Firefox 49 To Offer Linux Widevine Support, Firefox Also Working On WebP Support

There are two exciting bits of Mozilla Firefox news to pass along today: Winevine support on Linux out-of-the-box to handle Netflix and friends. Separately, WebP image support is being worked on.

Trailing the Windows and OS X support, Winevine is being advertised as supported out-of-the-box now on Firefox for Linux. This change will happen for the upcoming Firefox 49 release.

Winevine CDM is the content decryption module for playing protected HTML5 audio/video that was originally backed by Google. Netflix is the most famous user of Widevine and thus with Firefox 49 on Linux Netflix.com should be playing nicely out-of-the-box. Confirmation via this bug report.

A Phoronix reader also wrote in about experimental support for WebP on Firefox. WebP is the image format produced by Google and derived from WebM. WebP supports both lossy and lossless compression and tends to compare better in performance to JPEG and PNG. Chrome has long supported WebP along with some other software while now there is finally experimental support coming to Firefox, several years later.

Details on the experimental WebP support in Firefox via this Bugzilla report.