I am very impressed with WA first cut at a web interface. The login is simply genius and the interface is clean and minimalist.

When revealing it to my friends in a Whatsapp group some where very curious and hesitant to know if the service is more vulnerable that it's now has a web service.

I initially assured them that is practically the same it being on any other platform, however I had some doubts myself.

Thought Id open it up to HN... IS whatsapp now more vulnerable with the new web interface?

Further discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8924600

Doesn't work in Chromium. :-( I know Firefox has some WebRTC limitations but I thought Chromium was enough. I suspect ignorant browser-detection.

I've wanted this for a long time. Anyone know why they can't offer it on Apple?

(Warning: totally uninformed comment ahead.)

IIRC, whatsapp is built on xmpp/jabber, which makes me think their web client uses WebRTC to connect to the service. WebRTC is supported fully natively on Android, but not on iOS. Specifically, Safari does not support it yet.

It's possible that this will work on iOS chrome but not iOS safari.

Is WebRTC not browser to browser? Think websockets would be better suited for this problem.

Yes but you can't use all featuers in all browsers as far as I know. WebRTC in this case would be used to connect to TURN/STUN servers.

Again, no clue what I'm talking about. But I suspect the ability to support in-browser TURN/STUN handshakes is what's holding ios back.

the app is not working on s5 as of now no way to get to the web mode in app...

You may need to update the app on your device.