Chrome and Firefox now FLAC friendly

Google and Mozilla have released new updates to their respective browsers in the form of Chrome 56 and Firefox 51. Amongst the updates sits something important for you digital audiophiles.

The biggest news for music-lovers is that these latest updates to Firefox and Chrome brings native support for FLAC (Free lossless audio codec).

The addition of FLAC support means that you can now stream high-quality audio without using an external media player straight from your browser.

This could see more embedded high resolution media appearing on sites. I for one would be happy to see streaming sites such as Spotify upping their game. That could make things interesting for Tidal and their MQA-streaming site.

Still, the increase in audio quality will mean little if you have poor speakers or headphones 😉

What is FLAC?

The Free Lossless Audio Codec is an audio format similar to MP3, but it is lossless.

This means that audio packaged in FLAC does not (or should not) lose any quality.

Consider it something similar to how Zipped files work. It’s just that with this format you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio.

The main downside to FLAC is the size of the files, in comparison to MP3.

Firefox and Chrome

Firefox is also an open source browser maintained by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

Chrome is a Google project that shares a lot of code with the open source Chromium browser… but Chrome itself is not free and open source software.