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

[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.

[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.

[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?

[torsionbar28]

No service provider is going to stream FLAC because it is uncompressed

Lol, what? Do you understand what FLAC is? It's an audio codec for *compressing* audio.

[torsionbar28]

Priorities... I use FLAC all of the time in my personal music collection, but I never found myself wishing for support for it in a browser.

I too keep my music collection stored as FLAC. I realized recently how nice browser FLAC support would be, when I attempted to set up a streaming media server so I could listen to my home music collection from my desk at work. The only way it would work, was to have the streaming app transcode it (on the server side) first, due to lack of FLAC support in the browser.

Next thing I'd like to see added to browsers is MKV video file support...

[torsionbar28]

Some of it has to do with how unlikely it is for Microsoft or Apple to implement it. MS because they're lazy, and Apple because they hate standards and want to see them fail.

On a personal level, I would be happy that it's here, but it's not in Chromium so practically speaking it's not "here" for me.

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

[uid313]

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.

[Anvil]

dont expect Firefox 51 as an update in Fedora Linux anytime soon.https://lists.fedoraproject.org/arch...NQBQVGWPPNT2I/

[starshipeleven]

I'm now talking about e10s. Xul won't be dropped in the nearest future.

Firefox is trying desperately to not end like PaleMoon, to do that it must change, and changes must be gradual.

[higuita]

e10s really need add-ons to be updated... in the past everything run inside one thread, now you have several of then and add-on must negate their use. This had to happen someday, if not now, later, when servo replaces geko, it would need that change, forcing not only that change but several others... the result would be that most add-on would die, too much work. smaller steps make easier to migrate or fork and migrate than huge jumps