Chrome 56 Released With WebGL 2.0 By Default, FLAC Support

[L_A_G]

I1. Why do browsers have to be jacks-of-all-trades?

Because nobody wants to have dozens different browsers and other standalone applications to actually use whatever they want to use on the internet.

2. Why FLAC?

People listen to a lot of music in the browser these days so there's naturally a real world market for high quality file formats in the browser as well. Record labels haven't been among those going after Youtube the heaviest just for for the hell of it.

Anyone here remember the origins of Firefox? It was once outcoupled from the Mozilla Suite (formerly Netscape, today Seamonkey) because it was named to be so "bloated", "obese" and "slow". FF 3 was fairly good and fast, but I can't say that about today's FF. (Of course, webpages have become increasingly horrible. Back in the days people used sometimes colours that looked like a LSD trip, but today there is more ads and broken Java Script code than actual content.)

When people want to do many more things in their browsers it really is a choice between adding loads more features (introducing plenty of new attack vectors) and simply being left behind and forcing users who want to do these things to either install a second browser or move to another browser entirely.

Besides, as long as you sandbox your browser the additional attack vectors aren't even that big of a problem as any practical exploit will also have to be bundled with a virtual machine escape exploit.

[johanb]

improves performance of the browser by throttling web-pages in background tabs

This is not true Michael, you have clearly read that wrong somewhere.

Those of you who read Hacker News and saw the article about this a couple of days ago and read the comment section might have stumbled over this from a Chromium developer.

Hi, this is Alexander. I'm an engineer on Chromium team working on scheduling and on background tab throttling in particular.
Firstly, I want to make clear that we are not shipping this in Chrome 56. We have enabled throttling as an experiment in beta channel to measure impact and collect feedback from web devs. We will aim to ship it in Chrome 57, subject to further feedback.

In response to concerns voiced we will disable aggressive throttling when active websocket connection is present. Tabs playing audio are already unthrottled.

We will also consider more signals to use in exempting a page from this throttling: metatag, pinned tabs, permission to show notifications from user. Please leave a comment in the bug (crbug.com/650594) if you have other suggestions.

Looking forward to your feedback, Alexander.

[FishPls]

excellent news. If only it was available for XP too.

You can still compile chromium for XP. At least Opera still supports XP, and I suppose they keep local patches around to keep it building. Well, actually it should still build fine, so maybe not. Just try it.

[devius]

FF 3 was fairly good and fast, but I can't say that about today's FF.

Actually I noticed a significant performance improvement starting with version 50.

(Of course, webpages have become increasingly horrible. Back in the days people used sometimes colours that looked like a LSD trip, but today there is more ads and broken Java Script code than actual content.)

True. A lot of sites are horrid in that regard, but I use the hosts file trick to limit what gets loaded and to avoid using a computational heavy ad-blocker. Works pretty well.

[dlq84]

excellent news. If only it was available for XP too.

Yeah, more incentive for people to use unsupported software is always a great idea.

[Azrael5]

by the way, the 5.1 audio codec will be ever available also on youtube?

[finalzone]

I don't understand FLAC support in FF or Chrome or whatever-browser.
1. Why do browsers have to be jacks-of-all-trades?
It just increaes surface for vulnerabilities and bugs. And memory footprint.
2. Why FLAC?
FLAC is awesome for a backup of your CDs. But seriously, does anyone listen to his/her music collection via Browser? And: Would anyone in the world stream FLAC? That is a lot of bandwidth.

Wav format is part of standard support on majority of browser so why not FLAC. On the positive side, it is good an open standard lossless audio format got adopted which will be useful when doing intranet activity.

[torsionbar28]

2. Why FLAC?
FLAC is awesome for a backup of your CDs. But seriously, does anyone listen to his/her music collection via Browser? And: Would anyone in the world stream FLAC? That is a lot of bandwidth.

I stream my home audio collection via browser. The files are all stored as FLAC of course. Browser support means I'll no longer have to transcode them. I like that.

As for the bandwidth, it's really not a lot these days. 10 years ago, sure, it wouldn't make sense. But with today's internet connection speeds, it makes perfect sense. Streaming FLAC is less bandwidth than a standard-def youtube video, and people stream those all day every day, over cell phones no less!

[Azrael5]

Yeah, more incentive for people to use unsupported software is always a great idea.

there is no reason to unsupport XP considering that opengl APIs by drivers make it still modern. By the way XP is still supported up to 2019 named as windows embedded POSREADY. The reason developers don't support XP is that MICRO$$hit had made pressure in order XP be dismissed in favor of newer operating system so to sold them.

[mulenmar]

excellent news. If only it was available for XP too.

XP

*facepalm*

Nobody wants to service your 16-year-old botnet node.

By the way XP is still supported up to 2019 named as windows embedded POSREADY. The reason developers don't support XP is that MICRO$$hit had made pressure in order XP be dismissed in favor of newer operating system so to sold them.

Look, I hate Macrosucks software as much as the next guy, but XP is such shit from a security standpoint these days that they even gave away -- IE, not making money on the OS -- the newer versions. Embedded stuff isn't (or SHOULDN'T) be Internet-connected, so it's not as big a deal.

If you're going to troll, please at least do so intelligently so we can have a laugh.