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Chrome is Getting the Ability To Play FLAC (theverge.com)
Audiophiles are getting a new way to listen to one of the top formats for lossless music. From a report: Google has begun adding FLAC support to Chrome, and it should be rolling out to the masses very soon. FLAC support is already live in Chrome's beta build and it's live in the current version of Chrome OS, too. If you have local FLAC files or come across one on the web, the added support allows Chrome to open it up in a completely bare-bones music player that takes over the entire tab. It's not exactly elegant, but it works. And it means that Mac users with Chrome installed will have an easy way to play back FLAC files should they come across one. While there are plenty of apps that can handle FLAC -- VLC being a popular one -- no native macOS app is capable of it. Windows 10, on the other hand, includes native support.
Google assumes you don't have a flac player installed, so chrome will become the default. They can then fingerprint the file and send that along with the filename back to google whenever you open one.
Nothing fancy. I can hear a definite difference between FLAC and MP3 files on my old Marantz receiver with some JBL speakers.