It's of course fine to ask what a project is for or how it addresses a specific concern, criticize substantively, and so on, but there should always be a baseline of respect for someone who tried something and put it out there.
That said, the browser will not return to only acting as a display conduit with no interactivity despite what some people would like to see...
If you want a better platform than the browser for server-driven interactive applications not requiring you to install extra applications, then build one. To date, there hasn't been a better, more open option.
However I think you would have more success in A) gaining an understanding of what someone is trying to achieve / what problem they might be trying to solve and B) sharing your likely very valid point of view / experience with others if you change the way you communicate your reply.
The way you worded your reply could be hurtful to the person that came up with the idea and spent their time to try and create something from it.
I'm sure your intentions are good, probably a mix of wanting to educate people, share your experiences and show heartfelt frustration with certain types of software trends or implementations.
I think it would be more constructive and less potentially hurtful if you focused on talking about how you could see issues with using X to do Y and perhaps offer a suggested alternative path to look at if they're interested.
Tldr; If someone is demoing their ideas or product - friendly constructive criticism and feedback is very important and valuable. Keep comments positive and your words will have more of an impact.
As for software trends: all hope is lost.
While JavaScript is probably slower and use much more resources, it's not always the case.
I would also argue that bit-torrent doesn't take up much resources, at least when only seeding a few files, I guess you would have to seed thousands of files for performance to matter.
The IRC-like chat on Social Savannah will run up your browser memory and until you run out and crash. pdf.js (in firefox), as mentioned, starts sucking down cycles and bytes with just intel reference manuals open.
WebRTC should always be gated behind permissions. Most uses are video/audio, which already require a prompt, so no problem. Other websites shouldn't have this capability, so annoying users is no problem. But that's not very palatable, as it means acknowledging that WebRTC data doesn't really belong on the wider web.
Honestly, what are the real good uses for it outside of media? Games? WebTorrent?
I'm rather annoyed that such a feature was deployed, giving any webpage the ability to override my proxy settings or otherwise change the normal browser networking behaviour.
http://help.opera.com/Windows/12.10/en/sitepreferences.html
localstorage, separate widget localstorage, separate userjs storage, Web SQL - you could limit/disable/define everything with fine granularity(disabled, quota, popup if quota exceeded) globally and per domain.
opera:config#PersistentStorage
Can you imagine something as crazy as letting user decide which sites are allowed to run Javascript? use localstorage? leave permanent cookies? use plugins? or something as weird as defining custom useragent string per website? All possible in Old Opera, No other browser will let you do that now afaik.
Today? Today you get Firefox forcing Pocket, Google serving Voice control binary blob, and all around people coming up with things that cant be fine tuned at the user level like webRTC. We are slowly moving to a point (wtf webassembly) to a point we will lose any control over whats flowing down the wire from the server and runs on our computers.
You could use it to implement p2p collaborative editing in a productivity app, which could actually give you privacy and security benefits that aren't available when a central server is involved.
Security is a legitimate concern, but the browser is already completely exposed since it downloads and runs arbitrary code all day long.
I do have some objection to WebRTC but it's more architectural. WebRTC is overly complex, overly monolithic, and bloated. It tries to do too many things with one standard.
media.peerconnection.ice.default_address_only
until every torrent client supports it is not as useful as it could potentially be
Google cache (appears broken): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
Edit: It appears that the OP's link was changed. Original was https://webtorrent.io/
Of course, it's not perfect. It appears to try and load the entire file to memory to seed, which makes sense, but that means you can't transfer a 1GB file without using 1GB of RAM...
The help me seed it is not working atm, but the idea is that you don't have to stay seeding it.
Rather than restricting what browsers can send and making kludgy workarounds that waste resources, why don't we just allow browsers to send whatever they want?
It's very basic, and doesn't have proper error messaging. Would recommend only attempting to stream mp4 (h264) if you're giving it a shot.
Note: sorry for any grammar issues, on mobile now
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/torrent-tor...