You raise valid points and thank you for the detailed answer. It’s a shame wasm isn’t hardware accelerated, is that because of security or is it simply not implemented yet? (i can google this but I’m just wondering.) I agree that being able to call on a web browser is perhaps less necessary because of the phone having to be linked anyway, but it still would be nice to have :)
WASM is designed to be hardware independent. It’s basically Java but without all the direct access to hardware, and in a slightly weird format. Recent improvements to the standard have added vectorization support which should improve performance, but there’s still no way to access any hardware encoder/decoder. All of those fancy direct access features are exactly why running Java applets used to be such a massive security risk and part of the reason why support for it got purged from anywhere but Internet Explorer.
I believe Google Meet does video processing in the frontend for blur effects and such, and it’s one of the reasons you NEED Chrome to use it properly (its WASM is clearly optimized for Chrome) and why your laptop will heat up if you enable the blur effect. Though, I think they use a native extension to do it these days. And that’s just 720p video, I can’t imagine sending any quality streams through the browser like that.
It’s not technically impossible to do secure video calls from the browser, it’s just not possible with the protocols WhatsApp has set up right now.
For instance, Element has encrypted video calling in their web client, partially because they designed their video calling protocol around web technology.
WhatsApp could implement browser calling, but I don’t see why they’d invest the time and effort.
You raise valid points and thank you for the detailed answer. It’s a shame wasm isn’t hardware accelerated, is that because of security or is it simply not implemented yet? (i can google this but I’m just wondering.) I agree that being able to call on a web browser is perhaps less necessary because of the phone having to be linked anyway, but it still would be nice to have :)
WASM is designed to be hardware independent. It’s basically Java but without all the direct access to hardware, and in a slightly weird format. Recent improvements to the standard have added vectorization support which should improve performance, but there’s still no way to access any hardware encoder/decoder. All of those fancy direct access features are exactly why running Java applets used to be such a massive security risk and part of the reason why support for it got purged from anywhere but Internet Explorer.
I believe Google Meet does video processing in the frontend for blur effects and such, and it’s one of the reasons you NEED Chrome to use it properly (its WASM is clearly optimized for Chrome) and why your laptop will heat up if you enable the blur effect. Though, I think they use a native extension to do it these days. And that’s just 720p video, I can’t imagine sending any quality streams through the browser like that.
It’s not technically impossible to do secure video calls from the browser, it’s just not possible with the protocols WhatsApp has set up right now. For instance, Element has encrypted video calling in their web client, partially because they designed their video calling protocol around web technology.
WhatsApp could implement browser calling, but I don’t see why they’d invest the time and effort.