Two Years After Chrome and Edge, Firefox is Getting AV1 Hardware Acceleration (neowin.net) 44
Firefox is finally gaining proper AV1 support. Neowin reports: According to an update made to a post on Bugzilla, the Mozilla Foundation is finally ready to add hardware acceleration for the AV1 video format. Developers plan to implement improved AV1 support in the upcoming release of Firefox 100, scheduled to arrive on May 3, 2022. Hardware acceleration for AV1 video brings several noticeable benefits to customers. The standard developed by Alliance for Open Media and initially released in March 2018 offers better video compression than H.264 (about 50%) and VP9 (about 20%). Shifting AV1 video processing from software to hardware improves efficiency and reduces energy consumption, resulting in better battery life on tablets and laptops. Google and Microsoft announced hardware-accelerated AV1 video in Chrome and Edge in late 2020. Mozilla, on the other hand, did not rush to introduce improved AV1 support in Firefox. While it is easy to dunk on Firefox, there is a reason why developers took their time. Hardware-accelerated AV1 video is not something you can add to any computer with Windows 10, and it requires a PC with the most recent and powerful hardware.
Edge? (Score:2)
As if Edge does anything innovative, its just a copy of Chrome with MS crap added on top.
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^innovate^steal
There's a reason Microsoft lost the 1990s antitrust lawsuit.
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It was convicted three times in a court of law in the US and in another court of law in the EU.
This has nothing to do with X is bad, Y is good, it is about convicted criminals being convicted and criminal unless they reform - and Microsoft haven't.
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Any action that is a continuation of an action for which they have been convicted is, ergo, an action for which they have been convicted.
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It was able to innovate a higher market share than Firefox.
In all fairness though, it *does* come pre-installed on a major desktop OS. I doubt Firefox is used by 90% of its users just to download some other browser and then never touched again.
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It was able to innovate a higher market share than Firefox.
Beating Firefox requires no innovation, thanks to Mozilla's completely incompetent management.
The Social Justice Buffoons at Mozilla have nearly destroyed what was once the best browser.
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In the sense of this article it does.
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I use it because I'm used to its interface (when they stop buggering about with it for 5 mins). Its just a feckin browser, get over it. Its not the most use app on my desktop by a long way and its perfectly ok for every web page I view. Obviously if you're some loser who spends his life online YMMV.
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Uhh... you just outed yourself as a retrogrouch (and I say this as one myself [though I do NOT have a handlebar mustache, thank you very much]) with that comment.
I use Firefox (I'm a former Chrome user) for two reasons: One their spell-check doesn't break at random times (I never found a reliable fix for this on Chrome) and two, they didn't hard-code a hamstring to ad-blockers so they actually work as intended.
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As if Firefox users ever see ads. Once you've used FF+uBlock Origin, using any other browser is as shocking and dismaying as trying to watch TV in a hotel room.
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It's the only one that can really block javascript and adverts at a granular level.
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I use NoScript, a plug-in for FF that lets you block cross-site scripts and java. You have to do permissions on a per domain basis, but that's the strength. You would be amazed at how many cross-site scripts a great deal of website run.
You don't need the vast majority of them either. I tend to give permissions to the specific site I'm on and sometimes a CDN at their subdomain. Most of the time this enough to make the site perfectly functional without allowing 10 other sites to run scripts, collect info on m
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On some sites I use reader view (shortcut F9) for even cleaner page.
Fire who? (Score:2)
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I don't want to lose the Gecko engine. Having a web monoculture would be terrible. That being said, if Brave supported vertical tabs (Like Vivaldi or FF+TreeStyleTabs), I'd be off of Firefox entirely. Mozilla lost its way when they got Brendan Eich to resign.
Addons on Android restored ? (Score:1)
Thought not.
Because Mozilla thinks it knows better than its users what addons they should be allowed to use.
Better idea... (Score:2)
I have no idea what AV1 Hardware Acceleration is, I'd just like Firefox to open to the home page I specified instead of Yahoo search.
