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Microsoft's web browser chat standard challenged by Google and Mozilla

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that it used the CU-RTC-Web standard to launch a demo that allowed Windows users of Internet Explorer 10 to video chat with users of the Mac OS X version of Google's Chrome web browser. At the time, Microsoft was a bit critical of another competing web standard, WebRTC, which it said was "far from complete and stable."

Today, Google and Mozilla jointly announced that they have used WebRTC to successfully launch a video chat between the Chrome and Firefox browsers. The efforts were demoed in a video, shown above, which saw Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer, Todd Simpson, talking with Google’s Director of Product Management, Hugh Finnan. The chat took place with the Mac versions of those browsers.

The WebRTC standard video chat can be checked out now if you download the desktop Chrome 25 beta and Firefox Nightly for Desktop. Google states, "In Firefox, you'll need to go to 'about:config' and set the 'media.peerconnection.enabled' pref to 'true'. Then head over to the WebRTC demo site and start calling."

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is currently considering both WebRTC and Microsoft's push for CU-RTC-Web but there's no word yet on which direction the W3C might take.

Source: Google Chromium blog

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