Firefox 72 Released With Picture-In-Picture Video Support Working On Linux

[DanL]

Firefox is a completely dead browser. Their market share is in the single digits now. It just goes to show -- you can't just hire dozens of blue-haired SJWs into software engineering roles and hope they'll produce quality work. Especially not when you're competing with Google.

Your name should be changed to braindead_pederson. Neither FF or chromium have managed to get video decode accel on Linux right.

[Guest]

Firefox is a completely dead browser. Their market share is in the single digits now. It just goes to show -- you can't just hire dozens of blue-haired SJWs into software engineering roles and hope they'll produce quality work. Especially not when you're competing with Google.

The problem with that is that Google is overran with SJWs as well, so your argument makes little sense.

[DanL]

The problem with that is that Google is overran with SJWs as well, so your argument makes little sense.

The problem is not the evil, evil, SJW boogey(wo)men as you'd like to believe, but the problem is that Google and Mozilla just point their fingers to the assortment of video decode API's and drivers on Linux like they can't pick one or more and receive bug reports about them, even hidden behind a white/blacklist flag. They don't even try.

[Guest]

The problem is not the evil, evil, SJW boogey(wo)men as you'd like to believe, but the problem is that Google and Mozilla just point their fingers to the assortment of video decode API's and drivers on Linux like they can't pick one or more and receive bug reports about them, even hidden behind a white/blacklist flag. They don't even try.

That wasn't even the core of the argument in the first place, but whatever. It was about Firefox being quite irrelevant on the browser market.

[hax0r]

How you can use hardware decoding if Firefox on Linux still not support it? Or maybe you taking on layers?

Yes I enable:

layers.acceleration.force-enabled

I was under impression that this causes H264 hardware decoding to be used during video playback? I know youtube is VP9 by default that's why I force AVC with h264ify. I might be totally wrong though, H264 HW decoding might be on Windows only.

[tildearrow]

It makes perfect sense. They've been hiring based on diversity quotas and Adversity Olympics instead of technical excellence. Their downward spiral into irrelevance is a classic example of what happens to a company when they fill their ranks with mediocre SJWs.

Further proof is that the logo ball is no longer blue but purple, and that the font is a bit more "feminine" or "less-serious" (or that is how I explain it....)

OK, I am not going to discuss about this anymore for now.

[caligula]

That's true, but Google is a much bigger company, where it's easier for the competent people to pick up the slack created by diversity hires...

Google also has piles of cash to burn, whereas Mozilla is a one-product shop whose one product is becoming irrelevant. It won't be long before one of the Android bloatware browsers has a bigger market share than Firefox...

Unless it affects the development somehow, I don't see why the market share matters. It's a bit silly to even talk about market when the product is free. At least on Linux, Firefox is still miles ahead Epiphany and other shit tier browsers.

[caligula]

Apart from the not-yet-existing hardware decoding on Linux, the Webrender issue for this is AFAIK https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579235

That looks horrible. This layer / hw acceleration stuff has taken way too long. I bought Baytrail and Cherrytrail Atom tablet/laptop some years ago and hoped that the perf issues will be fixed rather soonish. Well, here we are now, the devices are still horribly slow for browsing the web. FWIW, the Intel cstate bugs are still there https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051. I guess it's best to get rid of that crap and switch to ARM64/Android.

[240Hz]

Yes I enable:

layers.acceleration.force-enabled

I was under impression that this causes H264 hardware decoding to be used during video playback? I know youtube is VP9 by default that's why I force AVC with h264ify. I might be totally wrong though, H264 HW decoding might be on Windows only.

Your impression is wrong, this has nothing to do with video playback. This option is to hwaccel the UI. There is NO way to have hwaccel video playback on Firefox, the only way is to use chromium with the vaapi patch, afaik most distributions have chromium with the vaapi patch in their repositories

[Djhg2000]

Perhaps the reason hiring programs aimed at anything but competence are allowed to keep going is that the real competence is on its way out anyway. We need Gecko to keep WebKit somewhat at bay, but now Gecko is eating memory like crazy anyway. There used to be Presto and Trident as well but they got killed in favor of WebKit. All we have left now for graphical browser engines are WebKit flavors, Gecko, KHTML on life support and Links2.

Turns out we need diversity in browser engines, not competence. Since everything is turning into JavaScript kludge now anyways it's only a matter of time before WebKit really does become an operating system. Too bad it's what GNOME and Google wanted anyway.

Not surprising since JavaScript is a garbage-oriented language with the learning curve of a stapler. We need to introduce C as a minimum bar for what qualifies as a professional programmer, perhaps then shooting yourself in the foot will start hurting again instead of causing a barely noticable performance regression on a workstation.

But hey, as long as everyone can feel like they're contributing hot ideas to the dumpster fire there's no reason for them to ever get out of their comfort zone, right?