Month: March 2022

Enlarge / The F-150 Lightning will be offered as a SuperCrew cab with a 5.5-foot bed. (credit: Ford)

When Ford announced the F-150 Lightning, the company's first electric pickup truck, the automaker pledged that the Lightning's $40,000 base model would travel 230 miles on a full charge—and that the extended-range model would reach 300 miles. Not too shabby for a 6,500 lb truck with a not-insignificant drag area.

It turns out that at least one of those numbers was conservative. Ford said today that the base Lightning model did reach its predicted 230 miles under EPA testing and that the extended-range model sailed past estimates to reach 320 miles.

“We are laser focused on continually improving our energy consumption efficiency for Lightning, and the team is really happy to deliver these results for our customers,” said Linda Zhang, the trucks’s chief program engineer.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg | Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton)

Andy Yen has big dreams for ProtonMail, the secure email service he founded in 2014 that now has 50 million users worldwide. One day, he hopes, it could be a rival to Gmail, the communications behemoth owned by Google, which boasts over 1.5 billion users.

But he says Proton can never be a true competitor to Google while the Internet continues to be an unregulated Wild West. “We grow based on the goodwill of tech giants,” Yen says from his head office in Geneva. In fact, he says, the same goes for his company’s very existence. “Tech giants could today remove us from the Internet with zero legal or financial repercussions.”

Like Proton, many companies across Europe are pinning their hopes on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU’s first overhaul of the rules that govern competition on the Internet in 20 years. It is one of two major pieces of technology legislation in the works in Brussels; the other is the Digital Services Act (DSA), which will cover areas such as privacy and data use.

Enlarge / The Mozilla building, Friday, Jan. 19, 2018, in San Francisco, California, Mozilla is the maker of the web browser Firefox. (Photo by Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images) (credit: San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Images)

Firefox is finally gaining proper AV1 support. Neowin noticed that Mozilla has closed a two-year-old bug report asking for the feature, with AV1 hardware decoding scheduled for the release of Firefox 100 in May 2022.

Firefox added software decoding of the AV1 codec back in 2019. Software decoding is slow and uses a ton of power, but it's better than not being able to see a video at all. Hardware decoding makes AV1 playback a first-class citizen on Firefox, allowing for faster, more power-efficient playback powered by your GPU (provided you have recent hardware). For GPU accelerated AV1 playback, you will need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series card, an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series, or an 11th-gen Intel CPU with Iris Xe graphics.

AV1 is the Internet's next big video codec. While some tests show that the newer AV1 codec compresses video 30 percent more efficiently than the competing H.265 standard, what really matters for adoption is that AV1 is free while H.265 has licensing fees. AV1 can trace its roots back to Google; the codec is the successor to Google's VP8 and VP9 codecs, but development is now done under the "Alliance for Open Media." The Alliance is made up of most major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung. Chrome and Edge already support AV1 hardware decoding, with Safari being the main holdout (even though Apple is in the alliance).