Firefox 49 For Linux Will Ship With Plug-in Free Netflix, Amazon Prime Video Support (mozilla.org)

Posted by msmash on Monday August 15, 2016 @02:43AM from the plug-in-free-world dept.

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.

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Re:This move from modularity to massive monoliths. by Eravnrekaree · 2016-08-15 04:50 · Score: 1, Interesting

Most Firefox memory use is due to memory leaks and caching of image data, rather than actual code. What the browser could and needs to do is allow for more on the fly decompression of image so off screen images are not stored in memory uncompressed and allow the user to set the maximum size of the image cache. Google Chrome seems to do a little better because each tab is a different process, there is more chance for memory to reclaimed by the OS when a tab is closed and the process killed. Firefox is one big process that just accumulates leaked memory.