Changes coming with the March Release of Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience
To better support users of Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience, we are excited to announce these changes to browser support in the March release:
- Adding native WebRTC-based support for users in Safari® 11 on macOS, Safari 12 on macOS®, and Microsoft Edge® on Windows® 10.
- Adding (beta) native WebRTC-based support for users of Safari in iOS 11 and iOS 12.
- Ending support for browsers that do not natively support WebRTC, and require the use of Adobe Flash® for media - this means ending support for Internet Explorer® 11 on Windows and Safari 10 on Mac OS.
When Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience was released in 2015, Adobe Flash was a significant enabling technology for live media in the browser. This was at a time when only Google ChromeTM supported WebRTC well enough for the interactive demands of online classrooms with hundreds of participants. Today, every major, modern browser has support for WebRTC.
WebRTC provides a superior experience to Flash for media access, with the ability to view multiple speaker videos, higher quality audio and video, and better bandwidth adaptation.
In July 2017, Adobe announced the end-of-life for the Flash plugin to take effect at the end of 2020. Browser vendors have communicated plans for ending support of Flash in their browsers and are making it difficult to enable and use Flash. These decisions make it clear that the best path forward for Collaborate with the Ultra Experience is with browsers that natively support WebRTC.
In addition to our support for WebRTC in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox®, we are excited to add support for WebRTC in Safari 11, Safari 12, iOS 11, iOS 12, and Microsoft Edge. We are confident that focusing on these technologies strengthens our ability to provide our users with the best possible experience.