Comment by est

1 day ago

WHy? Browsers should have supported plethora of formats!

Plethora means an excessive amount, so I disagree.

Adding formats to the browser gives us more code to maintain, increases the binary size, and increases the attack surface area. That's why, at Firefox, we insisted on a Rust decoder.

  • > gives us more code to maintain, increases the binary size

    In that case, don't nanny everything as a monolith. Let formats/codecs can be installed as extension/plugin.

    For example I really want to webrtc to f' off, I can't. I can't even disable it for a particular site like microphone permissions. It sucks!

    And to my knowledge, webrtc stack is so much more complicated than an image format, so many sites trying to grab my private IP using webrtc. yet every browser vendor are happy to support it!

    • Browser vendors want their browser to be safe to use. If we encourage users to essentially bake their own browser from a hodge podge of unverified third party code running at high privilege, we don't meet that goal.

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