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A comment on Firefox 80. Parent comment

Re:Firefox 80 by ocdtrekkie on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @02:47PM (#24274617)
Honestly, I really miss Edge's EPUB support. Like really miss it. There's a lot of things I think browsers should not do. WebUSB? WebMIDI? Burn these things with fire. Do not connect the web browser to hardware.

Web browsers are supposed to actually be document viewers. HTML is a document format. I am 100% on-board with web browsers also reading PDFs and EPUBs.

I know Mozilla is hurting for manpower right now, but I'd drop dead with excitement if EPUB support came to Firefox.

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Re:Firefox 80 by nickjj on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @03:30PM (#24275093)
Fortunately Sumatra (on Windows) opens pdf, epub and mobi files: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

I switched to it a while back and haven't looked back since. It's open source too.

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Re:Firefox 80 by kelnos on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @03:04PM (#24274808)
> Web browsers are supposed to actually be document viewers.

That ship sailed long ago. For better or worse, web browsers are application platforms now.

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Re:Firefox 80 by mhh__ on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @04:00PM (#24275455)
Not really sure about WebUSB but WebMIDI is pretty harmless, surely?

The browser probably won't be good enough to replace Ableton (or similar) for a while but it is the primary medium for a lot of digital (interactive) artwork - for projects that use sound it's nice to plug a MIDI device straight into the browser.

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Re:Firefox 80 by acolumb on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @04:25PM (#24275700)
As long as VSTs are native-only (which based on the low-latency nature of audio processing would probably never see a cloud implementation,) web-based DAWs will never replace locally-run ones. Most music studios airgap their systems anyway.
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Re:Firefox 80 by flingo on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @08:05PM (#24277706)
You could probably get alright performance running in the browser using webassembly. No idea if anyone's working on anything like that.
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Re:Firefox 80 by lioeters on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @03:28AM (#24280041)
I'm curious too. From a quick search, I found WebDSP, "A client-side DSP library utilizing the power of WebAssembly".

https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp

> WebDSP is a collection of highly performant algorithms, which are designed to be building blocks for web applications that aim to operate on media data.

> The methods are written in C++ and compiled to WASM, and exposed as simple vanilla Javascript functions developers can run on the client side.

..On further reading, they have functions for video and image processing, but not audio as far as I can tell.

---

There's Glissando, "A web-based digital audio workstation using the web platform APIs (Web Audio, Web MIDI) and WebAssembly".

https://github.com/glissando-daw/glissando-app

They mention "VST support", but I cannot imagine how that's possible from the web.

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Re:Firefox 80 by moonchild on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @04:09PM (#24275544)
It can be used for fingerprinting. And most people who care enough to own dedicated MIDI devices also care enough to own dedicated MIDI software.
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Re:Firefox 80 by symlinkk on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @04:05PM (#24275504)
How far do you go with that? Should web browsers render .docx?
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Re:Firefox 80 by ocdtrekkie on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @05:03PM (#24276076)
I mean, sure? XML-based document formats aren't really foreign to web browsers anyways, and it'd probably be a safer way to view third party documents than Word...
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Re:Firefox 80 by int_19h on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @06:00PM (#24276690)
And just like that, we'll reinvent OLE eventually, but with HTML5 and JavaScript.
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Re:Firefox 80 by notriddle on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @04:57PM (#24276017)
Yeah, that would be awesome.
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