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Firefox 49 For Linux Will Ship With Plug-in Free Netflix, Amazon Prime Video Support (mozilla.org)
Reader LichtSpektren writes: Widevine, the media protocol that allows users to watch videos on Netflix, is supported in Firefox for Windows and macOS. But until now, its users on Linux were required to use a plug-in. That changes with v49, which offers out-of-the-box support for Netflix.Mozilla plans to offer plug-in streaming for Netflix as well as Amazon Prime Video and other similar services. The v49 will be available on Linux in September. Mozilla adds that it will be removing support for NPAPI plugins from its browser in the near future, plugins that some video streaming sites rely on for playback. "Mozilla plan to support the Widevine CDM on Linux, letting users watch Netflix without plugins," the company said.
for netflix viewers: ignore this update, you already likely see netflix on an embedded linux television.
for non viewers: enjoy your free, mandatory DRM in the browser.
for Firefox developers: get rid of pocket, get rid of sync, please work on fixing the bugs youre assigned, hustle up and get that godforsaken voice chat program out of the browser, restore cookie control functionality, quit mandating signed plugins to curtail adblock users, and ditch the targeted advertising tiles.
Good people go to bed earlier.
A proper plug-in based video streaming like streamed .wmv would use a 2D graphics card's abilities to scale video and do YUV to RGB conversion in hardware so that a low end 500MHz CPU would play full screen smooth, with no SSE, no hardware decoding or no OpenGL.
Your statement here is...bizarre. You laud not using hardware acceleration in a process using hardware acceleration? YUV to RGB is definitely hardware decoding. Though perhaps you were thinking about whole-stream in-hardware decoding of MP4?
Fast-forward a decade and a faster netbook with 16x the RAM is struggling playing 240p youtube even in small size windowed mode. Well done.
SSE came out in 1999, not 2006, and was in response to AMD's 3dNow! from 1998, which itself was a response to Intel's 1997 MMX technology, whose specific purpose was graphics processing acceleration on the CPU. We're getting darn near 20 years ago, at this point.
Now, I won't argue that the layers upon layers of APIs and abstractions aren't harming performance and reliability. On the contrary, I think the proliferation of different components all fighting to talk to the GPU is creating a huge bottleneck and complexity point. And browser architecture, such as it presently exists, isn't making things much better. It sort of helps you understand why flash was so popular for so long; a content provider could trust that there was a team of people at Adobe dedicated to concentrating on and working around platform issues that harmed the viewer's subjective experience. (Yes, flash is buggy, it crashes, it's the worst thing that ever happened to the web, whatever. But nobody else had a team dedicated to providing what Flash tried to provide.)
If processes can't be assigned fine-grained permissions then your operating system is shit.
Let's ignore that there are entire operating systems built around the browser experience. The browser itself is the new thick client for a huge swath of user experience; you don't need to escape the browser's process to do real damage.
Firefox does do "on the fly decompression of images so off screen images are not stored in memory uncompressed".
When complaining about Firefox memory usage, make sure your understanding of the issues is up-to-date.