Firefox 51 Released With FLAC Audio Support, WebGL 2.0 By Default

[Hi-Angel]

Glad its finally here, but why it took so long for an open source web browser to implement an open source audio codec?? The WINE folks could have reverse engineered some Windows DLL's faster than this. LOL

As someone already said, priorities. Besides, being open sourced means that you can implement something, not that project's employees going to implement anything.

Some of it has to do with how unlikely it is for Microsoft or Apple to implement it. MS because they're lazy, and Apple because they hate standards and want to see them fail.

On a personal level, I would be happy that it's here, but it's not in Chromium so practically speaking it's not "here" for me.

Not sure if I got you, but if you're referring to the fact that MS & Apple have browsers too — well, that doesn't mean that other browsers can't implement something, thus forcing stragglers to catch up.

Thankfully the next ESR release is 52 which means I can have my add ons working for another 2 months. Then I will hate Mozilla again. God damn them.

It's perhaps the 50th time they are breaking add ons in a major way. Also, Australis!

No wonder their market share is around 6% nowadays. They deserve it. You do not f*ck with your userbase.

There's an ongoing effort in extending Firefox API so that old addons could be ported https://bugzil.la/1215059 Not sure how successful it'd be, but hope they're not too crazy to drop a vast functionality of the browser.

[birdie]

I'm now talking about e10s. Xul won't be dropped in the nearest future.

[Wilfred]

wayland and video hw accel please :/

Yeah, seconded. There used to be a fedora special repo with firefox+wayland. But it's way out of date now, and it was unusably slow.

[higuita]

e10s really need add-ons to be updated... in the past everything run inside one thread, now you have several of then and add-on must negate their use. This had to happen someday, if not now, later, when servo replaces geko, it would need that change, forcing not only that change but several others... the result would be that most add-on would die, too much work. smaller steps make easier to migrate or fork and migrate than huge jumps

[starshipeleven]

I'm now talking about e10s. Xul won't be dropped in the nearest future.

Firefox is trying desperately to not end like PaleMoon, to do that it must change, and changes must be gradual.

[Anvil]

dont expect Firefox 51 as an update in Fedora Linux anytime soon.https://lists.fedoraproject.org/arch...NQBQVGWPPNT2I/

[uid313]

FLAC support is completely uninteresting and useless. Nobody is going to use it.
No other major browser supports FLAC, not Chrome, not Edge, only Firefox.
No service provider is going to stream FLAC because it is uncompressed so it requires huge bandwidth which makes it too expensive.

It would be better if they improved the got it working with GTK+ 3 on Wayland, or if it added support for input elements of type date, datetime and datetime-local.

[torsionbar28]

Some of it has to do with how unlikely it is for Microsoft or Apple to implement it. MS because they're lazy, and Apple because they hate standards and want to see them fail.

On a personal level, I would be happy that it's here, but it's not in Chromium so practically speaking it's not "here" for me.

Someone has to do it first, and the rest will follow. Does Mozilla want to lead? Or follow?

[torsionbar28]

Priorities... I use FLAC all of the time in my personal music collection, but I never found myself wishing for support for it in a browser.

I too keep my music collection stored as FLAC. I realized recently how nice browser FLAC support would be, when I attempted to set up a streaming media server so I could listen to my home music collection from my desk at work. The only way it would work, was to have the streaming app transcode it (on the server side) first, due to lack of FLAC support in the browser.

Next thing I'd like to see added to browsers is MKV video file support...

[torsionbar28]

No service provider is going to stream FLAC because it is uncompressed

Lol, what? Do you understand what FLAC is? It's an audio codec for *compressing* audio.