Most of the design and development technologies we work with every day are in ‘evolution’ mode, not ‘revolution’ mode. Enhancements are made, bugs are fixed, but the leaps are relatively small. A browser here adds support for the latest HTML5 canvas feature, a device there adds an API for better map coordination. Nifty, but a little light on the ‘wow factor.’

With the release of Firefox 22 this week, though, there’s a browser advancement that has the potential for a real leap: WebRTC is now baked-in and turned on by default. That means both Chrome and Firefox have it up and running in their latest versions. It will soon be ubiquitous (or perhaps ubiquitous-ish until IE follows along…).

Why is this so great? WebRTC is a W3C standard that allows for real-time communication (thus the RTC) in the browser — audio chats, video chats, whatever. No plug-in for users to download and install. Cross-platform and cross-browser compatible. Just code and go.

It will soon be much more trivial to just throw a video customer-service chat on a help-desk website. Or bake it into a community website to allow for in-site community chats. Or integrate it with the many more social networking sites with varying results depending on the site (you can let your imagination run on that one).

The possibilities are pretty remarkable. It’s a great case of where the technology itself has been around a long time, but by establishing a standard, the power is in the interconnection. Like, I don’t know, almost all Internet-based technologies.

There’s a good getting started tutorial over at HTML5 Rocks, and you can also jump off of the WebRTC home page. Either way, it’s worth a click-around. I think this will be big.