Linphone-web is officially discontinued due to removal of NP-API from Google Chrome and Firefox.

Technically speaking, embedding the liblinphone engine required the browsers to be able to load a specific plugin (called linphone-web-plugin) that makes a full JS API wrapper of liblinphone available to web application developers. The common format or protocol required for such plugin was the NP-API, which existed for many years and was used by almost all kind of plugins.

Google has deprecated support for NP-API plugins in Chrome starting from april 2015: https://www.chromium.org/developers/npapi-deprecation

Firefox also recently announced its intention to remove NP-API plugin support by the end of 2016: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-fire...

As a result of these deprecations, Linphone-web is no longer working on recent versions of Google Chrome, and will stop working on Firefox as well at the end of next year.

Our team has been actively searching for alternatives to NP-API that would allow linphone-web to continue on these two major browsers. After reviewing a lot of documentation and developing prototypes, it appeared that no alternative is currently technically available to allow linphone-web to continue with the same API and same level of features as it was with NP-API.

Belledonne Communications is obviously and definitely sorry about this situation, as we we invested a lot in the linphone-web product since 2013.

However, the support of current customers using linphone-web will continue until December 31, 2016.

Moving to a desktop client application with minimal control for web apps

Because the desktop computers represent an important marketshare for VoIP calls, especially in the professional usage, we have decided to engineer a new Linphone desktop application for windows, Mac and Linux, with an entirely redesigned UI. This new application will have the capability to be invoked from a web page running in a browser with basic commands, to typically launch a call or a conference to a list of users. The control of operations during the call will not take place into the browser, but in the new Linphone application’s call view.

This capability will for example allow a web agenda application to schedule conference call meetings between users and have these users simply start the session from a web page.

This solution is currently in study for the exact form of interaction between web page and desktop client. We invite anyone interested in this subject to contact us in order to submit ideas, wishlist, comments or questions