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

[smitty3268]

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

Right, which is why we're all watching Ogg Theora videos online these days.

What's the actual use-case for supporting FLAC, besides "it's cool"? It means your browser now has extra code/size, and more potential security holes to worry about. I'm not sure I see the upside, particularly if you assume most other browsers won't follow, and again, the question is why would they? Which websites want to use FLAC?

[smitty3268]

I don't understand the reason for which firefox team doesn't abandon ANGLE for WEBGL also on microsoft operating systems. Currently webgl is preferable also on these operating systems.

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.

[liam]

Glad its finally here, but why it took so long for an open source web browser to implement an open source audio codec?? The WINE folks could have reverse engineered some Windows DLL's faster than this. LOL

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.

[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.

[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)).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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...