iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on

Re:iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from lin... by atonse on Thursday June 08, 2023 @08:39PM (#36251503)

As someone who grew up with mp3s, your example seems interesting because it seems like an example where you had to encode from something obscure (ogg) to the closest thing to a “universal” sound format as wav could be: MP3.

In that case doesn’t it seem like Google took an ideological stance by choosing a non-patent-encumbered codec instead of supporting mp3? And they could do it because of their dominance? Or is that not accurate?

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Re:iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from lin... by seba_dos1 on Thursday June 08, 2023 @10:42PM (#36252441)

Vorbis was ubiquitous on the Web way before Google had such influence over it as it has today, and MP3 was absolutely nowhere near universal. Firefox did not support MP3 for a while, and even once it did it relied on system codecs - and many distros didn't ship with MP3 support by default until its patents expired a few years ago.

Choosing non-patent-encumbered codecs for open standards is as much ideological as practical.

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Re:iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from lin... by jonhohle on Friday June 09, 2023 @01:01AM (#36253429)

I’ve never seen Vorbis and ubiquitous in the same sentence. Besides Mozilla, who had Vorbis native support in their browser?

In practice, MP3 has had support on every platform since the mid 90s. I could probably count the number of times I’ve come across an ogg file being distributed on one hand.

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Re:iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from lin... by seba_dos1 on Friday June 09, 2023 @10:06AM (#36257998)

> Besides Mozilla, who had Vorbis native support in their browser?

Pretty much everyone who implemented HTML5 audio for a few years, while MP3 support in the browser was initially barely heard of? Mozilla, Google, Opera, KHTML, WebKit... Safari and IE were the only outliers, and had tiny minority of market share for a while (not counting versions that didn't support HTML5 audio at all).

You couldn't use MP3 without Vorbis fallback on the Web for about a decade. Whenever you played audio in the browser without using Flash on anything else than iPhone since 2009, chances that it was Vorbis were very high for a good while. Even YouTube used it before switching to Opus.

In practice, although very popular, MP3 was nowhere near universally supported until just a few years ago. I know that pretty well - I have posted patches to some projects that enabled MP3 support once its patents expired myself.

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Re:iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from lin... by account42 on Monday June 12, 2023 @11:02AM (#36294822)

I had a portable "MP3" player that natively supported Vorbis long before HTML5 was a thing.

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Re:iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from lin... by pjmlp on Friday June 09, 2023 @02:47AM (#36254213)

In what alternative universe?

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Re:iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from lin... by dwaite on Friday June 09, 2023 @04:32AM (#36254969)

Non-patent-encumbered and standard are not the same thing at all. Platforms do not want to ship support for esoteric formats, and will fight back against adding anything not needed for long-term interoperability - for examples, see JPEG XL drama lately in Chrome.

This is for maintainability/security surface reasons as well as patent risks, as open/closed and standardized/bespoke axes have nothing to do with whether or not something is patent encumbered.

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