Microsoft has rolled out Windows 10 desktop build 10547 for those of you participating in the Windows Insider Program. Along with new improvements to the operating system, build 10547 brings along new improvements to the Microsoft Edge browser.
One of the biggest new features in Edge is the ability to use the browser’s ORTC API and Twilio Client to place a voice call directly from your browser to your mobile phone. You can check out a demo here. This demo uses Twilio Client and Edge’s Object RTC (ORTC) APIs to initiate a Voice over IP connection to Twilio’s cloud communications servers, and then connects that to an outbound call to the phone number you provided.
First, Twilio Client requests access to your microphone by calling getUserMedia(), which returns a MediaStreamTrack object. This object is than provided to an RTPSender to generate a description of the media session. Twilio Client passes this offer to Twilio’s servers via a WebSocket signaling connection, and then uses Edge’s DTLSTransport and ICETransport/ICEGatherer objects to establish a secure DTLS session with Twilio’s media servers and receive incoming media on an RTPReceiver object.
Object RTC is a next-generation API in the family of WebRTC APIs, and Edge is the first browser to support ORTC. Twilio Client enables Voice over IP calling in both WebRTC and ORTC-compatible browsers.
Microsoft Edge also includes the following new EdgeHTML features:
- <template> element
- <picture> element
- Extended srcset (sizes)
- a[download] attribute
- Canvas ellipse
- CSS Mutability Pseudo-classes (:read-write, :read-only)
- CSS Range Pseudo-classes (:in-range, :out-of-range)
- input type=datetime-local
- SVG external content
There are also new Chakra features: ES2016 Async Functions (behind “Enable experimental JavaScript features” flag) and ES2016 Exponentiation operator (behind “Enable experimental JavaScript features” flag).
The user string in Edge has also been updated. The full User-Agent string is now : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10547
Further reading: Microsoft, Microsoft Edge
