It’s not a great sign when the headline ‘Lots to see in Firefox 93’ fills me with dread. I was expecting some new UI breakage, advertising being crammed in, or something else.
This list, at least, looks largely uninteresting – which is a massive relief.
The SHA-256 algorithm is now supported for HTTP Authentication using digests. This allows much more secure authentication than previously available using the MD5 algorithm.
As I have read this, I though this is strange (and not because it’s 2021 and we still have MD5). So I have looked how digests works in the MDN and found this quote:
Firefox 93 and later support SHA-256 encryption. Previous versions only support MD5 hashing (not recommended).
What the hell is SHA-256 encryption? So looked at the RFC and the Wikipedia article how digits works. It’s a hashing protocol with has some nice features. The problem with this is the server must Store the password (or something which effectively is the password). So in most cases digests itself is insecure.
This bugs me because developers and vendors should be clear and correct (in official communication) with there wording.
How’d that work out for JPEG2000? HEIC and AVIF actually have traction. It does help that accelerated rendering is basically cheaper with the video-derived codecs.
One problem with HEIC is that it’s really slow without acceleration; a HEIC images from my iPhone take about 3 seconds to load. Browsing a directory is undoable without some thumbnail cache. Not sure why libheif isn’t using hardware acceleration: maybe it’s not implemented, or maybe it just doesn’t work on my particular machine, I couldn’t really figure it out and just accepted that it’s slow. AVIF has similar performance characteristics in my testing.
Personally I’d consider that a huge downside for a generic wide-spread image format. “Your site loads really slow for me and takes up 100% CPU”, “oh, you don’t have the right kind of computer to do hardware-based HEIC decoding”.
Not sure how this compares to JPEG XL since I never used it, but Wikipedia states “JPEG XL is about as fast to encode and decode as old JPEG using libjpeg-turbo and an order of magnitude faster to encode and decode compared to HEIC with x265”, so that sounds a lot better.
Also, both Chromium and Firefox seem to have JPEG XL support in testing, so it seems like it’s forthcoming. JPEG 2000 was never supported in any browser AFAIK, and the biggest hurdle wasn’t technical but patents/licensing (JPEG XL is royalty-free).
Eh, going back to ‘90s performance is not something I’m looking forward to. Having the same performance (measured in time I need to wait) as 25 years ago is kinda silly. Having worse performance is very silly.
I remember using a program for DOS/Win 3.1 that implemented lookup tables to speed up JPG rendering on my first serious computer - a 386 with 2MB RAM and no math co-processor.
It’s not a great sign when the headline ‘Lots to see in Firefox 93’ fills me with dread. I was expecting some new UI breakage, advertising being crammed in, or something else.
This list, at least, looks largely uninteresting – which is a massive relief.
Advertising is being crammed in.
https://lobste.rs/s/h0rdjd/navigate_web_faster_with_firefox_suggest
This is the highlight of Firefox 93 for me.
As I have read this, I though this is strange (and not because it’s 2021 and we still have MD5). So I have looked how digests works in the MDN and found this quote:
What the hell is SHA-256 encryption? So looked at the RFC and the Wikipedia article how digits works. It’s a hashing protocol with has some nice features. The problem with this is the server must Store the password (or something which effectively is the password). So in most cases digests itself is insecure.
This bugs me because developers and vendors should be clear and correct (in official communication) with there wording.
With all those features, I still can’t use FF due to not fixed bugs!
What does this mean? (regarding AVIF)
PNG and JPEG are lossy. Is AVIF lossy also and it’s just a typo? Or is it lossless and yet still better compression than PNG or JPEG?
PNG can be lossless, though it’s not always used that way.
“Although PNG is a lossless format, PNG encoders can preprocess image data in a lossy fashion to improve PNG compression.”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Lossy_PNG_compression
According to Wikipedia AVIF supports lossless and lossy compression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIF
PNG is lossless…
The AVIF authors really should’ve cancelled the project in favor of JPEG XL. Let an actual image codec take over the world.
How’d that work out for JPEG2000? HEIC and AVIF actually have traction. It does help that accelerated rendering is basically cheaper with the video-derived codecs.
One problem with HEIC is that it’s really slow without acceleration; a HEIC images from my iPhone take about 3 seconds to load. Browsing a directory is undoable without some thumbnail cache. Not sure why libheif isn’t using hardware acceleration: maybe it’s not implemented, or maybe it just doesn’t work on my particular machine, I couldn’t really figure it out and just accepted that it’s slow. AVIF has similar performance characteristics in my testing.
Personally I’d consider that a huge downside for a generic wide-spread image format. “Your site loads really slow for me and takes up 100% CPU”, “oh, you don’t have the right kind of computer to do hardware-based HEIC decoding”.
Not sure how this compares to JPEG XL since I never used it, but Wikipedia states “JPEG XL is about as fast to encode and decode as old JPEG using libjpeg-turbo and an order of magnitude faster to encode and decode compared to HEIC with x265”, so that sounds a lot better.
Also, both Chromium and Firefox seem to have JPEG XL support in testing, so it seems like it’s forthcoming. JPEG 2000 was never supported in any browser AFAIK, and the biggest hurdle wasn’t technical but patents/licensing (JPEG XL is royalty-free).
I mean, that’s what JPEG was like in the early 90s - it took seconds for one to render. Now we don’t even think of them.
Eh, going back to ‘90s performance is not something I’m looking forward to. Having the same performance (measured in time I need to wait) as 25 years ago is kinda silly. Having worse performance is very silly.
I remember using a program for DOS/Win 3.1 that implemented lookup tables to speed up JPG rendering on my first serious computer - a 386 with 2MB RAM and no math co-processor.
Comparing AVIF to PNG is funny, better to compare to a competitor like WebP
This release note is specifically about image support in elements. AV1 support has already existed for a while.
WebP is an image format. Are you thinking of WebM?
Ahahahha, yeah. Thanks.
Could this be merged with https://lobste.rs/s/3nddqb/implementing_form_filling since they both cover new Firefox release features, albeit the latter in more detail.