Mozilla Eyes Removal Of Theora Support In Firefox

[DanL]

Killing Theora also will just kill OGV since OGV only officially supports Theora as a video codec as far as I know.

The ogg container also can hold dirac or daala. IIRC, it is technically capable of holding other video codecs too, but yes, I would guess the vast majority of .ogv files out there are theora.

[jacob]

What a Chrome-competition, which do everytime the same like Chrome.

Seems to be a similar thing like Hotelling's law .

What is, if there are Theora videos on some websites?
Then they can no longer be seen with both browsers.

If that's the case, it shouldn't be a problem for the operator of the website to transcode the videos into a better supported codec. Or, worst case scenario, the user can still watch those videos for example using VLC.

[ElectricPrism]

This whole debacle hammers home that we are doing the web browser wrong.

Linux Web Browsers should offload video playback to the offline video player.

I am also fine with clicking on a image opening in high-res in the offline image viewer as I've seen in some Linux Social Media apps. (Tuba? Or the other one)

Sensible limits can be a very good thing. I really like the idea behind Gemini, I just think that they are slightly more simplistic than I prefer and the "Hyper Space Web" should be slightly more robust, inline image and video previews.

Blazing fast.

Making web browsers into a operating system in many ways was a mistake.

[Anux]

Ha, I saw the headline "Mozilla Eyes Removal ..." and a scared Fish with a big eye.

[billyswong]

Are you actually this pathetic or just pretending to? If you stumble upon an ancient website with videos that your browser doesn't support natively, then just download them to your computer and use some other software for playback. I'm pretty sure e.g. WMV is much more popular than Theora and no browser ever supported that video format.

The last time, browsers used the excuse that they don't want to support "insecure" media player plugins for video/audio and would rather take everything into their own hands. So the old embed tags and objects tags became out of support. They didn't remove media format/codec support directly. They just threw them away together with ActiveX and Java objects indirectly. I can still remember the old days when "Java applet" was a thing. Flash was the only 3rd party object survived, with a lot of media player plugins done in Flash objects too.

Then Adobe gave up support of Flash by themselves.

[aviallon]

Yeah I mean granted a WASM sandbox layer would be good. But IIRC there are already (on some platforms?) other layers of isolation / sandboxing / security configurations etc. for the browser that make exploits harder so that's something. And anyway it's a CODEC something one would kind of expect to be bomb-proof / fuzz-proof / resistant to invalid / corrupt input data, coded robustly / safely, etc. etc.
Maybe I'm giving too much credit for code quality and security but if devs (browser, CODEC library) can't even get THAT stuff right routinely almost every single time after many versions of a stable and widely upstreamed CODEC then that doesn't say anything good about SW engineers / engineering pratices or about the house of cards of bad code / technology we've built everything on.

"If carpenters built houses like programmers build software then civilization would have been destroyed by the first woodpecker that came along."

The main issue is : _proving_ that a code is safe is very very expensive and costly.

[Danny3]

Mozilla probably thought that if VR takes off it would be really bad for them to not have support ready for it. To be honest, HDR is a gimmick similar to VR and not widely supported either. Your fake HDR display most likely has its fake HDR disabled by default and you don't even know it. Enabling it would result in awful picture quality and you'd hate your life.

HDR support in Firefox is not really needed.

My display, yes it has some fake HDR, which doesn't work correctly, even on Windows, but my TV has proper HDR support.

I know it because when I give it some HDR movies on a pen drive, it displays them properly and the HDR-on log appears at the begging of playback.

So for that, I want proper HDR support.

Unlike, Vr, with missing HDR support, Mozilla is making a big mistake.

Remember that videos playback is a huge deal and many users want it in today's internet.

And besides videos, images can have HDR too.

Why do you think that a web browser not being able to display images and vides as they were intended by their creators is not important or needed?

For me it is as I want to be able to use Firefox to see my personal photos and videos on Nextcloud instance and to download high-quality wallpapers, which some of them might have HDR support and I want to see them at the full quality possible, exactly as they were created.

[Danny3]

People have HDR capable displays? Never had one. My wife and me we both have two screens on our desk. But they are like 5-10 years old. No reason to replace them as they work fine. I figure it's similar for other people.

But I'm finally eying with VR headset. So I'm happy for any VR support I can get.

Don't you have and HDR-capable TV, don't you watch movies, don't you care about quality of the image?

I'm eyeing a TV (OLED or Mini / Micro-LED), 4K @ 120 Hz and HDR-capable of course for my next computer display.

There are so many options now.

[Estranged1906]

Theora was never widely used. Wikipedia probably makes up 95% of all (still viewed) Theora videos on the web. And the Theora videos are usually 720 and below. Using a WASM decoder for this legacy stuff is not a huge issue. On the other hand, a next-generation codec (image/video/audio) *has* to be as fast as possible. There is a JXL-Wasm decoder, but it is super slow compared to native code. Also every website using JXL would have to ship the decoder wasm, so you quickly diminish any size advantages over using jpeg. (Ok, using a big CDN will mostly eliminate that size overhead. But the performance will still suffer.)

Apple could make the start on their websites and maybe push others to adopt JXL + a WASM decoder. Safari natively supports JXL, so it would make it appear to be the fastest browser, and they could advertise some neat benchmarks like "Safari renders apple.com x times faster than Chrome".

[oleid]

Don't you have and HDR-capable TV, don't you watch movies, don't you care about quality of the image?

No, we don't have a HDR capable TV. We got an elder used one, which is like 12 years old. And we connected a RASPI to it to make it "smart". As long as it works I don't see any need for a replacement.

I'm eyeing a TV (OLED or Mini / Micro-LED), 4K @ 120 Hz and HDR-capable of course for my next computer display.

There are so many options now.

I always thought TV screens had bigger input lately due to the additional video processing and a worse pixel response time.

Can you deactivate the operating system of the TV somehow?