Chrome 86 Beta Enables Native File-System API By Default, WebCodecs Added

[grok]

So they finally accepted the community patches hum? We are living a age of Linux desktop miracles. First Firefox, now Chrome allow hardware accelerated video.

Tomorrow I'm hopping to finally have my beloved Flash support back in place. How can we surf the web without it? So many abandoned websites broken, so sad. I want to see them back to their former glory.

/s

But now you need to tell your friends that things now work properly, but their computer supports hardware h264 but not vp9, so as a workaround you'll do this..

I won't tell them probably.

[dwagner]

Just prompt the users. "You need to click C:\Documents and Settings"

Or the likes of:

Would you like to grant web page X access to: /home/you/harmless                                                                                            /../../../dev/nvme0
(Yes)  (No)

[mezo]

You can now easily enable vaapi / video acceleration in chrome 86 from chrome://flags

could you please tell which flags? i cant get it to work.

[Guest]

There is funny engineering principle: if something could go wrong, it would. So I can imagine this feature would give birth to all kinds of mischief.

As for persistence and sessions, aren't there e.g. background workers that could run detached from "tabs" or something, even quite some time after user thinks they "closed it"?

As for directory pickers and so on I can imagine apps would readily scan dirs - and send content to their servers if they can access this kind of information.

Then most of users aren't system level geniuses and would just click. Unhealthy things would happen.

Facebook will be the #1 user of this API. Their motto is "all your data belong to us".

[Guest]

"Native File System API" - Guess I'm disabling this. Hopefully I can disable this via chrome:flags. Or even compile my own version of Chromium without this.

[Guest]

I will buy a big cake the day electron dies, and it will be a massive party. Its like the Margaret Thatcher of computers.

Not just Electron, CEF on general. Shipping a whole web browser with your app, because you couldn't be bothered to learn something other than HTML/CSS/JavaScript is just idiocy.

[xAlt7x]

You can now easily enable vaapi / video acceleration in chrome 86 from chrome://flags

could you please tell which flags? i cant get it to work.

Just checked, it doesn't work.
Normally you need to enable it in chrome:flags

chrome://flags/#enable-accelerated-video-decode

for Brave browser I needed

chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blocklist

For latest Chromium 85 I also launched it with flag

--use-gl=desktop (e.g. /usr/bin/google-chrome-beta --use-gl=desktop)

Also you may need to install h264ify extension to force YT to use h264 codec.
Finally launch some video & open

chrome://media-internals/

At properties you should see

kVideoDecoderName "MojoVideoDecoder"

instead of

kVideoDecoderName "FFmpegVideoDecoder"

None if this works here. They enabled option selection but probably built it without "use_vaapi=true" flag (don't know to check build flags)



So until they build it properly we still have to rebuild Chromium for VAAPI...

[ssokolow]

As for persistence and sessions, aren't there e.g. background workers that could run detached from "tabs" or something, even quite some time after user thinks they "closed it"?

I haven't checked but I imagine that persistent background workers would see closing the last visible tab as equivalent to using the omnibar icon to revoke all permissions before the session has ended.

[arQon]

Or the likes of:

Would you like to grant web page X access to: /home/you/harmless /../../../dev/nvme0
(Yes) (No)

Yeah. And even without that, this is pretty much a terrible idea. Everyone freaks out about OS-level exploits, but - as FB has shown, amongst others - it's /home that actually MATTERS. Anyone can reinstall an OS (my dad did it a few years ago when his Ubuntu machine's HDD died, and I didn't even know until months later: #proudson :P), but if you don't have backups in the first place, some random website written by the lowest bidder that offers to save your receipt automatically etc can do SO much harm with this. And that's without getting into the DELIBERATELY malicious uses of it and hoovering up all the TXT / DOC / etc files in there.

When Firefox killed XUL and broke extensions like DownThemAll, this was one of their (many) arguments for why extensions had to die. It'll be interesting to see if they back-pedal on that now and support this.