpEncodingParameters.active can be used to determine whether or not the encoding is being used to send data. (See Firefox bug 1676855 for more details.)
• WebRTC methods RTCRtpSender.getParameters(), RTCRtpSender.setParameters(), and RTCRtpReceiver.getParameters() are now compliant with the specification (Firefox bug 1401592).

Firefox - 109 (Jan, 17th)

• No Notable changes

Conclusion

Firefox seems to be catching up with WebRTC, which is very good news: interoperability will be easier and the user experience should be more similar from one browser to another.

The year 2024 should get off to a great start! But as 2023 isn’t over yet, I hope to see more WebRTC changes in the upcoming November and December releases!

And you, how is your WebRTC experience with Firefox?