WebRTC Testing – Try out conversat.io with other users and file bugs!

Jason Smith

Hi Everyone,

With the Nightly and Aurora builds of Firefox, you should be able to take advantage of existing chat applications that make use of WebRTC-based APIs. One of the applications I’d recommend trying out for testing out these APIs is called conversat.io. With this application, you can create a room that can house up to six people and conduct a normal meeting over video chat that relies on WebRTC-based APIs.

So how can I help test WebRTC-based APIs using this application? The first is that you can dogfood the application in your day to day life scenarios that involve video chat. Such examples of this include:

  • Conduct a small public meeting for an open source project
  • Conduct a 1:1 meeting with a family member
  • Talk with your friends over video chat

The second is you could run test cases directly using this application across Firefox Nightly and Aurora builds and Chrome. Here’s an example set of test cases I’d recommend trying out:

  • Start a video call between Firefox and Chrome with a room you’ve created in conversat.io. Now, talk back and forth in the call. Are you hearing the sound you just said in Firefox on Chrome? Vice versa?
  • Conduct a long-running video call with two Firefox tabs that goes for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes past, is the video from each camera still running correctly? If I generate sound, do I still hear it in one Firefox tab from a different Firefox tab?
  • Say I start a video call between two Firefox instances on different machines. Now, after the video call has ran for a few minutes, one of the Firefox instances closes. Does the other Firefox instance still in video chat not crash? Does the remote video stream stop?
  • Start a video call on two different machines running Firefox on different wifi networks for five minutes. Is the video stream still running between both Firefox instances correctly?
  • Start a video call with six different tabs in Firefox running off of the same conversat.io room. Does the video stream come through cleanly on each Firefox tab?

For any issues you run into while conducting video chat with WebRTC APIs in Firefox, feel free to either file a bug here or email me directly with your feedback.