We understand and appreciate the feedback you’ve been providing, and are striving to make TwoSeven more friendly and safe for you to use. When we first built TwoSeven, it was only used by me and my husband—and we would always have our webcam and mic enabled. The way we saw it, adding additional clicks to enable webcam or mic were a waste of time. In other words, a lot of our initial design decisions were made based on the way we used TwoSeven.

We take your privacy very seriously and have made the following changes:

1. Webcam and mic will no longer automatically turn on when you join a page
2. You can choose to turn on your mic without sharing your webcam video
3. No big, black box when there’s no webcam video

This post is about the difficulties we faced in performing a simple operation: changing the volume of a audio stream. Imagine having a group call with your Skype pals with binary volume control—zero or maximum. You could lower the volume on your speaker, but some of your friends may have low sensitivity on their microphones rendering them inaudible. This was the horror that we had to overcome. Getting volume-control to work took us down a rabbit hole of browser bugs that have spanned upwards of seven years. We did finally manage to get it working however, and this post documents our solution to this problem.

If you’ve had any significant experience in building web pages, you’re probably well-versed with browser differences. These differences are a direct consequence of the ways in which specs are implemented. On one hand, having a good choice of browsers in the market; each built on different codebases is desirable. On the other, we need to deal with these differences that pop up. One such difference that we struggled with for a long time was volume control, specifically on remote WebRTC MediaStreams in Chrome.