preferCurrentTab

Category: Realtime / Communication
Type: New or changed feature
Status: Enabled by default (Chrome 94)
Intent stage: Prepare to ship

Summary

We introduce a dictionary member to MediaStreamConstraints called preferCurrentTab. It's a boolean defaulting to false. When getDisplayMedia() is called with preferCurrentTab=true, the browser should offer the current tab as the most prominent capture source.

Motivation

Sometimes a page wishes to capture itself. For example, a slide-deck might wish to capture itself and stream itself to a conference call, or a user might wish to capture footage of themselves playing an online game.

Standards & signals

Specification: https://wicg.github.io/prefer-current-tab/
Firefox: Negative — It is worth mentioning that Firefox does not support tab-capture. The new dictionary member, preferCurrentTab, is therefore irrelevant for this browser, and will be silently ignored by Firefox with no adverse consequences.
Safari: No signal — Apple did not complete our interaction on their mailing list and did not provide an official position. It is worth mentioning that Safari does not support tab-capture. The new dictionary member, preferCurrentTab, is therefore irrelevant for this browser, and will be silently ignored by Safari with no adverse consequences.
Web developers: Strongly positive — Strong public support from Emil Ivov (Jitsi), Arnaud Budkiewicz (RingCentral) and Sergio Garcia Murillo (Millicast).
Tracking bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1136942

Explainers: https://github.com/WICG/prefer-current-tab/blob/main/README.md

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