Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Firefox 52 Released With WebAssembly Support, Security Fixes, CSS Grid

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #21
    Originally posted by stqn View Post
    Using openal or portaudio or whatever instead of alsa/pulseaudio directly seems like the right way to go about it indeed. But Mozilla hasn’t done anything right since Firefox 4, so no surprise there.
    Pulse audio is more or less the linux standard so they do the right thing. Wayland support & HW accel (video and graphics) are needed for linux.

    Comment


    • #22
      Originally posted by cl333r View Post
      1) Chrom[ium] youtube download forbidden by Google
      2) its adblock extensions suck compared to Firefox.
      You shouldn't even be using a browser extension to download youtube videos, there's a program called youtube-dl for that (it works for hundreds of other sites too), and both browsers support uBlock Origin, which I can guarantee is a better adblocker than whatever you're using right now.

      Comment


      • #23
        Originally posted by LoneVVolf View Post
        If Mozilla wanted to reduce the number of supported sound backends, why didn't they switch to a high level backend like gstreamer or qt5-multimedia ?
        Because Firefox's platform integration is already GTK+ based ("no adding Qt dependencies, please") and and, last I checked, GStreamer was unsuitable for the JavaScript APIs which allow generating raw audio streams in the browser. (eg. so that you can write Emscripten ports of DOSBox and ScummVM that don't have horribly stuttery/crackly audio.)

        Comment


        • #24
          Originally posted by ssokolow View Post

          Because Firefox's platform integration is already GTK+ based ("no adding Qt dependencies, please") and and, last I checked, GStreamer was unsuitable for the JavaScript APIs which allow generating raw audio streams in the browser. (eg. so that you can write Emscripten ports of DOSBox and ScummVM that don't have horribly stuttery/crackly audio.)
          What about openal or portaudio though?

          Comment


          • #25
            Can someone tell me if WebAssembly is open or not?
            I hear both versions and I'm not sure which one is true.
            I want to know if it can be inspected like HTML and javascript or is something more like a binary black-box crap.
            If it's binary and Firefox doesn't add and easy option to disable it on all sites in the preferences, I will give up on Firefox for the first time.

            Comment


            • #26
              Originally posted by LoneVVolf View Post
              Another change is that mozilla has deprecated alsa and by default now only support pulseaudio for sound.

              Arch Linux firefox package 52.0-1 was build without alsa support . The maintainer responded favorably to a bug report and firefox 52.0-2 now supports both alsa and pulseaudio for sound again.

              The maintainer did warn that mozilla in near future ( firefox 54 ) plans to remove alsa support completely.


              If Mozilla wanted to reduce the number of supported sound backends, why didn't they switch to a high level backend like gstreamer or qt5-multimedia ?
              That would have allowed users to choose anything supported by that framework.

              I have been a content user of netscape navigator / firefox as primary browser since approx 2000 , but am wondering how much longer i will stay a user.
              I refuse to install/configure pulseaudio (personal reasons) , and a browser without sound support feels rather restricted ...

              Have a look at https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

              Comment


              • #27
                Originally posted by Danny3 View Post
                Can someone tell me if WebAssembly is open or not?
                I hear both versions and I'm not sure which one is true.
                I want to know if it can be inspected like HTML and javascript or is something more like a binary black-box crap.
                If it's binary and Firefox doesn't add and easy option to disable it on all sites in the preferences, I will give up on Firefox for the first time.
                There is a text format that's supposed to be more readable than asm.js.

                Comment


                • #28
                  Originally posted by Danny3 View Post
                  Can someone tell me if WebAssembly is open or not?
                  I hear both versions and I'm not sure which one is true.
                  I want to know if it can be inspected like HTML and javascript or is something more like a binary black-box crap.
                  If it's binary and Firefox doesn't add and easy option to disable it on all sites in the preferences, I will give up on Firefox for the first time.
                  Yes, the binary is just a minified version and can be viewed in a "text format":
                  https://github.com/WebAssembly/desig...rce-on-the-web
                  https://github.com/WebAssembly/desig.../TextFormat.md

                  You can't read the original code it was trans-compiled from though, but the WASM is "open" like js. As I said multiple times before, it runs in the same sandbox as JS does, so realistically it's no different from minified/uglified/obfuscated JS or asm.js.

                  Comment


                  • #29
                    Originally posted by Danny3 View Post
                    Can someone tell me if WebAssembly is open or not?
                    ....
                    I want to know if it can be inspected like HTML and javascript or is something more like a binary black-box crap.
                    It's "open" as long as people don't obfuscate it (you can obfuscate javascript and most other languages too, it's not a new feature).

                    It is shipped and executed in binary form because it's the whole point of it (it's supposed to be executed by machines so why not ship a machine-friendly file?), but the browser's debugging tools/panels will be able to translate it back to a human-readable text which won't resemble the original source code, but will allow inspection and debugging.
                    (dat official site) http://webassembly.org/docs/text-format/
                    WebAssembly does, however, have a specified textual representation of function bodies which should be displayed in browsers and other tools when debugging modules.

                    And you see the example in the table, with a c++ program that is turned in binary wasm and distributed like that, that can be displayed as text in a browser debugging window.

                    Most stuff is still a draft, but the goal (as you see in that official page) is getting a standardized text representation for all binary stuff in the wasm. Sure it won't resemble the original code that created it, but it's not a black box.

                    Comment


                    • #30
                      The WebRTC screensharing now actually works for any site (with user confirmation), which is great for things like a self-hosted jitsi-meet!

                      See https://medium.com/@pastith/feeling-...600#.yq4qo0f76

                      And with the long-announced removal of NPAPI they actually broke Hangouts (https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Fix-p...x/ta-p/1368368), so one more reason to switch to something self-hosted :-)

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X