Yesterday I was at Cisco’s Collaboration Summit where Cisco’s CTO for Collaboration Jonathan Rosenberg and I showed Cisco’s new WebRTC-based Project Squared collaboration service running in Firefox, talking to a Cisco Collaboration Desktop endpoint without requiring transcoding.

This demo is the culmination of a year long collaboration between Cisco and Mozilla in the WebRTC space. WebRTC enables voice and video communication directly from within the browser. This means that anyone can build a video conferencing service just using WebRTC and HTML5 standards, without the need for the user to download a plugin or a native application.

Cisco is not only developing WebRTC-based services that run on the Web. They have  also joined a growing number of organizations and companies helping Mozilla to build a better Web. Over the last year Cisco has contributed numerous technical improvements to Mozilla’s WebRTC implementation, including support for screen sharing and the H.264 video codec. These features are now shipping in Firefox. We intend to use them in the future in Mozilla’s own Hello communication service that we are bringing to Firefox.

Cisco’s contributions to the Web go beyond just advancing Firefox. For the last three years the IETF, the standards body defining the networking protocols for WebRTC, has been unable to agree on a mandatory video codec for WebRTC, putting ubiquitous interoperability in doubt.

One of the major blockers to coming to a consensus was that H.264 is subject to royalty-bearing patents, which made it problematic for open source projects such as Firefox to deploy it. To break this logjam, Cisco open-sourced its H.264 code base and made it available in plugin form. Any product  — not just Firefox — can download the plugin and use it to enable H.264 without paying any royalties.

This collaboration between Mozilla and Cisco enabled Firefox to add support for H.264 in WebRTC, and also played a significant role in the compromise reached at the last IETF meeting to adopt both H.264 and VP8 as mandatory video codecs for WebRTC in browsers. As a result of this compromise, in the future all browsers should match the capabilities already available in Firefox.

Mozilla will continue to work on advancing Firefox and the Web, and we are excited to have strong partners like Cisco who share our commitment to the open Web as a shared technology platform.