this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Firefox 118 Available With Performance Improvements, Automated Translations (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 year ago by pyromaniac_donkey@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Profile switching is a big one for me.

Also kind of nitpicky on my end, but I would like to at least have the option for H.265 support. I know they can't include it OOTB, but I can't even buy a license compatible with FF.

[–] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Profile switching is a big one for me.

You can change profiles by going to about:profiles. I find the way it's implemented in Firefox preferable to other browsers but I can see why others wouldn't.

You can also start up the profile switcher when you launch Firefox when launching it from the command-line with firefox -p.

Is this what you were talking about, or were you referring to something different?

but I would like to at least have the option for H.265 support.

Google Chrome only recently implemented this via hardware decoding. I imagine it's possible for Firefox to do the same thing without infringing on patents, as the browser doesn't implement a decoder this way; rather, they use the decoder implemented by NVIDIA et al.

I can only laugh when I consider Google announced they were dropping H.264 support 12 years ago: https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html

H.264 support only exists in Firefox by the grace of Cisco. Out of curiosity, why are you interested in H.265 support?

[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The profile manager isn't available on mobile, at least I couldn't find it or switch accounts without completely signing out. Checks all the boxes for me on desktop though.

I travel a lot for work and stream Plex. All my media is in HEVC and I dont want to have to buy a video card for the server just so I can transcode it to Firefox when everything else can play HEVC out of the box.

[–] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, mobile. That's not a platform I use often. I'll defer to you on that!

All my media is in HEVC and I dont want to have to buy a video card for the server just so I can transcode it to Firefox when everything else can play HEVC out of the box.

As far as I know, Google Chrome did not support HEVC until last year. Safari is still the only browser with a software decoder for HEVC, but I'm pretty sure it was the only one with any form of decoding support for HEVC until 2022. Let me check caniuse!

https://caniuse.com/hevc

So, it seems Samsung Internet (a browser I've never heard of, but presumably is the default on Samsung devices) also supported HEVC decoding for a long time, but aside from that, even hardware decoding support in Chrome is super recent: https://bitmovin.com/google-adds-hevc-support-chrome/

I was going to make a snarky comment about VP9 being good enough for Sisvel since they're trying to chase down Google for patent infringement royalties on HEVC, but yeah, transcoding all that media does not sound fun.

But on the other hand, a bug triager for Mozilla opened a new ticket for HEVC support 3 months ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1842838

It's a strange ticket. No description at all, and why would they care about bugs for a video codec they don't support? It suggests Mozilla is going to do...something with HEVC sometime in the future. Shrug.

Edit: Did some more digging. See this ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1853448

HEVC playback will be supported via the Media Foundation Transform (MFT) and WMF decoder module will check if there is any avaliable MFT which can be used for HEVC then reports the support information.

HEVC playback can only be support on (1) users have purchased paid HEVC extension on their computer (SW decoding) (2) HEVC hardware decoding is available on users' computer

HEVC playback needs hardware decoding, and it currently only support on Windows. HEVC playback check would be run when the task is in the mda-gpu, which has the ability for hardware decoding. On other platforms, HEVC should not be supported.

Hooray for Windows users, I guess.

[–] ugo@feddit.it 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What does profile switching do better than tab containers?

[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Syncing 2 different sets of extensions, bookmarks and browsing history across devices reliably. I wish it did work, I hate running Edge on Linux. Even regular Firefox profile sync is kinda flaky for me though.

[–] adihex@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Firefox has a profile manager right?

[–] moist_towelettes@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On desktop yes but not mobile.