1360187 - Consider a way to open WebRTC connections across synced devices

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

If a user has multiple accounts on Firefox sync we could provide a way for extensions to open connections across these devices using WebRTC.

Use cases:

- Spotify style multiple device control
- Using phone as an assistive control for a laptop/tv
- Chromecast style video streaming

Sync details would be used to just "onramp" the connection, a normal WebRTC connection would be used after that.

Local device detection might be interesting also however I'm not really sure of the security implications of letting an extension do a UDP multicast or whatever.

There may be other ways to make this easy for developers, I'm open to suggestions.

Comment 1

[Andy McKay]

It's unclear to me how this is related to WebExtensions and what you can't do in WebRTC already. Could you elaborate on what this would like to a WebExtension API.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

It perhaps doesn't need to be specific to WebExtensions however I essentially want a way to easily configure cross device communications that would otherwise require a lot of setup.

Currently cross device communication is adopted by prevalent companies in the industry like Netflix, Spotify, WhatsApp, Google as they have large market shares.

Firefox has sync so is essentially in a similar situation as these companies.

One of the frustrations of cross device communications is getting a user to pair all devices, if web extensions could ease this adoption by requiring only the users to install an extension on each device we could ease adoption of the use cases above for the smaller extension authors.

Comment 3

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Jonathan and Andy -- if it makes sense to talk about this in the design decision meeting, I'd like to add it to the agenda for the August 1 meeting.  Otherwise let me know if this has been approved or denied. 

Aug 1 call in info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Contribute/Triage#Next_Meeting

Aug 1 meeting agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5zlSASqZAzzJGZhHtLWY1yaUwCKZiHXXGP1k_2W-TU/edit#

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kingston [:jkt] he/him]

It makes sense to discuss the idea to see if it is feasible, I probably should have found some time at the all hands.

Whatever the interface the scope would require sync and dom peers to work on this.

Comment 5

[Andy McKay]

As I understand it, there's a couple of steps here. 

1) Auth through Firefox Accounts. That's being tracked in bug 1320862.

2) Provide an API to get the devices or profiles logged into a Firefox Account. There is a similar API to this in Chrome: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/signedInDevices, that's currently experimental.

...and then something else.

I'm just going to move this to holding, in the sense that something might be cool here but we've got to a little clearer what that is and we've got to get these other things done before hand.