Chrome Further Optimizes Its OpenH264 Encoder With More Assembly x86

[Vistaus]

Would you strip features missing from ANY of those or ALL of those? ...because you'd get a surprisingly useless browser if you supported only what IE supported while most of the features you list (H.264 encoding, WebGL, built-in PDF reader, etc.) are present in Firefox and Opera too.

False. GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany) supports WebGL, has a built-in PDF reader and more while still being very lean. I've also had no problems loading websites, everything just works (with the exception of Outlook.com loading in some sort of lightweight mode, but that's easily solveable by changing Web's useragent to Chrome with dconf-editor). I'm using it for a long, long time now.

[ssokolow]

Uh... since when does 99% of the userbase do video encoding in their web browser, or use 3D accelerated web pages? The vast majority of people (particularly those who don't use Chrome) have or prefer an external PDF reader. You are heavily exaggerating how useless a browser would be by removing these niche or redundant features.

False. GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany) supports WebGL, has a built-in PDF reader and more while still being very lean. I've also had no problems loading websites, everything just works (with the exception of Outlook.com loading in some sort of lightweight mode, but that's easily solveable by changing Web's useragent to Chrome with dconf-editor). I'm using it for a long, long time now.

You're both missing the point. I was asking what criteria you wanted to use to mark a feature for inclusion or exclusion and saying that the only two criteria which are, in my mind, justifiably not arbitrary, are going to either cripple the web far more than you think or exclude far less than you think.

schmidtbag, just to name a couple of examples, Google Street View uses WebGL for rendering and tools like web.skype.com are already integrating support for WebRTC.

Vistaus, I don't even know what you think you're saying "False" to when Epiphany supporting WebGL and having a built in PDF reader supports my point.

Also, Firefox does not support built-in video encoding or PDF reader. As for Opera, the modern version is basically just a modified version of Chrome, so very often (but not always) whatever Chrome supports, Opera will eventually too. Anyway, that still doesn't detract from the fact that some of these features are unnecessary. Also, I just used those 3 as examples. There are others too.

Yes, it does to both of those Firefox claims... unless you want to split hairs over what counts as "built-in".

Firefox includes PDF.js, which is about as native as the panel UIs for the WebExtensions API they're aggressively migrating to, and the bundled "OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc." plugin provides encoding and decoding in order to meet WebRTC requirements.

As for "unnecessary", I think we'll have to agree to disagree... especially for WebRTC. Most humans don't share our perspective and don't see text (even rich text) as an acceptable substitute for voice and/or video. The whole point of WebRTC was to remove the need for Flash to implement sites like YouTube and compete with proprietary offerings like Skype. (Since nobody else seems to be able to get "Just Works™" right in app form.)

[torsionbar28]

Hey, web browser developers -- here's a shocking thought:

BROWSERS ARE NOT OPERATING SYSTEMS.

Quit making the browser do what the operating system already does -- GUI drawing, video encoding, or anything else. You're duplicating functionality.

But Microsoft says the web browser is an integral part of the OS and it's not technically possible to separate the two. lol

[droidhacker]

No they weren't... :\ That is, all modern browsers have the same capabilities (mostly) as older browsers, but newer ones have way more features and support a lot more standards.

Way more USELESS crap that bogs things down and makes the "web" generally painful.

[devius]

Way more USELESS crap that bogs things down and makes the "web" generally painful.

Totally agreed man!

Sent from my courier pigeon through a smoke signal firewall.