[skrowl]

It sounded interesting until: Allow www.sharedrop.io to run "Adobe Flash"?

Then: We're really sorry, but your browser is not supported. Please use the latest Chrome for Desktop or Android or Opera. Firefox support is coming soon!

So basically, this is a webkit app, not a HTML5 app?

[szimek]

No idea why it asked for Flash.

At this moment the app works only in Chrome and Opera, because Firefox doesn't support HTML5 FileSystem API. There's a polyfill for that, but we had some issues with it, so we've decided to release it anyway. We'll continue working on Firefox support. The whole source code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/cowbell/sharedrop), so anyone can help.

[higherpurpose]

This reminds me of how awfully behind IE is in HTML5 development. If even Firefox doesn't have this feature, IE might not get it for at least another 2 years. I don't think Microsoft has even announced support for WebRTC in any future IE version yet.

[alexjh]

I'm running Chrome version 26.0.1410.63 on Linux, and I'm getting the not supported error message. Is there a minimum Chrome version?

[szimek]

I think it worked since 32. The current stable Chrome version is 33.

[szimek]

I think I've figured out why it asked for Flash. I forgot to remove socket.io related files that we were using before switching to Firebase.

[luke-stanley]

Why did you switch to Firebase?

[szimek]

Originally, we used socket.io for presence management and PeerJS library (http://peerjs.com), which uses its own websocket server, for WebRTC signaling. We had 2 websocket servers and we really wanted to avoid hosting them ourselves, so we considered 3 third-party services - Pusher, PubNub and Firebase.

Pusher has really awkward presence management that requires you to store user state on your own server, if I understood their docs correctly.

PubNub had similar issue as Pusher, though very recently they released a new feature that allows you to broadcast user state changes without having to store it on your own server.

Firebase is in my opinion the easiest one to use, especially for presence management, because it's a real database and not only a messaging service. It's also actually really easy to use for private messaging as well, even though I think it wasn't originally designed for that. We've changed PeerJS library to use Firebase for WebRTC signaling, which is basically a form of private messaging. We've also used Firebase in some of our previous projects - e.g. https://github.com/cowbell/presence-firebase.

If you're interested, you can check out the relevant source code for presence management at https://github.com/cowbell/sharedrop/blob/master/app/scripts... and WebRTC signaling at https://github.com/cowbell/sharedrop/blob/master/app/scripts....

[derefr]

Something can be supported by an HTML5 standard, where all browsers have agreed to implement that standard, but only a few have gotten around to it yet. (Not sure if that's the case here.)

[headShrinker]

Chrome doesn't use Webkit anymore. Safari does and it's not supported by this website.

[pjmlp]

Webkit is the new IE.

[Angostura]

It's not a Webkit app - it rejects the latest version of Safari on Mac too - and you can't get much Webkittier than that.

[robmcm]

Wow, someone is really pushing the boundaries of what is possible on the web and all you care about is old browser support.

That's it guys, lets pack up and go back to getting CSS to center vertically.