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Huh? Just set it in preferences.
Even better: Set it to "whatever was open when you closed it"
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If you can't change a simple setting in a web browser, there's probably no point in even explaining AV1 to you. Maybe have someone teach you to tie your shoelaces and then we can work from there.
Meh? (Score:2)
I'm a bit meh on hardware video decoding, because it doesn't seem to be the main bottleneck.
Compare the CPU use of a 1080p60 video playing in youtube versus one playing in, say, mplayer. The former is getting pretty heavy on my ancient laptop, the latter doesn't make the fan come on. It seems firefox is spending far more time on compositing after decoding than decoding.
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I barfed slightly: it was h264 video. I don't know if it is enabled, I'll check. I did test my phone with ffmpeg a while ago in the terminal and they can comfortably decode well above real time and I'm pretty sure that doesn't have hardware acceleration.
Finally more ads per second (Score:2)
I was beginning to worry.
Slashdot browser when? (Score:2)
A good thing (Score:3)
AMBE+ and H26* have been dominant in hardware acceleration for so long for no good reason. There are better codecs that are open and lack the massive patent warchest burden, but for some reason there just hadnt been enough energy behind making chips for them.
It will be great to see at least av1 get acceleration.
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but for some reason there just hadnt been enough energy behind making chips for them.
There's plenty of energy, you just aren't paying attention to the development cycle. AV1 is a baby. It's only 3 years old. The day after version 1 was released the first company announced hardware support coming for it. By the end of 2019 (less than a year) every major smartphone manufacturer had announced hardware decoders for SoCs. By the end of 2020 every major TV manufacturer, several smart TV devices (e.g. Roku) and NVIDIA, Intel and AMD announced AV1 hardware for their GPUs.
You don't develop silicon f
Don't be evil (Score:2)
I am still waiting for all the Google browsers: Chrome, Edge and Firefox to add H.265 hardware decoding back.
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Impressive patience you have. Patents surrounding H.265 are expected to expire around 2027 to 2028.
But if pretty much everyone has moved on to AV1 by then, or even whatever comes after AV1, whether the browser makers who don't wish to be patent encumbered will reward your patience with support for a then-obsolete codec remains to be seen.
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Have a nice wait. MPEG fucked H.265 in any commercial product with their shitty licensing scheme. That clusterfuck is the reason why AV1 exists to begin with, and why H.265 will be the last codec released by MPEG. The tech industry had enough of their bullshit and put together their own working group, and created their own more efficient and better video codec, and then released it without licensing encumbrance.
AV1: brought to you by:
Amazon
Apple
ARM
Cisco
Facebook
Google
Huawei
Intel
Microsoft
Mozilla
Netflix
Nvid
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I'm confused. You want Google to add hardware decoding thus directly supporting MPEG-LA and their dumbfuckery, but your title suggests you want them to not be evil. Make up your mind.
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No I want them to support H.265 when there is actual hardware available on the device, that's it.
Negative slashvertisement? (Score:2)
Baseline (Score:2)
I know it is widely used, but H.264 [wikipedia.org] (AVC) was published almost 18 years ago. They should compare to H.265 [wikipedia.org] (HEVC, almost 9 years ago) or to H.266 [wikipedia.org] (VVC, published 2 years ago).
Note that the main "selling point" of AV1 [wikipedia.org] (published 2018) is not its compression speed or compression ratio, but being royalty-free and sufficiently good. But still, if you compare its figures to the competition, please select a proper baseline.
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H.265 is basically dead due to the ridiculous licensing pools and their costs.
H.266 is probably dead due to every major hardware and software company involved with video playback getting pissed at MPEG over H.265 and deciding to band together to fuck MPEG over.
AV1 is the first attempt at that fucking. It's the only thing we've ever seen Intel, AMD, Apple, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Samsung and Netflix agree on; much less about 30 other companies.
MPEG got too greedy and fucked themselves. Couldn't