AV1 and the Video Wars of 2027
It’s six years in the future, and Netflix costs $4,000 a month. What happened? We continued our reliance on patented video codecs to stream web video, instead of supporting royalty-free AV1. Read more
Judy McConnell
An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs
Here’s a surprising fact: It costs money to watch video online, even on free sites like YouTube. That’s because roughly 80% of video files rely on a patented video codec to compress and transmit media quickly over the internet. Read more
WITHIN creates distribution platform using WebVR
Virtual Reality (VR) pioneers at WITHIN have launched one of the first VR distribution platforms. Now anyone can enjoy gorgeous VR on their PC, headset, or mobile device, thanks to the WebVR API, created by Mozilla engineers. Read more
Mozilla experiment aims to reduce bias in code reviews
Mozilla is kicking off a new experiment for International Women’s Day, looking at ways to make open source software projects friendlier to women and racial minorities. Its first target? The code review process. Read more
Snips Uses Rust to Build an Embedded Voice Assistant
The team at Paris-based Snips has created a voice assistant that can be embedded in a single device or used in a home network to control lights, thermostat, music, and … Read more
WebAssembly support now shipping in all major browsers
Apple and Microsoft are shipping WebAssembly support in the latest versions of Safari and Edge, so all four major browsers can now run code compiled to the super-fast wasm format. Read more