Firefox 51 Released With FLAC Audio Support, WebGL 2.0 By Default

[mulenmar]

Btw, I'd agree that Linux desktop doesn't warrant a port of lots of software, but browsers are a bit special. If developing new software, if at all possible, you should maximize your potential market by using a cross platform framework.

As long as the browser is not misused as that framework. A UNIX- or (some vaporware)Plan9-derivative actual operating system, sure, that's what it's for. It can even be a usermode layer.

Browsers, however, are for delivering hypertext with *suggestions* on how to display it, not for lazy developers who can't be bothered to even learn Python and QT for delivering platform-independent programs, or how to write fallback code for people with handicaps like blindness.

[liam]

Huh? It has nothing to do with the "majority". Those of us with real hi-fi audio equipment won't touch lossy codecs with a ten foot pole. Yes hi-fi enthusiasts are not a large number. But then again, Netflix has been offering 4k streaming content for a while now - I don't even know anyone who owns a 4k television. Unless your screen size is 80" or larger, there's no compelling reason to use 4k over 1080p. From a normal living room couch viewing distance, 4k video is completely useless to the vast majority of TV watchers. On the other hand, I know a half dozen people with serious hi-fi home audio systems.

Following your logic, the majority of internet users don't use Linux, therefore why should any browser vendor, Firefox, Chrome, etc. bother with a Linux port? Focus on Microsoft and skip that tiny niche operating system with the penguin.

By saying majority, I was trying to politely say pretty much everyone, bar unreplicated golden ear listeners.
One more thing, the size of the screen doesn't mean much, and I'm not going to claim to know what a "normal" distance might be, but I'd be interested in reading about where such values come from.
For a 50" 4k tv you should be able to see a difference up to about 6.5ft.


Btw, I'd agree that Linux desktop doesn't warrant a port of lots of software, but browsers are a bit special. If developing new software, if at all possible, you should maximize your potential market by using a cross platform framework.

[liam]

Uncompressed PCM at 16b 48kHz is 768kb/s. That is not an order of magnitude (unless you are working in base 2) higher. And FLAC frequently reaches a compression ratio of 2 (aka “half the size“) on many sources that are not mostly white noise.

As for Opus, I suspect it should be transparent at 128kb/s already. It's VASTLY better than MP3. I wonder why Music stores still sell MP3 by default instead of Opus (probably because certain groups of consumer still have outdated players that only play MP3, even though Opus has been out for 5 years (bitstream freeze)).

https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/201594722-How-good-is-the-sound-quality-on-TIDAL-

HiFi:
Flac 1411 kbps - Lossless
(16/44.1 khz)

So, half an order of magnitude
Regarding opus, xiph says that 128 is pretty much transparent. Nice estimate, cg.

https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings

I think the main reason why mp3 is still around is laziness I'm not really joking, but that is kinda sad. On the desktop, I believe all the major browsers support opus, so, no issue there. On mobile, it should, mostly, be the same (not positive about iPhone, but definitely Android is fine).

[torsionbar28]

Question is, do you have any reason to expect that anyone *will* follow? If yes, then by all means be the leader. But if not, not much point in spending time implementing a feature that everyone will ignore for lack of cross-browser support.

The various Apple devices all support Apple Lossless format. Most other brands of MP3 and music players support both OGG and FLAC. Why would you want to own media files in a format that cannot be streamed through a browser? Clearly there is a market for this. Not to mention the fact that Mozilla has just implemented it...

[torsionbar28]

Because streaming with lossless audio codec is stupid (unless you are planning on mixing it later)?
Mp3 is transparent to the majority around 384Kb. I'd expect opus to be a decent amount lower, so perhaps under 300Kb? A lossless track can easily be an order of magnitude larger.

Huh? It has nothing to do with the "majority". Those of us with real hi-fi audio equipment won't touch lossy codecs with a ten foot pole. Yes hi-fi enthusiasts are not a large number. But then again, Netflix has been offering 4k streaming content for a while now - I don't even know anyone who owns a 4k television. Unless your screen size is 80" or larger, there's no compelling reason to use 4k over 1080p. From a normal living room couch viewing distance, 4k video is completely useless to the vast majority of TV watchers. On the other hand, I know a half dozen people with serious hi-fi home audio systems.

Following your logic, the majority of internet users don't use Linux, therefore why should any browser vendor, Firefox, Chrome, etc. bother with a Linux port? Focus on Microsoft and skip that tiny niche operating system with the penguin.

[Delgarde]

Someone has to do it first, and the rest will follow. Does Mozilla want to lead? Or follow?

Question is, do you have any reason to expect that anyone *will* follow? If yes, then by all means be the leader. But if not, not much point in spending time implementing a feature that everyone will ignore for lack of cross-browser support.

[mulenmar]

*headdesks*

BROWSERS. ARE. NOT. OPERATING. SYSTEMS.
FLAC IS NOT FOR STREAMING.

Call the host's media player software (WMP, Quicktime, whatever XDG-util sends back as the media player) to playback the content if you absolutely MUST stream a few hundred megabytes of music.

WebGL just smacks of something that's going to become as overused as auto-playing MIDI files were in the 90s and Javascript is today, but at least THAT makes some sense to have.

[Azrael5]

I not sure if you understand what ANGLE is. It doesn't replace WEBGL. It's just a backend for it. ANGLE could only be replaced by a OpenGL backend, and good luck getting that to work on Intel hardware on windows.

Yes it works it's enough to disable angle.

[CrystalGamma]

Because streaming with lossless audio codec is stupid (unless you are planning on mixing it later)?
Mp3 is transparent to the majority around 384Kb. I'd expect opus to be a decent amount lower, so perhaps under 300Kb? A lossless track can easily be an order of magnitude larger.

Uncompressed PCM at 16b 48kHz is 768kb/s. That is not an order of magnitude (unless you are working in base 2) higher. And FLAC frequently reaches a compression ratio of 2 (aka “half the size“) on many sources that are not mostly white noise.

As for Opus, I suspect it should be transparent at 128kb/s already. It's VASTLY better than MP3. I wonder why Music stores still sell MP3 by default instead of Opus (probably because certain groups of consumer still have outdated players that only play MP3, even though Opus has been out for 5 years (bitstream freeze)).

[liam]

FLAC support is completely uninteresting and useless. Nobody is going to use it.
No other major browser supports FLAC, not Chrome, not Edge, only Firefox.
No service provider is going to stream FLAC because it is uncompressed so it requires huge bandwidth which makes it too expensive.

It would be better if they improved the got it working with GTK+ 3 on Wayland, or if it added support for input elements of type date, datetime and datetime-local.

According to the bugreport, tidal use FLAC.