Ask HN: Will Google fix WebRTC captureStream() in Chrome before the end of Q1?

2 points

5 years ago

A regression[0] identified in the Chrome implementation of WebRTC captureStream() in the 88 update in early December effectively breaks many streaming video use cases, including some of the official samples. This is an ongoing problem at our company since some of our product's features rely on that functionality.

I'm reaching out on HN partly because I have seen other people successfully reach the higher echelons at Google and get results or communication through this channel in the past. Additionally, I'd like to invite a discussion about how to better manage a startup company's reliance on platforms like the Chrome browser, if we can't reliably expect consistent performance on base APIs or information about fixing broken APIs. Curious to hear if anyone has had similar experiences with Chrome or other platforms and how they managed it.

The bug discussion was closed to comments over a month ago, the issue is open without an estimate or nextaction, and there hasn't been any additional communication about the problem as far as I can find. The bug still appears on Chrome Canary as well.

I'm trying to at least gather some optics on the situation that I can share with our customers beyond "something is broken in the browser and Google is working on it." The provided workaround is not very workable, and I don't like suggesting a version downgrade since there may be other vulnerabilities etc in the older browser.

[1]https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1156408&q=capturestream&can=2

This issue is logged as blocked by another related bug, that also has little to no information regarding any upcoming resolution[2]https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1132965