Today, Google announced a new browser choice screen in Europe. We love an opportunity to show more people our products, like Firefox for Android. Independent browsers that put privacy and security first (like Firefox) are great for consumers and an important part of the Android ecosystem.

There are open questions, though, about how well this implementation of a choice screen will enable people to easily adopt options other than Chrome as their default browser. The details matter, and the true measure will be the impact on competition and ultimately consumers. As we assess the results of this launch on Mozilla’s Firefox for Android, we’ll share our impressions and the impact we see.

• NAB 2019: Haivision Announces Peer-to-Peer Low-Latency Streaming for Its SRT Framework

  Prior to releasing SRT P2P to the open-source community, Haivision is seeking partners to collaborate and stress-test the technology at scale.

  [...]

  SRT P2P is the latest development for the SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) initiative that Haivision started in 2017 when the company open-sourced the SRT protocol and technology stack. SRT has been endorsed as a low-latency contribution and distribution streaming protocol by more than 200 companies across the broadcast and streaming industries. With a focus on video delivery, SRT P2P extends the SRT initiative to create a comprehensive framework for high-performance streaming from contribution through distribution and into delivery.

• Netflix and Intel to Deploy AV1 CODEC For Content Streaming

  At The National Association of Broadcasters Show today, Intel and Netflix announced a new high-performance video codec that is available as open source and royalty-free to content creators, developers and service providers. Scalable Video Technology for AV1 (SVT-AV1) offers performance and scalability in video processing.

  AV1 is a royalty-free codec and offers improved compression compared to vp9 or hevc, the video bandwidth reduction can run upwards to 30 to 40 percent, without you seeing a difference. The best thing yet, this is a royalty-free model. 

• NAB '19: Netflix and Intel Release SVT-AV1 Codec as Open Source

  This morning at NAB, Intel and Netflix together announced the SVT-AV1 codec which is capable of real-time 4K/60p 10-bit encoding when running on Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Xeon D processors. To our knowledge, this is the first software-only AV1 implementation capable of real-time encoding and it represents an order of magnitude acceleration of AV1 encoding. The companies released SVT-AV1, or Scalable Video Technology for AV1, into the open source community for immediate availability.

• Hugin 2019 Released! How to Install it in Ubuntu 18.04/16.04

• Hugin-2019.0.0 Release Notes

• Kiwi TCMS 6.7

  We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 6.7! This is a small improvement and bug-fix update.

• Hugo Extended on CentOS 7

• curl says bye bye to pipelining

  HTTP/1.1 Pipelining is the protocol feature where the client sends off a second HTTP/1.1 request already before the answer to the previous request has arrived (completely) from the server. It is defined in the original HTTP/1.1 spec and is a way to avoid waiting times. To reduce latency.

  HTTP/1.1 Pipelining was badly supported by curl for a long time in the sense that we had a series of known bugs and it was a fragile feature without enough tests. Also, pipelining is fairly tricky to debug due to the timing sensitivity so very often enabling debug outputs or similar completely changes the nature of the behavior and things are not reproducing anymore!

  HTTP pipelining was never enabled by default by the large desktop browsers due to all the issues with it, like broken server implementations and the likes. Both Firefox and Chrome dropped pipelining support entirely since a long time back now. curl did in fact over time become more and more lonely in supporting pipelining.

• Daniel Stenberg: Workshop Season 4 Finale

  The 2019 HTTP Workshop ended today. In total over the years, we have now done 12 workshop days up to now. This day was not a full day and we spent it on only two major topics that both triggered long discussions involving large parts of the room.

  [...]

  Mike Bishop did an excellent presentation of HTTP/3 for HTTP people that possibly haven’t kept up fully with the developments in the QUIC working group. From a plain HTTP view, HTTP/3 is very similar feature-wise to HTTP/2 but of course sent over a completely different transport layer. (The HTTP/3 draft.)

  Most of the questions and discussions that followed were rather related to the transport, to QUIC. Its encryption, it being UDP, DOS prevention, it being “CPU hungry” etc. Deploying HTTP/3 might be a challenge for successful client side implementation, but that’s just nothing compared the totally new thing that will be necessary server-side. Web developers should largely not even have to care…

  One tidbit that was mentioned is that in current Firefox telemetry, it shows about 0.84% of all requests negotiates TLS 1.3 early data (with about 12.9% using TLS 1.3)

  Thought-worthy quote of the day comes from Willy: “everything is a buffer”

• Daniel Stenberg: The HTTP Workshop 2019 begins

  35 persons from all over the world walked in the room and sat down around the O-shaped table setup. Lots of known faces and representatives from a large variety of HTTP implementations, client-side or server-side – but happily enough also a few new friends that attend their first HTTP Workshop here. The companies with the most employees present in the room include Apple, Facebook, Mozilla, Fastly, Cloudflare and Google – all with three each I believe.

  Patrick Mcmanus started off the morning with his presentation on HTTP conventional wisdoms trying to identify what have turned out as successes or not in HTTP land in recent times. It triggered a few discussions on the specific points and how to judge them. I believe the general consensus ended up mostly agreeing with the slides. The topic of unshipping HTTP/0.9 support came up but is said to not be possible due to its existing use. As a bonus, Anne van Kesteren posted a new bug on Firefox to remove it.

• foss-north 2019 – it is happening

  This years experiments are the training day, and community day. Looking at the various RSVPs for the community day, it looks like we’ll be 130+ attendees. For the conference days we have only ten tickets left out of 240, beating last years record attendance with 90 people.

• The Openness Continues: SUSECON Day 2 Recap

  Michael Miller then took the stage, provided an overview of the day and then welcomed Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, President of Engineering, Product and Innovation to the stage.  But before diving into this discussion for the day, Thomas introduced a new SUSE video instructing everyone on the proper way to say “SUSE”.