Firefox 80 Available With VA-API On X11, WebGL Parallel Shader Compile Support

[jacob]

They sort of do, you know. And many of those projects are guaranteed to be FOSS, which Chromium isn't. With Firefox gone, the stage is set for another set of browser wars within the Chromium community. But the biggest point is that Firefox and Chromium isn't developed by a single entity, while Chromium is.

There are actually many FOSS projects that are developed in cathedral mode; having a single entity in control doesn't mean much either way in terms of potentially malicious code. Bazaar projects like Linux did have instances of garbage or questionable code sneaking in that had to be removed ex-post. In some ways bazaar can even actually make it easier if it means that there is less oversight of the individual subprojects of components. And Firefox is also developed by a single entity; there is really no difference there except that Google is generally clearly evil while Mozilla are supposedly (but not entirely) the Good Guys.

Google could potentially stop releasing Chromium as open source and switch to a strictly proprietary licence, but they can't retroactively withdraw the FOSS licencing of the existing releases. Should that happen and if the community saw value in keeping Chromium, someone would just pick up the last free code base and keep developing it separately from Google. There is a number of precedents for that too, for example with ZFS and Solaris.

By the way Firefox is not gone and is not going anywhere.

[jacob]

Which license does glibc use? If it's copyleft, then it's intentionally and specifically not a monopoly. Google can take the ball and go home at any time. Don't you think that has an effect?

It's LGPL. Not real copyleft but obviously it's safe from monopolisation.

[Veerappan]

Many of us have moved on from X11, nothing particularly exciting about Firefox better supporting legacy systems. I'd be just as moved if they improved support on Windows 3.1, for comparison.

Partially serious, but yes I know y'all are still using X11 DEs

I've been using Wayland on my personal machines for quite a while now.... but the work laptop still has to use X11 because Zoom/RingCentral don't screenshare nicely from Gnome/Wayland. It just creates a garbled screencap last I checked, similar to cat'ing /dev/urandom and encoding it as a video stream.

[Mez']

Just so others can appreciate this...Firefox's importance comes not from being simply an open source alternative so much as a competitor. If Firefox fails to have enough market share, then Google will have a monopoly over the web and will abuse it far more than they do now. Chromium, Edge, Vivaldi, are all part of Google's monopoly because they use Google's rendering engine.

Its importance is because it's much better than Chrome/ium for some users.
Every time I use Chromium (@home as Firefox backup) or Chrome (@work), there are a decent amount of customizations or features I just can't have and I found it very frustrating. Especially the videos playing automatically (even if muted), how is it possible that Chrome doesn't have a global setting (as in not be set per every damn website) for this nonsense? Or where is my bookmarks button (not bar)? I'll stop here, I could go on for hours with the missing features of Chrome/ium.
I don't care about Google dominance. I care about being more efficient at work (I'm losing time with Chrome) and more confortable at home while browsing.
I've tried several browsers lately (to get rid of the weak Chrome/ium as Firefox backup), none of them is even close to Firefox in terms of usability (for me).

[mattia.b89]

Hi guy,
glad to see this prominent feature finally here; glad to see many people here to discuss about it!

I'd like to share with you my experience: I am on Arch Linux and I have just updated FF; as empirical test I checked GPU usage (I have an integrated Intel thus I used their ‘intel_gpu_top‘ utility): with my surprise, 3D GPU usage raise from 0 to 100% with this update, without doing nothing, neither about:config edit nor environment variables

[Danielsan]

Chromium is exactly as free as any other. You have the ability to fork it and remove code that bothers you. That's what FOSS freedom gives you, nothing more, nothing less. Does Linus ask for your opinion every time he commits code into Linux? Do Gnome, GCC, KDE or Blender devs ask you?

You can fork it but losing functionality hence forking Chromium is useless as using Chrome.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...40#post1202840

[blackshard]

Finally got it working on an ancient HD3450 on Ubuntu 20.04.
Had to

• change media.ffmpeg.dmabuf-textures.enabled to true in about:config
• change media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled to true in about:config
• change media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled to true in about:config
• launch firefox with this command line: MOZ_X11_EGL=1 MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 firefox
• use h264ify, because the GPU does not support anything else than h.264

[jacob]

You can fork it but losing functionality hence forking Chromium is useless as using Chrome.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...40#post1202840

Interesting, I didn't know that. In that case Chromium is simply not free, period.

[pal666]

Which license does glibc use? If it's copyleft, then it's intentionally and specifically not a monopoly. Google can take the ball and go home at any time.

parts of chromium are copyleft, but it doesn't really matter. copyleft would be google's defence against google's competitors, not against google itself. and if you can't develop firefox better than google, you just as well can't develop chromium better than google, no matter its license

Don't you think that has an effect?

no

[jo-erlend]

There are actually many FOSS projects that are developed in cathedral mode; having a single entity in control doesn't mean much either way in terms of potentially malicious code.

I'm not talking about malicious code.

And Firefox is also developed by a single entity; there is really no difference there except that Google is generally clearly evil while Mozilla are supposedly (but not entirely) the Good Guys.

But Chromium _and_ Firefox isn't developed by a single entity. I want competition on the web, for the sake of it. Why do we even need W3C if Google is the only developer? Should the web be allowed to turn into a Google product? I mean, officially? There's no need for any standards if there's only one product.

Google could potentially stop releasing Chromium as open source and switch to a strictly proprietary licence, but they can't retroactively withdraw the FOSS licencing of the existing releases.

Yes, they can. The people who already have the code, still have the license to use it, but for others, it can retroactively be made proprietary. It's not GPL.

Should that happen and if the community saw value in keeping Chromium, someone would just pick up the last free code base and keep developing it separately from Google. There is a number of precedents for that too, for example with ZFS and Solaris.

Yeah, and replacing Google as a web browser development is a piece of cake, right? What I believe would happen if Google made Chromium proprietary, is that Microsoft and Apple would follow. Then we might end up with another series of browser wars as Google focus on turning the web into a part of ChromeOS, with Microsoft and Apple potentially wanting to do similar things down the line.